Apex Magazine

Issue 17

October, 2010

“Still Life (A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale)” Copyright 2010 by Ian Tregillis

“The Girl Who Had Six Fingers” Copyright 2010 by Brenda Stokes

“Citizen Komarova Finds Love” Copyright 2009 by Ekaterina Sedia (First published in EXOTIC GOTHIC 3, Ed. Danel Olson, Ash-Tree Press)

“Love’s Ecology” Copyright 2010 by Rose Lemberg

“Anything So Utterly Destroyed” Copyright 2010 by Elizabeth McClellan

Publisher—Jason Sizemore

Fiction Editor—Catherynne M. Valente

Senior Editor—Gill Ainsworth

Submissions Editors—Zakarya Anwar, Ferrett Steinmetz, Martel Sardina, Mari Adkins, George Galuschak, Patrick S. Tomlinson

Cover designed by Justin Stewart

Cover art by Mitenkov Maxim

ISSN: 2157-1406

Apex Publications

PO Box 24323

Lexington, KY 40524

Please visit us at http://www.apexbookcompany.com.

Submission Guidelines are listed at the end of this issue.

Table of Contents

Fiction

Still Life (A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale)

By Ian Tregillis

The Girl Who Had Six Fingers

By Brenda Stokes Barron

Citizen Komarova Finds Love

By Ekaterina Sedia

Poetry

Love’s Ecology

By Rose Lemberg

Anything So Utterly Destroyed

By Elizabeth McClellan

Submission Guidelines

Title Page

Front Matter

Still Life (A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale)

By Ian Tregillis

Every evening was a fin de siècle in the great sprawling castle-city of Nycthemeron. But, of course, to say it was evening meant no more than to say it was morning, or midnight, or yesterday, or six days hence, or nineteen years ago. For it was every inch a timeless place, from the fig trees high in the Palazzo’s Spire-top cloud gardens all the way down to the sinuous river Gnomon encircling the city.

Nycthemeron had tumbled from the calendar. It had slipped into the chasm between tick and tock, to land in its own instantaneous eternity. And so its residents occupied their endless moment with pageants and festivals and reveled in century-long masques, filled forever with decadent delights. They picnicked in the botanical gardens, made love in scented boudoirs, danced through their eternal twilight. And they disregarded the fog that shrouded their city with soft grey light.

As for time? Time was content to leave them there. It felt no pity, no compassion, for the people stuck in that endless now. This wasn’t because time was cold, or cruel, or heartless. But it had no concern for that glistening place, no interest in the people who existed there.

Except one. Her name was Tink.

And it was said (among the people who said such things) that if you sought something truly special for your sweetheart, or if you yearned for that rarest of experiences—something novel, something new—you could find it at Tink’s shop in the Briardowns. For Tink was something quite peculiar: she was a clockmaker.

Indeed, so great were her talents that normally staid and proper clock hands fluttered with delight at her approach. Time reveled in her horological handiwork. If it had to be measured, quantified, divvied up and parceled out, it would do so only on a timepiece of Tink’s design.

How could this be? She was a clockwork girl, they said. And indeed, if you were to stand near Tink, to wait for a quiet moment and then bend your ear in her direction, you might just hear the phantom tickticktickticktickticktick serenading every moment of her life. Who but a clockwork girl would make such a noise, they said. And others would nod, and agree, and consider the matter settled.

But they were wrong. Tink was a flesh and blood woman, as real as anybody who danced on the battlements or made love in the gardens. She was no mere clockwork.

Tink was the object of time’s affection. It attended her so closely, revered and adored her so completely, that it couldn’t bear to part from her, even for an instant. But time’s devotion carried a price. Tink aged.

She was, in short, a living clock. Her body was the truest timepiece Nycthemeron could ever know; her thumping heart, the metronome of the world.

But the perfectly powdered and carefully coifed lovelies who visited her shop knew nothing of this. They made their way to the Briardowns, in the shadow of an ancient aqueduct, seeking the lane where hung a wooden sign adorned with a faceless clock. Midway down, between an algebraist’s clinic and a cartographer’s studio, Tink’s storefront huddled beneath an awning of pink alabaster.

Now, on this particular afternoon (let us pretend for the moment that such distinctions were meaningful in Nycthemeron) the chime over Tink’s door announced a steady trickle of customers. The Festival of the Leaping Second was close, and if ever there was an occasion to ply one’s darling with wonderments, it was this. Soon revelers would congregate on the highest balconies of the Spire. There they would grasp the hands of an effigy clock and click the idol forward one second. Afterward, they would trade gifts and kisses, burn the effigy, then seek out new lovers and new debaucheries.

If you were to ask the good people of Nycthemeron just how frequently they celebrated the Festival of the Leaping Second, they would smile and shrug and tell you: When the mood descends upon us. But Tink knew differently. The Festival came every twenty years, as measured by her tick-tock heartbeat. She felt this, knew it, as a fish feels water and knows how to swim.

To a marchioness with a fringe of peacock feathers on her mask, Tink gave an empty, pentagonal hourglass. “Turn this after your favorite dance, and you’ll live that moment five times over,” she said.

To a courtier in a scarlet cravat, Tink gave a paper packet of wildflower seeds. “Spread these in your hair,” she said. “They’ll blossom the moment you kiss your honey love, and you will be the posy she takes home.”

Tink requested only token payments for these trinkets, expecting neither obligation nor gratitude in return. Some, like the marchioness, paid handsomely; others, such as the tatterdemalion scholar, gave what they could (in his case, a leather bookmark). And sometimes she traded her wares for good will, as she did with the stonemason and gardener.

Though she was young and strong and did not ache, Tink spent what her body considered a long day rummaging through her shop for creative ways to brighten static lives. Her mind was tired, her stomach empty.

Unlike the rest of Nycthemeron’s populace, Tink had to sleep. She announced her shop closed for the remainder of the day. Cries of dismay arose from the people queued outside (though of course they had long ago forgotten the meaning of “day”).

“The Festival!” they cried; a chorus of painted, feathered, and sequined masks. Everyone wore a mask, as demanded by the calculus of glamour.

“Come back tomorrow,” she said (though of course they had forgotten the meaning of this, too). But a tall fellow in a cormorant mask came jogging up the lane.

“Wait! Timesmith, wait!”

Nobody had ever called her that, but the phrase amused her. Few people dared to let the word “time” touch their lips. The rest of Tink’s petitioners grumbled at the bold fellow’s approach. They dispersed, shaking their heads and bemoaning their bad luck.

“Sorry, pretties. Sorry, lovelies,” said Tink. “You’ll get your goodies tomorrow.”

The newcomer laid a hand upon the door, panting slightly. His breeches, she noticed, displayed shapely calves. “Are you Tink?”

“I am.”

“Fabled maker of clocks and wonderments, I hear.”

“Let me guess,” said Tink. “You’re seeking something for the Festival. Something with which to impress your lady love. You want me to win her heart for you, is that so?”

His shrug ruffled the long silk ribbons looped around the sleeves of his shirt. Some were vermilion, and others cerulean, like his eyes. “It’s true, I confess.”

“The others wanted the same,” she said. “I told them I could do no more today. Why should I become a liar?”

“Do it for my flaxen-haired beauty.”

Tink thought she recognized this fellow. And so she asked, knowing the answer, “Will you love her forever?”

“Forever? That is all we have. Yes, I will love her forever, and she me. Until the Festival ends.”

Aha. “You are Valentine.”

He bowed, with a flourish. The ribbons fluttered on his arms again. “You know me?”

“Everybody knows you.”

Valentine: the legendary swain of Nycthemeron. Valentine, who could spend centuries on a single seduction. Valentine, famed for his millennial waltz. Charmer, lothario, friend of everyman, consort of the queen.

Though it was against her better judgment, Tink beckoned him inside. Valentine’s eyes twinkled as he examined her space. The shelves were stacked with odds and ends culled from every corner of Nycthemeron: strange objects floating in yellow pickle jars; workbenches strewn with gears and mainsprings, loupes and screws and a disassembled astrolabe; the smell of oil and peppermint.

He said, “Your sign says ‘Timepieces’.”

“Is that somehow strange?”

“But you gave that fellow with the scarlet cravat just a packet of wildflowers.”

“You know this how?”

“I stopped him and asked. I knew he’d come from your shop because he looked happy.” He crossed his arms. “Flowers are nice, but they’re no timepiece.”

“Everything is a clock,” said Tink. “Even the buckles on your shoes and the boards beneath your feet. But this place,” she said, with a gesture that implied all of Nycthemeron, “has forgotten that.”

“The stories are true. You are a peculiar one.” And then he cocked his head, as if listening to something. “They say you are a clockwork, you know. “

His gaze was a stickpin and Tink a butterfly. She shrugged, and blushed, and turned away.

Which was odd. Time had never seen her fall shy.

“As for your lady love,” said Tink, changing the subject, “I know what to do. Come with me.”

She led him to shelves stacked with clocks of sand, and candle wax, and other things. (Time frequently sprawled here, like a cat in sunlight.) She stopped at a grandfather clock carved in the guise of a fig tree. Tink set it to one minute before midnight.

“Hold out your hand,” Tink said. She gave the clock a nod of encouragement, and it began to tock-tick-tock its way toward midnight. Valentine watched with fascination. But, of course, he had never seen a working clock.

A miniscule hatch opened above the twelve and a seed plinked into Valentine’s hand. Tink repeated the process.

“What are these?” he asked.

“Intercalary seeds. At the Festival, put one under your tongue. Have your lady do the same. The seeds will release one minute that belongs solely to the pair of you.”

Valentine tucked the seeds into the tasseled sash at his waist. He took her hand. His touch, she noticed with a shudder, was warm and gentle. With his other hand he removed his mask, saying, “I am in your debt.”

He winked and kissed her hand. Now, Tink was prepared for this, for Valentine was nothing if not notorious for his charms. But when she saw the laugh lines around his eyes, and felt his breath tickle the back of her hand, and felt his soft lips brush against her skin, her metronome heart—

...diners in a sidewalk café marveled at a turtledove hanging motionless overhead, just for an instant...

—skipped—

... the candles in a Cistercian chapel, all 419 of them, stopped flickering, just for an instant...

—a—

...all the noises of life and love and revelry and sorrow, the voice of Nycthemeron, fell silent, just for an instant...

—beat.

Tink did not sleep that night. Lying on a downy mattress just wide enough for one—she had never needed anything more, having never known loneliness—she replayed those few minutes with Valentine in her head, again and again. She smelled the back of her hand, imagined it was his breath tickling her skin.

Tink could win his heart. All she needed was time.

She awoke with a plan.

In order to win Valentine’s heart, she had to know him, and he had to know her. In order to know him, she had to be near him. To be near him, she had to get into the Palazzo. She could get into the Palazzo if she brought a birthday gift for Queen Perjumbellatrix.

Of course, birthdays held no meaning in a place exiled from the calendar. But the eternal queen was fond of gifts, and so she held masques and received tributes once per year (measured, as always, by the ticking of Tink’s heart). And Valentine, her consort, attended each. Even so, Tink would be fortunate to get more than a few moments with him.

Thus, after the Festival, Tink went to work on a special series of clocks. Each was designed to delight the revelers in Her Majesty’s grand ballroom.

And each was designed to steal one minute from Her Majesty. Each clock would swaddle Tink and Valentine in sixty purloined seconds. Nor was that all.

For Valentine—pretty, perfect Valentine—minutes held no meaning. One was much the same as another. Thus, it would be nothing odd for him to experience a conversation strung across the decades, one minute per year.

But Tink—mortal, metronome Tink—had to live her way from one stolen minute to the next. So she designed the clocks to string those moments together like pearls on a necklace, forming one continuous assignation with Valentine.

The first clock was a simple thing: a wind-up circus. But Her Majesty disappointed courtiers throughout the Palazzo when she declared it her favorite tribute.

Tink curtsied, feeling like a dandelion in a rose garden. The braids in her silvery hair had unraveled, and her gown—the finest from the secondhand shop in the Briardowns—was not fine at all in this company.

She retreated to a corner of the ballroom. Tink had never learned to dance.

Valentine danced with every lady in the hall, always returning to Perjumbellatrix in the interim. He hadn’t changed one tock from the way he’d appeared at Tink’s shop. The ribbons on his sleeves traced spirals in the air when he twirled his partners so, the feathers of his cormorant mask fluttered when he tipped his ladies thus. Tink fidgeted with her embroidery, waiting until the clockwork elephants on the queen’s gift trumpeted midnight.

Everything stopped. The ballroom became a sculpture garden, an expressionist swirl of skin and feathers and jewels and silks. Beads of wine from a tipped goblet sparkled like rubies suspended in midair; plucked harp strings hung poised to fling notes like arrows.

“Well done, Timesmith.” Tink turned. Valentine bowed at her. “It is a wonder,” he said, marveling at the motionless dancers. “But I think your wonderment has missed its mark, no?” He pointed: Tink’s clock had made a statue of the statuesque monarch.

Tink swallowed, twice. She found her voice: “The clock is for her. But this,” she said, “is for you.” And me.

Valentine smiled. “I’ve never seen its equal.” He took her hand. Her skin tingled beneath his fingertips. “Thank you.” Her metronome heart skipped another beat when he touched his lips to the back of her hand. But the world had stopped, so nobody noticed.

He asked, “How long will they stay like this?”

“That’s complicated,” said Tink. “But they’re safe.”

The room blurred about them. Merrymakers blinked into new positions around the ballroom. The eternally tipping wine goblet became an ice sculpture of the queen. And her gift, the clockwork circus, became an orrery.

A year had passed.

“I see! I see, I see!” Valentine clapped. He understood, for every moment was the same to him.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

“It’s marvelous,” he said. “Now let me show you something you’ve never known. Dance with me.”

She wanted to waltz with him, but feared to try. She had impressed him. But could that be undone by a single awkward step? Valentine was a graceful creature, accustomed to graceful partners.

“I don’t, that is, I’ve never—”

“Trust me,” he said.

Valentine pulled her to the center of the ballroom. His hand warmed the small of her back. He smelled like clean salt, like the distant sea. Dancing, she discovered, came naturally. It was, after all, a form of rhythm. And what was rhythm but a means of marking time?

The room blurred around them. The orrery became an hourglass. They wove and whirled amongst the motionless dancers. Tink laughed. It was working.

“Look,” said Valentine. “Look at their eyes.”

Masks hid their faces, but not their eyes. She looked upon a man who wore the burgundy cummerbund of a baronet. His eyes glistened with hidden tears. They pirouetted past a countess with a diadem on her brow, butterfly wings affixed to her cheeks, and soul-deep weariness in her eyes.

Valentine asked, “What do you see?”

“Sorrow,” said Tink.

“They’ve lost something. We all have.”

“Three things,” said Tink. For suddenly she knew what Valentine wanted and needed. He didn’t know it himself.

Yet still they danced. It was wonderful; it was magical. But his eyes returned again and again to Perjumbellatrix. He danced with Tink—and what a dancer he was—but his heart and mind were elsewhere.

The final timepiece expended its stolen minute. The bubble of intimacy popped under the assault of music, laughter, and voices raised in tribute to the queen.

“Truly marvelous,” said Valentine. “Thank you for this dance, Timesmith.” With a wink, a bow, and a kiss, he returned to his place beside the queen.

Tink’s feet ached. Her lungs pumped like bellows. Her skin wasn’t quite as smooth as it had been when their dance began. She had aged twenty years in twenty minutes. But it was a small price for the key to somebody’s heart.

She returned to her shop, deep in thought. And so she did not notice how the hands of every clock bowed low to her, like a bashful admirer requesting a dance. Time had seen how she had laughed with joy in Valentine’s arms. It yearned, desperately, to dance with her.

Tink spent months (measured, as always, by the thumping of her heart) holed up in her shop. She labored continuously, pausing only for food and rest. And, on several occasions, to climb a staircase of carved peridot and dip a chalice in the waters atop the aqueduct.

Far above the city, craftsmen and courtiers built an effigy clock atop the Spire. Valentine, Tink knew, was there. She wondered if he ever gazed from that aerie upon the Briardowns, wondered if his thoughts ever turned from queen to clockmaker.

When the Festival of the Leaping Second returned to Nycthemeron, and a crowd again milled outside Tink’s shop, they found it locked and the storefront dark. Her neighbors, the algebraist and the cartographer, told of her forays along the aqueduct and of strange sounds from her workshop: splashing, gurgling, the creak of wooden gears.

By now, of course, the queen had grown quite fond of Tink’s wonderments. And when she heard that the clockmaker had arrived, promising something particularly special for the Festival, she ordered a new riser built for Tink’s work.

There, Tink built a miniature Nycthemeron: nine feet tall at the Spire, six feet wide, encircled by a flowing replica of the river Gnomon, complete with aqueducts, waterwheels, sluices, gates, and even a tiny clockmaker’s shop in a tiny Briardowns. There, a model clockmaker gazed lovelorn at the Spire, where a model Valentine gazed down.

When the revelry culminated in the advance of the effigy, Tink filled the copper reservoir on her water clock. And everybody, including the queen and lovely Valentine at her side, marveled at Tink’s work.

The water flowed backward. It sprang from the waterwheels to leap upon the aqueducts and gush uphill, where special pumps pulled it down to begin again.

It was a wonder, they said. An amazement. A delight.

Only time, and time alone, understood what she had done. Tink had given the people of Nycthemeron something they had lost.

She had given them their past.

Tink went home feeling pleased. Just a few more clocks, just a few more stolen moments, and Valentine would express adoration. But she couldn’t work as many hours at a stretch as she had in her youth. She had to unlock his heart before time rendered her an unlovable crone.

But there were interruptions. People peppered her with strange requests: vague notions they couldn’t express and that Tink couldn’t deliver. The fellow in the scarlet cravat returned, seeking a means of visiting “that place.”

“What place?” Tink asked.

“That—” he waved his hands in frustration, indicating some vague and distant land “—place.” He shrugged. “I see it in my head. I’ve been there, but I don’t know how to return. It’s here, and yet it’s not here, too.”

Tink could not help him. Nor could she help the baroness who requested a clockwork key that would open a door to “that other Nycthemeron.” At first they came in a slow trickle, these odd requests. But the trickle became a torrent. Tink closed her shop so that she could finish the next sequence of birthday clocks for Queen Perjumbellatrix.

Valentine invited Tink for another spin around a ballroom filled with motionless revelers. He was, of course, as handsome as ever. But when he doffed his mask, Tink saw the crease of a frown perched between his cerulean eyes. Her metronome heart did a little jig of concern.

“You look troubled,” she said as he took her hand.

Valentine said, “Troubled? I suppose I am.”

“Perhaps I can help,” said Tink. “After all, my skills are not inconsiderable.” She added what she hoped was a coquettish lilt to these words.

Valentine wrapped his arm around Tink’s waist. They waltzed past a duchess and her lissome lover. “I find my thoughts drifting to a new place. A different Nycthemeron.”

Tink faltered. The dancers blurred into a new configuration. Another precious year had passed.

Valentine danced mechanically. His movements were flawless, but devoid of the grace that had made Tink swoon when first they had danced together. And for her part, her whirring mind couldn’t concentrate on one thing or the other; she stepped awkwardly, without poise or balance.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Her gift was meant to impress Valentine, not confuse and distract him. But she had her pilfered minutes and intended to use them.

She rested her head on his shoulder, enjoying his scent and the fluid play of muscles in his arm. “What sort of place?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a place I’ve been, someplace close, even, but I don’t know how to get there.”

The revelers snapped into new arrangements; another year lost. Valentine led her in a swooping two-step around the ballroom. There was, it seemed, more room to move.

“Is it here in Nycthemeron? A forgotten courtyard? A secluded cloister?”

“I can’t say. I feel like it may be ... everywhere. Strange, isn’t it?” He shook his head and smiled. “No matter. Once again you have done a magnificent thing.”

But Tink barely heard his praise. She had given the people of Nycthemeron their past. But what did that mean to timeless people in a timeless city? Nothing. They were afflicted with strange thoughts they couldn’t comprehend: memories of times past. To them, the past was a foreign place they couldn’t visit.

They waltzed. Tink’s feet ached, twinges of betrayal from her aging body. Blur. They danced a sarabande. Her back ached. Blur. Her lungs burned. Blur.

Tink saw the thinning of the ballroom crowd.

“Valentine, have you noticed there are fewer people in this ballroom every year?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they going?”

“They’re trying to leave Nycthemeron,” he said.

“Oh, no,” she said, and crashed to the floor.

“Timesmith!” Valentine leapt to her side, cradled her head in his hands. “Please forgive me. Are you hurt?”

The ballroom floor was hard and her body less resilient than it had been minutes and years ago. But she disregarded her bruises, because Valentine was sopping wet. His slippery hands had lost their grip on her. He smelled of river grass and mud.

“What happened?” she asked.

“The queen sent me to stop her half-brother from trying to swim his way out of Nycthemeron. That’s where they’re going. To the river.”

But, of course, nobody could leave Nycthemeron. Not even Tink. The luminous fog was chaos, its touch deadly.

In a tiny voice, she asked, “Did you save him?”

“No. He entered the fog before I was halfway across.”

And at that moment Tink realized her gift, bestowed upon the people of Nycthemeron with love and intended to win love in return, was killing people.

Tink’s clock chimed midnight. Their stolen time had lapsed. And when Tink saw herself in the golden mirrors of the ballroom, she saw that her hair, once a lustrous silver, had tarnished to grey. She had aged another twenty years, but had gained nothing from it.

Tink returned to the Briardowns and her lonely, narrow cot, unaware of the clocks that capered for her attention. Time ached to comfort her, to console her. It sang her to sleep with a lullaby of ticks and tocks.

She’d been so foolish. She might as well have given a penny-farthing bicycle to the koi in the fishponds. The people of Nycthemeron couldn’t comprehend her gift. Right now they had the past bearing down on them like a boulder rolling toward a cliff. But that time had nowhere to go, no safe landing. It was disconnected. Meaningless.

She could salvage this. She could cure the malady she had created. She could still win Valentine. She could fix everything. All it required was a simple pendulum clock.

Tink paid a visit to the smithy in Nycthemeron’s Steeltree district. There, she commissioned the finest double-edged blade the smith could forge. No hilt—only the blade, with a tang for fastening it. A strange request. But it was considered no small honor to help the clockmaker create one of her fabled wonderments.

Thus, when she returned to his forge, he presented her with thirty inches of gleaming steel. It was, he proclaimed, the finest and sharpest blade he’d ever forged. Sharp enough to shear the red from a rainbow.

She thanked him. But it was not sharp enough.

And so, in the months before the next Festival (measured, as always, by the thumping of Tink’s broken heart), she spent every moment in her workshop. Things took longer these days. Her eyes strained at the tiniest cogs; her grip quavered as it never used to do.

People again reported odd noises in her shop. At first, the grinding of a whetstone. Later, a rasping, as of sand on steel. Then, the susurration of cotton on steel. And finally, if they pressed their ears to her shop, they might have heard the whisper of breath on steel.

And those who stayed until Tink emerged might have noticed something different about her. For where before there had always been the phantom tickticktick that followed her like a devoted puppy, now, when she carried the pendulum blade, there was sometimes only a phantom ti-ti-ti, and other times a ck-ck-ck, depending on how she held it.

Tink loaded her cart with a crate the size of a grandfather clock, then drove to the Spire. By now, of course, she was one of the queen’s most favored subjects, and so the ballroom had a place of honor reserved for Tink. There, she assembled her contribution to the Festival.

The revelers advanced the effigy. Tink wound her clock; the pendulum swung ponderously across its lacquered case. It was silent. Not even a whisper accompanied the passage of the pendulum. It sliced through the moments, leaving slivers of ticks and tatters of tocks in its wake.

At Tink’s request, the queen posted guards around the clock, for the pendulum blade was a fearsome thing. Its edges were the sharpest things that could ever be, sharp as the now that separates past and future.

But only time, and time alone, understood what she had done. Tink had given Nycthemeron something it had lost.

She had given it the present: a knowledge of now.

Tink returned to the Briardowns. Her body would be eighty years old at the next Festival, while Valentine would still be a stunning twentysomething. How many lovers had he charmed since his visit to Tink’s shop? How many stolen kisses, how many fluttering hearts? Her life had none of these things. Her pillow never smelled of anybody but Tink.

What chance had she of winning him now? It was a foolish hope. But she had spent her life on it, and couldn’t bear to think it had all been for nothing.

She tried to concentrate. But time’s desperation had become jealousy, so it had imbued the pendulum blade with a special potency. Anything for Tink’s attention.

The man in the scarlet cravat returned. He asked Tink for a trinket that would “set him moving” again. She couldn’t help him. Nor could she help the pregnant woman whose belly suggested imminent labor and whose eyes were the most sorrowful Tink had ever seen. She’d been that way, Tink realized, since time had lost its interest. Since the moment Nycthemeron had fallen from the calendar.

Tink was passing beneath the aqueduct, on her way to the Palazzo, when a man in a cobalt-colored fez crashed onto the street before her cart. The wind of his passage ruffled her hair, and he smashed the cobbles hard enough to set the chimes in Tink’s clock to ringing. Plumes of dust billowed from between the paving stones. She screamed.

Not because he had perished. He hadn’t, of course. Tink screamed because his sorrow had driven him to seek death, the ultimate boundary between past and future. And because he’d never find it.

He shambled to his feet, for his body was timeless. But when the poor fellow realized that nothing had changed, that he hadn’t bridged the gulf between was and will, he slumped to the ground and wept. He waved off Tink’s offers of a ride, of conversation, of commiseration.

A quiet gasp of dismay reached her ears. She looked up. People lined the tallest edges of the aqueduct.

The pendulum blade carved a personal now for every soul in Nycthemeron. And drove them mad. Tink had shown them they were entombed in time, and now they were suffocating.

Tink rushed to the Palazzo. The ballroom was emptier than she had ever seen it. Couples still danced, but just a fraction of those who had toasted the queen in pageants past.

The ribbons on Valentine’s arms still fluttered; his shapely calves still flexed and stretched when he waltzed with the queen. But was it Tink’s imagination, or had his eyes lost their sparkle? Was it her imagination, or did he seem distracted and imprecise in his movements?

An earl in an owl mask requested a dance, but she declined him and all the others who sought a few steps with the famous clockmaker. She might have been flattered, but now, with age weighing upon her, she lacked the energy for much revelry. She saved herself.

Her clock chimed. Once more, Tink and Valentine were alone together in a private minute. He took her hand.

“You look worried,” he said.

“How are you? Are you well?” She studied his face.

“I am the same as ever,” he said, a catch in his voice.

He was silent for what felt like eternity. Blur. Blur. Blur. It broke her heart, every wasted instant. This was her last chance. It wasn’t meant to be like this.

“Something is bothering you,” she said. “Will you tell me about it? You’ll never have a more devoted listener.”

That, at least, elicited a slight sigh, and a weary chuckle. “What is it like?”

“What is what like?”

“Aging.”

Tink said, “My body aches. I can’t see or hear as well as I could. My mind isn’t as sharp, my fingers not as nimble.” She paused while he gently spun her through a pirouette. “But I am more wise now.”

“More wise?”

“Wise enough to know that I’m a foolish old woman.”

Grief clenched her chest, ground the gears in her metronome heart. The years had become a burden too heavy for her shoulders. She faltered. Valentine caught her.

He asked, “Are you ill?”

She shook her head. “Just old. Will you sit with me?”

“Of course.”

They watched motionless dancers blink through the celebrations. Tink rested her head on his shoulder. She wanted to remember his scent forever. That was all she’d ever have of him; her efforts to win his heart had failed. Worse than that: she had transmuted his joy into melancholy.

“May I ask something of you, Valentine?”

“Anything, Timesmith.”

“Your ribbons. I would like to take one, if I may.”

“Allow me,” he said. He removed a vermilion ribbon and tied it into her grey hair. “Remember me, won’t you?”

That made her smile. She would remember him until the end of her days. Didn’t he realize this? Had she been too oblique in her bids for his affection? Blur.

Tink turned to thank him for the token, and to tell him that he was ever on her mind. But she didn’t. His shirt was tattered, his ribbons were frayed. Feathers had come loose from his cormorant mask. He was dusty.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“I... I fell,” he whispered.

“Oh, Valentine—” She reached up to touch his face. His changeless, beautiful face. Her stolen time came to an end. It left her very old, very tired, and very alone.

Valentine’s heart would never be hers; she could accept that. But it would never be pledged to anybody ever again, and that she couldn’t bear. It was broken. Because of her.

If Tink could do one final thing before she succumbed to old age, she wanted to mend him. Mend everybody. But though she knew what that would require, she did not know how to do it. The future was an abstract thing, built of possibilities and nothing else. It was impervious to cogs, springs, pendulums, blades, sand, beeswax, and water.

She paced. She napped. She ignored the urgent knocking of would-be customers. More napping. More pacing.

And then she noticed the model castle-city she had built years earlier. Her water-clock Nycthemeron sat in a corner, draped in cobwebs and dust.

Tink looked upon the Spire, and the surrounding gardens, and knew exactly what to do.

First, she paid a visit to the stonemason. He welcomed her. But when she told him what she needed, he balked. It was too much work for one person.

But Tink had not come alone. For she was famous, and drew a small crowd when she ventured outside. Some followers, such as the fellow in the scarlet cravat, had been waiting outside her dark and shuttered store, hoping to wheedle one last wonderment from the aging clockmaker. Others had followed the siren call of her tickticktick, hoping it would lead them to a novel experience.

Next, Tink called upon the gardeners who maintained the parklands along the river. Their objections were similar to the stonemason’s. But she solved their concerns as she had those of the stonemason: she presented the gardeners with strong and beautiful volunteers.

She supervised as best she could. But often the volunteers found her dozing in her cart because she had succumbed to weariness. They took turns bringing her home and tucking her into bed.

The changes to the outskirts of Nycthemeron drew more volunteers, and more still, as people abandoned their decadent delights. But nobody knew why Tink needed so much granite carved just so, nor why she needed the gardens landscaped just so.

Only time understood her plan. Only time, which had felt first confusion, then jealousy, then heartbreak while she squandered her short life yearning for Valentine.

Tink awoke with Valentine’s hand brushing her cheek. At first she thought she had died and had gone to someplace better. But when she touched his face and saw her aged hand, she knew she was still an old woman. Her pillow was moist with tears.

His eyes gleamed. Perhaps not as brightly as they once had, but enough to cause a stutter in her metronome heart. “I’ve come to take you to the Festival.”

That caused a jolt of alarm. “But my work—”

“Is finished. Completed to your every specification. Although nobody can tell me what your instructions mean.”

His face was smudged with dirt.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

“I’ve been gardening,” he said, and winked.

Valentine carried her to her cart. She dozed with her head on his shoulder as he drove to the Palazzo. Once, when the jouncing of the cart roused her, she glimpsed what might have been an honor guard with shining epaulettes and flapping pennants. It may have been a dream.

Tink dozed again during the funicular ride up the Spire. The view did not transfix her: she had seen it every year for the past sixty (measured, as always, by the beating of her failing heart). She preferred the drowsy sensation of resting in Valentine’s arms, no matter how chaste the embrace. Her glimpses of Nycthemeron, between dreams and sighs, showed an unfamiliar city.

Ah, she recalled. Yes. The Festival. It had seemed dreadfully important once, this final gift. But she was too exhausted and too full of regrets to care.

“Why do you cry, Timesmith?”

“I’m a foolish old woman. I’ve spent my entire life just to have one hour with you.”

She closed her eyes. When next she opened them, Valentine was setting her gently upon a cushioned chair in the gilded grand ballroom. It was, she noticed, a place of honor beside Queen Perjumbellatrix. The queen said something, but it was loud in the ballroom. Tink nodded, expressed her thanks, then returned to her dreams.

A jostling woke her, several minutes or decades later. Her chair floated toward the balcony. Valentine lifted it, as did the courtier in the scarlet cravat, and several others whom she felt she ought to recognize but didn’t.

Silence fell. All eyes turned to Tink.

She stood, with Valentine’s assistance. (His hands were so strong. So warm. So young.)

“This is for you,” she said to Nycthemeron.

The fog brightened, then thinned, then dissipated. A brilliant sun emerged in a sky the color of Valentine’s eyes. The Spire cast a shadow across the sprawling castle-city. Its tip pierced the distant gardens where so many had labored according to Tink’s specifications.

Nycthemeron had become a sundial.

Cheers echoed through the city, loud even to Tink’s feeble ears high atop the Spire.

Everyone understood what Tink had done. She had ended Nycthemeron’s exile. She had given the people a future.

Tink collapsed. Her metronome heart sounded its final tickticktick. Her time had run out.

But not quite.

Time understood that this magnificent work, this living sundial called Nycthemeron, was an expression of her love for Valentine. She had set him free.

Tink found herself in a patch of grass, staring up at a blue sky. The grass was soft, the sky was bright, and her body didn’t ache.

“Ah, you’re awake.” Valentine leaned over her, eclipsing the sky with his beautiful face. He wasn’t, she noticed, wearing the cormorant mask. Nor his ribbons. And his shirt was new. “I have something to show you,” he said.

When Tink took his hand, she saw that her skin was no longer wrinkled, no longer spotted and weak.

These were the Spire-top gardens. But everything looked new and different in the sunlight. Even the trees were strange: row upon row upon row of them. Strange, and yet she felt she somehow knew them.

Valentine saw the expression on her face. He said, “They’re intercalary trees. It seemed a waste to toss the seeds after they’d been spent. So I planted them.”

Seeds? Ah... Tink remembered when she’d first met Valentine, decades ago, when he’d wanted to charm a flaxen-haired beauty. Back when Tink had been young.

The first time she had been young.

And time, knowing it had failed to win Tink’s heart, had given her a parting gift, then set her free.

AUTHOR BIO

Ian Tregillis is the son of a bearded mountebank and a discredited tarot card reader. He is the author of Bitter Seeds, and the forthcoming sequel novels The Coldest War (October, 2011) and Necessary Evil. He is also a contributor to the Wild Cards novels Inside Straight, Busted Flush, and Suicide Kings. He lives in New Mexico, where he consorts with writers, scientists, and other unsavory types. He has sunburn.

The Girl Who Had Six Fingers

By Brenda Stokes Barron

And when the girl who had six fingers saw the grizzled fisherman, she knew he was the right one for her. The way his eyes set on the water like pins. How his bent frame showed little strain against the constant pull of the catch. How his hands gripped the pole with defiant might.

He was strong in spite of his age and she loved him for it. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the round stone and grasped it between the two fingers of her right hand. Though her grasp was tenuous, she did not perspire. She knew what she must do.

“Good morning Old Fisherman. How is Blue Fish biting today?”

“He’s reluctant, I say. Reluctant as a frost to melt in the dead of winter.”

The girl, whom many simply called Hardly Handed, smiled at his pleasantries.

“I’m sure he’ll latch on soon enough.” Her voice lilted, but her face dropped all expression. The stone in her hand turned fiery in an instant. The deep sting singed her skin but she made no noise. And as smoke rose from her charring flesh, she did not scream.

“I reckon it will,” Old Fisherman said, keeping his eyes on the still water. “And what have you—” he started, but when he looked up to where the girl they’d named Hardly Handed at the ceremony almost sixteen years ago had stood just a moment before, only an empty space remained. A small clearing in the brush and spindly trees.

Then the stone slapped onto his arm. The soft linen of his shirt frazzled immediately, connecting the red-hot stone with his flesh. His skin sizzled, imitating a roasting pig or snapping, popping eggs.

But when she looked into his eyes, he knew the round spot on his forearm—which would always leave a circular scar like a brand—was the least of his worries. Her eyes relayed a clear message. He had something only he could give her.

And when the girl who had seven fingers passed the potter’s shop, she knew she was the right one for her. Her hands sat poised on either side of the pot, molding the clay into something functional, something usable. The girl peered through the open window at row after row of completed pieces, each with the sharp geometric shapes so signifying of her heritage.

As Potter worked, her fingers shaped the rim, being careful to smooth out any bumpy indentations an individual finger left. Hardly Handed had learned when she was a child that it was important to leave no mark of the human hand on the pot, the vessel from which water was to be delivered to the village. The pot that stored healing salves and potions. The pot was of the earth, merely shaped by the potter then given back again. She knew this and respected this.

“Well are you just going to stare at me all day or are you coming in?” Potter asked.

“I’m sorry, Good Potter.” She walked over the threshold, her hands buried beneath the fabric at her waist. “How are you this morning?”

“Fine, fine. Working it away,” she said, smiling but never looking up from the emerging shape in front of her. “What is it you’ve come to see me about?”

Hardly Handed seized the opportunity to pull the round stone from her pocket. It was blazing hot, but its radiant surface did not burn her. Not this time. “I’ve come to speak with you about a new basin, Good Potter. My mother requires it.”

But there was no new basin to be made. Good Potter gasped more in surprise than in pain at the prickly heat of the Melding Stone—the stone of all Keepers. It would be done quickly, at least.

And when the girl who had eight fingers saw the carpenter poised with his hammer in the air, she knew he was the right one for her. His back bent with the work. He reached far with each arc of the hammer. His body shook as the blunted metal tool hit the wooden surface. The young girl, whom some had called Hardly Handed, smiled. “Good afternoon, Strong Carpenter. How has the world treated you on this fine day?”

Strong Carpenter paused mid-stroke and turned to the sound of her voice. His eyes widened. “W-why hello, young maiden. The world has treated me fair. How has it been received by you?”

“It’s been received with graciousness,” she said, providing the customary reply.

“Good,” he said, eyes downcast at his hands. He flexed the right one around the hammer, shook his head then set the tool aside. “Are you to lay the Melding Stone on me now?” he asked, eyes finally meeting hers.

She didn’t reply. Instead, she pulled the smooth rock from her pocket and rubbed its surface with her left forefinger. She was so close her steamy breath made contact with his neck. He shivered. Then came the pressure of her partly-handed grip on his forearm, the heat and the sizzle. The smile never left her face.

And when the girl who had nine fingers saw the blacksmith hunkered over the anvil, sweat dripping from his brow, she knew he was the right one for her. Dirt smudged his muscular arms. Constant work heat had permanently darkened his face. He didn’t so much as look up when she spoke.

“Good day Young Blacksmith. How are you?” Her expression strained in the heat. She wanted to bypass the formalities. But that wasn’t the way it was supposed to be carried out.

“I’m fine, m’lady. I’m awfully busy though. Mind stating your business so I can maintain my living wage?” he said, in between the harsh strikes of his hammer against the molten metal.

As she pulled the rock from her pocket, it warmed up immediately. The Melding Stone had a memory for its task. It got to work.

“I know you’ve come to take the last one,” Young Blacksmith said. “But I’m here to tell you one thing, young lady. Some of us are born more fortunate in life than others. And if you ask me, the way you come out of your Mother Dear is how you ought to stay. How you’re meant to stay.”

The girl who had nine fingers was only missing her right thumb now. The Melding Stone rested in her palm, clenched tightly by four fingers. One was strong and another gnarled and old, but this only made the hand more beautiful. A patchwork quilt of flesh and bone. And on her left hand, one was good and the rest her own. And though she felt more complete than she ever had, it still wasn’t enough. There was no question she was to be Fully Handed by day’s end.

“I’ve a right to it,” she said.

“More than me, who was born with all ten?” Young Blacksmith asked.

“Even more than you. Because I am the Keeper in the darkness. I need the steadiest of hands. The Keeper must lay her hands on the flesh of the wicked. Don’t you see? Without your thumb, I cannot be whole. I will still be Hardly Handed, and that is not enough.”

“But I think it is, child. It is enough.”

“It’s not.” And she slapped the stone against his arm, and he recoiled in pain. “My mother was Keeper so I will be Keeper. My mother wielded the stone, so I will wield the stone. My mother became Fully Handed so I will be Fully Handed. This is the only way to fulfill the burden as laid before me at my birth.”

“I refuse to be a part of this. I require my thumb to work and create the metal-works you use each day and night. I require it!”

But his yells were futile, for once the girl who had nine fingers set on something, she was not to be distracted or turned away.

“I require it more,” she shouted, covering his pleas with her own.

The girl who had ten fingers saw the milkmaid and knew she was the right one for her. Her hair was long and golden, catching the sun’s rays and reflecting them in shiny tendrils. Her hands moved along the cow’s udders with care and elegance. She made a mundane task beautiful, and that was enough to set Once Hardly Handed in motion. She had enough now to keep the town for another generation, yes. But more would be better. More was always better.

AUTHOR BIO

Brenda Stokes Barron is a writer from southern California. She enjoys long walks across forgotten lands and making up stories about the people who inhabited them. She also likes planning imaginary Halloween parties with her husband, playing with her pet rat, and drinking way too much coffee. She has work forthcoming from Electric Velocipede and you can find out more about her at The Digital Inkwell (digitalinkwell.wordpress.com).

Citizen Komarova Finds Love

By Ekaterina Sedia

The very little town of N. was largely bypassed by the revolution—the red cavalries thundered by, stopping only to appropriate the ill-gotten wealth of Countess Komarova, the lone survivor of N.’s only noble family. The wealth was somewhat less than the appropriators had anticipated—a ruined mansion and no funds to repair it. The Countess fled to the only N.’s inn, and the red cavalry moved on, but not before breaking all the windows of Komarov’s mansion and allocating it for the local youth club.

Everyone knows what N.’s youth is like, and by fall most of the Countess’ furniture was turned into firewood, and by mid-December the mansion stood abandoned and decrepit, and a turd frozen to its parquet floors served as its only furnishing and a testament of gloria mundi transiting hastily.

The countess herself, stripped of her title and now a simple Citizen Komarova, was used to poverty—before the revolution, she made her living as a piano teacher, but that winter, savage and bloody, pianos were turned into firewood, their strings now disembodied garrotes. In search of new means of gentile sustenance, she turned to seamstress shops, but no one was hiring. Nearing despair, she finally settled as a clerk in a consignment shop at the outskirts of N.

The owner of the shop, a man as old as he was ornery, let her rent the room above the shop, where the wind howled under the roof thatched with a ragtag team of tiles and shingles. There was a small and round metal stove, known colloquially as “bourgeoisie,” as indiscriminate and insatiable as its namesake: it burned books, pianos, furniture, twigs and entire palmate fir branches, crackling birch logs. It gave back cherry-red heat that spread in waves through the room over the shop and broke over the stained walls, much like the distant Mediterranean over its rocky shores.

Citizen Komarova thought of the Mediterranean often—these were the vague memories of early childhood and its naive surprise at the shiny, tough leaves of the olive trees, over the white wide-brimmed hats and mustachioed men on the beach, over the mingling of salt and sun; memories almost obscene in the frozen and landlocked N. It was the only frivolity she allowed herself, and only when the metal stove made the air shimmer with concentrated heat before it dissipated in the cold, cold winter nights. Then, Citizen Komarova hugged her bony shoulders, wrapped in the spider web of a pilling black crocheted shawl over the spider web of wrinkles etched in her dry parchment skin, and rocked back and forth on her bed and cried. The rusted springs beneath her, wrapped in a thin layer of torn and colorless rags, cried in unison.

During the day, when she was done crying over her lost Mediterranean family vacation, she minded the shop downstairs. It was a single room, but much larger than her garret above it, and its contents ebbed and flowed depending on the fortunes of the citizens of N.

By the middle of January, the lone room, echoey just this past December, became stifled with all the things people brought in, hoping that Citizen Komarova would somehow manage to sell them to someone more fortunate, even though whose fortunes were good remained to be seen. There were leather-wrapped yokes the collectivized farmers had managed to keep for themselves and now were forced to let go off by bitter cold and steadily declining expectations; there were books with pages forever gone to hand-rolled cigarettes and missing title plates. Chipped china, pockmarked kettles, knives, scissors, ribbons, baskets and moth-ravaged furs. Whatever nobility survived in the environs had gravitated toward N., bringing with them heavy brocade and monogrammed silverware. Several fox skins, both platinum and regular, stared at Citizen Komarova with their amber-colored glass eyes from dusty corners. She moved between the shelves, adjusting this and that, and casually swatting at pottery with a feather duster.

The first customer of the day surprised her—he stomped his feet and clapped his hands on the threshold, dislodging a small mound of snow off his boots, held together by long cloth wrappings, and his long military coat, its chest although still covered in white powder, sporting the recognizable chevrons and ribbons of the red cavalryman, one of Budyonny’s fighters. His hat and the red star decorating it gave Komarova momentary chills, and her knotted fingers curled around the feather duster defensively. She took a deep breath and stepped forth from behind the shelves to meet the gaze of the cavalryman’s clear eyes. The dead foxes stared too, transfixing the people in the crosshairs of their amber pupils.

“What can I do for you?” said Komarova. The flame of the kerosene lamp on the counter guttered in the draft from the door, and the cavalryman shut it without being told to.

“I have something I’d like to pawn,” he said.

“It’s a consignment store,” she answered. “Which means we can sell it for you, but we cannot offer you any payment straight away.”

“I can take it to the market then.”

“You could, I suppose.”

The two of them considered each other at length.

“What is it then?” citizen Komarova asked eventually; by then, the shadows had grown longer, and the fox eyes glittered in their corners.

The cavalryman dug through the deep pockets of his overcoat. The snow on his clothes had melted, and only tiny droplets clung to the tips of the stray woolen hair on his sleeves, like fur of a cat that had come in from the rain and was about to irritably shake off the moisture. From his pocket, the man extracted four horseshoes.

“For good luck,” he said.

“I can give you a copper,” said citizen Komarova.

“It’s a deal.” The man smiled for the first time, then, and she was startled by the glint of his teeth in the shadow of the shaggy unkempt beard, which looked unintentional to begin with. When he smiled like that, his eyes sunk and his mouth pulled back, and she felt a chill. She wrapped her shawl tighter still and offered the payment on the palm of her hand.

He took it with cold fingers and was gone on a swirl of the coat, just as the four heavy horseshoes tumbled ringing to the floor. Citizen Komarova picked them up gingerly and spent the rest of the afternoon stacking and unstacking them, and sometimes hanging them on the nails over the door for good luck. She was glad when the sun set and no one stepped foot into the shop for the rest of the day, leaving her to her thoughts and the visibly unlucky horseshoes.

The rest of January passed in the sparse slow sifting of snow from the clouds, grey and heavy like quicksilver. The stock of the consignment shop increased: every dress and fur coat and petticoat and necklace, every ring and feathered hat had made its way there, as the former nobility grew hungrier and less optimistic about the possible return of the old order of things. The corners were now filled with rustling of lace and slow undulations of peacock feathers, their unblinking green and azure eyes nodding in the drafts. Countess Komarova, who in her entire lifetime had never experienced such luxury, stroked the ermine muffs and guarded them jealously from marauding moths.

She picked up delicate dresses, the lace ruffling on the chests white as foam, or the ones that were light as air, held together by the silken golden stitching. These were the dresses for waists much younger and slimmer than that of the former countess, their skirts long and stiff with golden thread, puffed with petticoats. And still she held them to her bust and looked at herself in the mirror, parallel wrinkles running along her cheeks made more severe by the ruffled collars, by the artificial flowers, feathers, and colored buttons. Her eyes shone at her from the mirror and she reminded herself of a hungry cat, not the clear-eyed child of the Mediterranean vacation.

The last day of January brought with it a howling wind, a bitter cold, and another visit from the cavalryman. Citizen Komarova was a bit puzzled by his repeat visit—unlike most, he was already paid for his horseshoes, and the army of which he was a part had moved on a long time ago, so there was no reason for him lingering behind. With him, he brought the cutting wind and the sense of great desolation. As citizen Komarova stared into his eyes, she felt the awful sucking void tugging at her soul, and the whispers ebbed in her skull like the distant Mediterranean in a pink shell pressed against her child memory ear.

“I have something else,” the cavalryman said.

“A copper,” she answered without even asking what it was, as if some force nudged her from the inside.

His gaze lingered on her face and traveled down, softening. “It becomes you,” he said, his hand motioning vaguely at her chest.

She looked down and blushed, suddenly aware of the lace shawl over the dress that neither belonged to nor fit her.

His large, square hand touched her elbow. “I’m Vasily Kropotkin,” he said.

“Like the Prince.”

“Exactly.”

“What do you have for me then?”

Metal clanged to the ground—two sabers in rusted sheaths and a horseshoe, a set of gold-embroidered epaulettes, and several medals citizen Komarova did not recognize. “Surely it’s worth more than just one copper,” Vasily said.

She gave him two. Her fingers, gathered into a pinch as if for a blessing, touched his palm as if it was a holy font, and again her mind was momentarily invaded by whispers and bubbling, hissing screams. She took a step back, and he disappeared again—she could never see him actually leave, it was him and then the opened door and a swirl of snow, the ringing of his spurred boots on the frozen ground, his long coat sweeping the path in the snow. And then she was alone, among the glassy staring eyes of foxes and the silently accumulating dust. As soon as the sun went down, she fled up the stair into her small, virginal apartment where the heat from the potbellied stove chased away her fears that crowded so densely and so coldly in the shop downstairs, where the dresses rustled and the imaginary whispers grew louder after the sundown.

Vasily came back in the middle of February, when the wind chased the twisting snow serpents close to the cold ground and the icicles fringing every doorway and window frame pointed down like transparent daggers, threatening to break off and pierce at any moment. The door clanged open, and the cavalryman—gaunter and sadder but unmistakably himself—smiled at her. His lips, bloodless and thin, pulled away from his teeth, and his cheekbones became suddenly prominent, and a thousand ghost eyes—sharp as the icicles sparkling along the top edge of the doorway—looked through his, grey and cold.

Citizen Komarova felt a chill, and yet her fingers reached out, a greening copper held between them. She touched his callused palm before he had a chance to chase the horrors from his eyes and he smiled again, warming, becoming human at her mere touch. The foxes in the corners reared and whispered, baring their teeth, their weak dangling paws clenching, their eyes clear amber and malice. She paid them no mind.

“What do you have for me today?”

He gave her a burlap sack, its bottom dark and crusted. She looked inside, into the pink lace of frozen, frothy blood to see a horse’s leg, chopped off at the knee, its fetlock covered in long, matted hair. She noticed round holes studding the circumference of the hoof and no horseshoe.

She looked away, swallowing hard, fighting back a wave of nausea, a riptide of swirling blackness that edged into the field of her vision, threatening to swallow it whole. His callused, working-class hand took hers, steadying her on her feet, and she blushed bright crimson at his touch.

“I cannot give you more than one,” she said.

“It’s all right.” He smiled. “I will bring more.”

And before she could protest, before she could stop him, he was gone.

She had disturbing dreams that night—her usual memories of that one perfect summer overlapping over the more desolate and recent events, and one moment it was warm sand and the smell of olive blooms, the next she felt callused working-class genitals pressed against the small of her back and she arched, sighed and woke up, blushing, too hot to go back to sleep. And yet, soon the waves pounded and the bed rocked under her, with the rhythm of the sea or something even more forgotten and unknowable, the warmth, the salt.

The shop downstairs caught the mild contagion of her dreams, the faint malaise—it behaved in the mornings, but as soon as darkened afternoons demanded that she lit the kerosene lamp on the counter, the shadows agitated the dresses, and the fox skins, shameless, wandered around the shop on their soft woolen legs. The severed horse’s leg thumped on the hardwood tiles haughtily, searching for its missing horseshoe. The lace unraveled and the dresses paired up and twirled in a dance or flailing panic, and fur coats chased away the moths with their long sleeves and then silently stalked the fox skins, who had the advantage of having body shapes rather than being flayed and stitched to others like themselves. They also had eyes, unlike almost everything else in the shop, and they did a better job avoiding Citizen Komarova and not blundering blindly into her.

By the time of Great Lent, on Clean Monday, almost everyone in N. was hungry, and the fast seemed a necessity more than an imposition. When Citizen Komarova left the shop, chased away by the disturbing goings-on, she walked down the snow-paved streets, wondering to herself at how quiet everything was, before realizing that the missing sounds were those that used to belong to livestock—there was no mooing, bleating nor clucking; no hissing nor barking nor quacking nor meowing, for that matter. Even the human voices were few and subdued. She walked to the bakery and bought a loaf of bread, dry and raspy with mixed-in chaff. She took it to her garret and crumbled it into a bowl of water, with just a splash of precious sunflower oil, and ate it slowly, chewing each bite a hundred times, stretching it, stretching like a winter night when the sleep would not come. The skin on her neck hung looser, a long, sad flap. Her waist, however, had grown slimmer, and now most of the dresses in the shop were too large for her, their full skirts swirling of their own volition about her feet, and sometimes swaying with enough force to make her stumble or almost knock her off her feet. She wore them all the time now, never sure when Vasily Kropotkin would show up but confident that he would. She did not bother to explain to herself why his arrival was important, and why it mattered if he complimented her flowing skirts and the delicate crocheted flowers winding about her throat, so beautiful.

He arrived late at night. The kerosene lamp was blown out and Citizen Komarova lay sleepless in her narrow bed in her narrow garret, one side of the roof above her slanting at a sharp angle, memories of past snowfalls whispering in the rafters.

She heard the heavy footsteps in the shop downstairs and lay on her back, listening intently, trying not to breathe so as not to miss a slightest sound—neither the jingling of spurs, nor the creaking of the steps, nor the thump of a new burlap sack. It fell to the floor heavily and wetly, with a sucking thwack that made her skin crawl. She knew that she would never dare to look inside, but that the disembodied horse leg would probably investigate and lean against the sack forlornly, its furry fetlock matting with the slow seeping of thick black blood.

Of course he would want his payment—the steps creaked, closer and closer, and the chills and the whispers followed, reluctant to let him go.

The door creaked. Citizen Komarova licked her lips, and said in a small, croaking voice, squashed with terror and sadness, “I have no coppers to give you.”

“It’s too bad,” he said. The bed creaked and shifted as he sat on its edge, invisible in the darkness, but solid.

“There are some downstairs, in the shop,” she said. “Come back in the morning.”

His wide, warm palm touched her face gently but with a hidden threat of superior strength and class position. “Can I stay here?”

She nodded wordlessly, her lips and eyelashes brushing against the leathery contours of his open hand.

The bed creaked again, and she felt his weight pressed against her, then on top of her, his fingers indenting the thin parchment skin of her inner thighs, pushing them apart. Their fumblings were short and dry and bruised, but citizen Komarova barely noticed: with every thrust of the knotted, gnarled body on top of her, her vision filled to brimming with unfamiliar sights.

She saw a row after row of the red cavalrymen, their horses gone, lined along the darkened riverbank. She could not see their faces, shrouded in shadow as they were; only occasionally she caught a glint from under the visor of a red-starred hat. A glint of copper, she thought, before the man on top of her pulled away and she saw the ceiling of her garret, awash in the grey premonition of the morning, and then her eyes closed and she stared at the frothy waves of the sea, as they covered the white sand and retreated, leaving in their wake perfect lacy patterns of foam, even and complex like the crocheted doilies the local nobility left by the dozen in the shop downstairs.

Then there was the ceiling and warm breath on her face, and then it all drowned in the clanging of metal and sparks flying from the clashing of sabers, the whinnying of the horses, and the quick, stuttering ta-ta-ta of the machine gun. There was mud and a slippery road and a lightweight cart with a mounted machine gun but no rider, pulled by a single spooked horse. The two-wheeled cart tilted and tipped over, and the horse slid, its hooves (devoid of horseshoes) splattering mud and mustard-yellow clay over its hide, dark with sweat, before it tumbled down, its hind right leg giving under it awkwardly, with a crack that resonated through her bones.

The man on top of her exhaled a muffled curse and pulled away for one last time, leaving her with a brief but searing impression of several cavalrymen surrounding her bed in a semicircle, pressing closer intently as if they wanted to see better. She pulled the covers all the way to her chin, and they leered at her, a few of them smirking under the coppers on their eyelids.

“Is this why you need money?” she whispered and nodded at the silent, invisible throng. “For them?”

He seemed neither surprised nor perturbed by citizen Komarova’s observation. He rolled onto his back, hands under his head, and sighed. “Yes. They need coppers to cross over, and I am supposed to get them for them.”

“Why you?”

(The dead in her mind’s eye stared, some with copper, others with eyes white as boiled eggs.)

“I was the only one who survived.” He sighed. “The White Army, the Black Army—goddamn Makhno!—too many, too many. When there’s only one man left alive from the entire regiment, he has to take care of his dead. They sure aren’t taking care of themselves.”

“I can help you,” she whispered, the skin on her throat unusually tight, constricting.

They came downstairs when it was still barely light. The air, colored whisper grey, like a dove’s underside, pooled in the corners, and soft cold drafts moved the heavy folds of dresses—all but one, a white lacy number that twirled in a dance with a shearling overcoat, oblivious to the gruesome beast that was busily self-assembling from the dismembered horse parts and a fox pelt, all mismatched fur and yellow glow of glassy eyes, teeth and hooves and frozen blood, pink like cherry petals in the spring that was too far away, too hungry and cold to even dream about.

“I know where the owner keeps the shop’s take,” she said. “He never takes it home—afraid of the thieves. He thinks here no one will find it.”

“He’ll know it was you.”

She sighed and patted his head—lumpy old scars bulged like veins under his greying and short and badly cut hair. There were probably lice, she thought with only a distant shudder of disgust. There were always lice on these people; no wonder they were so eager to call everyone “bloodsuckers” and appropriate the appropriators, or whatever nonsensical phrase they were using nowadays. Worse yet, they were right. She closed her eyes for a second, to gather her courage. It was the least she could do. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I will show them.”

The small chest, wrapped in copper straps mostly for show, was hidden in its usual place—in the bottom of a larger, almost identical chest filled to overflowing with spotted linens, torn doilies, and torn drapes, with broken flowers of white silk and yellowing muffs. She took the little chest out of its soft nest and blew on it, gently displacing stray threads and cobwebs.

They left the paper money—who had use for it anyway, in the town where it would only buy a loaf of stale bread and a jar of sunflower oil?—and took all the coins, all colors, all sizes. Copper and silver, the old Tsar coins and the new ones. Ghostly fingers reached for them and the red stars of the ghosts’ hats flashed in the morning light, multiplied by the many faces of the coins, and soon all their white eyes were hidden under the soft shine or green patina of metal.

“It is time,” citizen Komarova said softly.

He gave her a puzzled look.

“I told you I would show them. Only you will have to help me.”

They went back up the rickety stairs with the composite horse-fox pawing at her hems with its toes and hooves and barking piteously. Soon, the strange beast was left behind, and citizen Komarova lay on her maiden-narrow bed. The ruffles brushed her chin and hid her neck, and the lace over her breast lay smooth, virginal white.

She closed her eyes and told Vasily Kropotkin what he must do. He hesitated a while, but he was a soldier and she was a parasite, no matter how appropriated. He found the class strength within him, and his heavy hands stroked her throat. There were a few minutes of blind kicking panic, and the sound of either a crushed trachea or of broken bones of the fox-horse as it lost its footing and tumbled down the stairs.

But soon enough her eyes closed under two coppers and she stood on the Mediterranean shore, a pink shell clasped in her hands and an entire regiment of the Red Army crowding behind her, eager like children to see the white sand and the gentle waves and sea, blue as nothing they had ever seen before.

AUTHOR BIO

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone were published by Prime Books. Her next one, The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in November 2010, and Heart of Iron: From St Petersburg to Beijing is expected in 2011. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Dark Wisdom and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. She is also the editor of Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner) and Running with the Pack anthologies. Visit her at www.ekaterinasedia.com.

Love’s Ecology

By Rose Lemberg

1.

I have been free

but didn’t know myself.

I won’t be free again, but now I know

2.

Your fingers are my bread,

your eyes my wine, your body

my tender birds

your heart my meat. It rots

between my teeth. Your body

fills up with worms in which the bloated birds

find poison from their flight. Your vision blots

the surface of the sun

and drowns the earth in stench.

I’ll purify

your grief in vats of boiling milk, dissolve the years

inside the furnace in my chest, give birth to you

until the moon will cast its blindness off

until the sun is petrified

and love becomes as useless as the sun.

3.

You say I am unfaithful. Reconstruct

three feathers in my purse into a firebird lover.

He comes, you say, into my bedroom when you sleep

face mashed on keyboard keys. He comes

you say, as evening burns its entrance

upon the fireplace logs,

and thrusts his flaming tongue between my teeth.

You say

I’ve taken Sun for lover when the limpid heat

slides off the rooftops, runs a sweaty line

between my breasts.

He wraps his golden arms, you say

ray by voluptious ray around my waist

when you’re at work in air-conditioned rooms.

4.

I have examined

my body, limb by limb - this shameful house

with its dilapidated roof. I will admit

I was the hoarder of your love -

the broken cups,

used teabags, empty toothpaste tubes and cans of soda

I never tossed, not even rotten fruit

your hand had touched,

not even dirty socks.

I hoarded clippings where your name appeared

twinned with some famous last name. I’ll admit

I stole your photograph, and covered all my ceilings

with it a thousand times. And when the roof

leaked, your repeated face

became a crowd

blue with viridian paint,

disfigured by the passage of the water

obese with fungus. Do not worry, love,

I never let the neighbors in.

You brought

moth-eaten dolls

and plastic unicorns with sagging noses

to keep me company

if you should leave. I will admit, I gained

a hundred pounds

and have no wish to lose them. No, I am not mad;

inside my body, I am shining

5.

Come, fire-

desirable to firebirds, fire

it comes, it comes,

to take, to purify

to make my home again inside this garbage heap of dreams

stuffed to the seams

with you

I have been free

AUTHOR BIO

Rose Lemberg was born on the outskirts of the former Hapsburg empire. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and now works as a professor of Nostalgic and Marginal Studies somewhere in the Midwest. Her office is a cavern without windows. When nobody's watching, the walls glint with diamonds or perhaps tears, and fiddlers dance inside the books. Rose’s short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons and Fantasy Magazine, and her poetry in Goblin Fruit, Jabberwocky, Mythic Delirium, and Abyss and Apex, among other venues. She edits Stone Telling, a new magazine of boundary-crossing poetry.

Anything So Utterly Destroyed

By Elizabeth McClellan

What would have been my right hand—

delicate fingers discolored a bit,

a ghost of a ring, a seam at the wrist—

belonged to Miss Clark, believed drowned

in Cumberland lakes, her father to never recover.

He buried an empty coffin, sent her infant hair

for a mourning locket: a jet deaths-head, <em>not dead but asleep</em> carved

(a scrollwork lie) around the skull motif.

It gleams dully, part of an uncatalogued collection

willed to Matterdale Church

years ago and forgotten.

Sarah Clark drowned, true—

and the resurrectionists cheered their good fortune.

A healthy profit—

that right hand, her liver, the still-flexible joints of her knees,

the virgin center between her thighs alone

worth a gold guinea.

Victor took only pieces of the small-framed, the slight—

bits of bird-boned girls compared in life to sparrows.

He would not build a second giant to terrorize the race of men.

I never had Sarah's face—heavy with

Ulswater, fed upon by turtles and swimming things, deemed unfit

for scientific use. Numbered pages, labeled samples,

but no flesh both nibbled and rotten,

however often he scrawled “filth” and “dread”

jaggedly in rigid margins. Lily lost her left hand, both feet,

a graceful neck. Hannah, unlucky girl, will rise someday

to meet her Maker with no head. He chose her

for the port wine stain that spilled from eye to chin, a flaw

made by nature, harmless to his results.

Pity the syndic’s son, growing morbid in his seaside charnel house.

Sea-salt cleanses, but cannot remove the stink

of furtive purchases from men who reek of gin,

churchyard loam and profiteering, flecks of skin

caught carelessly as soap-slivers under nails,

dead girls’ names

hawked like penny dreadfuls.

The resurrectionists reach conclusions,

mutter darkly about perversion and nature spurned, and bring

a new corpse every night. Their pockets jingle with wedding rings,

black brooches inlaid with amber, coins that lately adorned

the eyes of classicists suspicious of the life everlasting.

Virgin, high-breasted—he knew a bride’s cast, even

this Eve who never met the serpent, Cain-marked before I drew breath.

What would have been my body

jerked under current, Sarah’s fingers spasming, rhythmic,

grasping at life again, Lily’s lovely neck stiffening, arching.

Hannah’s mouth pulled slack as a frog’s. I remember he wept.

I remember not one body, but ten, or twelve, superimposed.

Phantom limbs, partly revived, dream of phantom wholes.

The souls toss and turn, seeking to occupy the same space

on the slab, while outside the waves clamor for the return

of Matilda’s breasts, Letitia’s thigh bones, Sarah’s knees.

Victor wept at the sound, and fled, always leaving me half-made.

So Adam found me—too tall for the hovel door, squatting and peering:

at my naked, dismembered specimen. If he found me disgusting,

unworthy, a grotesquerie, he did not say.

I could not turn my head to read his face.

Lust mingled with despair has its own stink: sweet like

formaldehyde, bitter and sharp as urine. Victor, more Pygmalion

than Prometheus now, shuddered when the sea-breeze

stiffened my nipples,

even as he jotted his observation of this curious effect.

The rondure of my belly, stolen from a deaf-mute

never baptized, was the horizon silhouetting an army of devils yet unborn.

One cannot trust the female of the species to keep compacts made

by the male, to leave civilization at peace, to accept exile in a country

of endless light, a cave of verdant greenery, a bed of leaves

and diet of berries. I would have been happy with an Eden

carved out in another land, too remote to further trouble

Victor’s dreams. I think I would have been happy.

The stone beach ran with congealed blood, infused with salt water,

the screams indistinguishable, pack-howls hurled at the moon.

I had no voice to cry out, even before he dashed poor Hannah’s head,

ripped from Lily’s neck, against a rock until it ceased to breathe.

Sarah’s nails clung to algae, found no purchase, sank. The other hand?

Crushed under Victor’s boot like a scuttling crab as it scrabbled to flee.

What safety it sought no one can know. The same coins that bought

our body purchased driftwood, lamp oil, and inattention;

the promontory blazed bright, then stank of spoiled pork for weeks.

A child brought its mother a shell the next season,

a curiously polished, smooth thing, plucked from Thorso harbor.

Thus the smallest toe of our left foot gathers dust still,

among a collection of beads and stones, in a china bowl

kept in the curio handed down from great-grandmother.

This is the interchange of kindness, the wages of commerce with monsters:

a shiny bone, blackened meat, nothing left

to rise again.

AUTHOR BIO

Elizabeth McClellan is a second-year student and law review member at the University of Memphis’ Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. When not pondering the implications of legal personhood for artificial intelligences, the failure of state statutes to provide adequate due process in pre-judgment attachment, or the arcane mysteries contained within the Bluebook, she writes strange poetry, weird fiction, and the occasional arch letter to the editor of her hometown newspaper. To learn what rights and duties should accrue to a conscious computer, where to see the monster girls dance the Tarantella, or how the nymphs of Law tend groves of treaties and treatises to ensure the fullest flourishing of their forests despite the depredations of the lumbering Hornbook, visit lizbet.org.

ARTIST BIO

Mitenkov Maxim is a Belarusian digital artist who is been self taught and constantly exploring new areas styles and techniques. Since 2006 he has specialized in the fields of photo manipulation, but has broadened his skills into other areas such as matte painting and digital painting. He is available for freelance commissions for CD-booklets, book-covers and posters. He maintains a website at vimark.deviantart.com.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Short Story Guidelines:

1) Mail submissions to apex.submission@gmail.com.

2) Maximum word length a firm 7,500 words.

3) Payment is .05 per word. Paid within 30 days of publication.

4) Please submit either a Microsoft Word Doc or RTF file.

5) Use standard manuscript formatting as outlined by William Shunn. Essentially–double space, 12 pt. Courier or Times New Roman, 1″ borders.

6) We accept reprint submissions. However, your story must have been sold to a highly respected semi-professional (think Interzone, Weird Tales, and so forth) or professional publication (F&SF, Analog, and so on). Payment is a flat $10. Mark your story as a reprint in the subject heading of your email. Word limit for reprints is 10,000.

Poetry Guidelines:

1) Send no more than five poems at a time. No simultaneous submissions with other publishers.

2) Payment is $0.25 per line or $5 per poem, whichever is greater, paid within 30 days of publication.

3) Format your submission professionally (Writers Digest format). Single-space within stanzas.

4) Poems formatted flush left are preferred over those requiring special formatting (concrete poems, poems with staggered indentation, etc.). We’re looking for creativity of expression rather than of page layout.

5) Mail submissions to apex.submission@gmail.com.

Rights and Rules:

1) No simultaneous submissions.

2) Average response time is 20-30 days. Please do not query until after 60 days have passed.

3) We buy first world rights, exclusive for three months, nine months of non-exclusive e-rights after those three months, and non-exclusive anthology rights for three years.

4) Stories are required to contain a dark speculative fiction element.

What are we looking for here at Apex Magazine?

We do not want hackneyed, clichéd plots or neat, tidy stories that take no risks. We do not want Idea Stories without character development or prose style, nor do we want derivative fantasy with Tolkien’s serial numbers filed off.

What we want is sheer, unvarnished awesomeness. We want the stories it scared you to write. We want stories full of marrow and passion, stories that are twisted, strange, and beautiful. We want science fiction, fantasy, horror, and mash-ups of all three—the dark, weird stuff down at the bottom of your little literary heart. This magazine is not a publication credit, it is a place to put your secret places and dreams on display. Just so long as they have a dark speculative fiction element—we aren’t here for the quotidian.

Keep in mind that the search for awesome stories is as difficult as writing them. If you are rejected, don’t get angry—instead, become more awesome. Write something better, and better, until we have to accept you, because we have been laid low by your tale. It really is that simple.

Table of Contents

Still Life (A Sexagesimal Fairy Tale)

The Girl Who Had Six Fingers

Citizen Komarova Finds Love

Love’s Ecology

Anything So Utterly Destroyed

Submission Guidelines

Title Page

Front Matter