Apex Science Fiction and Horror Digest #9

by Apex Authors

  Oh, how wrong I was.

  Ninth grade brought the indomitable Mr. Hendrick. Just to give you an idea—the quote I remember from Mr. Hendrick was, “Thoreau is right, and you are wrong.” His favorite editorial comment was the unadorned question mark, and I was the one student upon which he most often bestowed this beloved symbol. I probably should have contacted Guinness after receiving one red-ink-stained paper boasting thirty-three question marks—over six marks per page.

  What do you do with that, I ask you?

  We had to rewrite our Member of the Wedding paper three times, our Raisin in the Sun papers “had coffee spilled on them” and were never seen again, and we were forced to read Sister Carrie. I hated The Sea Wolf; it was where I learned to despise anything having to do with yeast, and the term “universal truth.” We even read some Dickens that year. Which is a shame—I might have actually enjoyed Great Expectations otherwise.

  The only bright spots were the 5+ on my poetry portfolio (five-plusses were about as widespread as whooping cranes, but I had at the last minute added a four-page unassigned narrative poem), and the time we were given extra credit for memorizing the Romeo and Juliet balcony exchange.

  I memorized the whole scene. It was about three pages of our Literature textbook.

  [ ... would through the airy regions stream so bright, the birds would sing and think it was not night ... ]

  At the end of that year Mr. Hendrick and I parted quietly and civilly. I was not sorry to see him go.

  Tenth Grade

  Tenth Grade brought Mrs. Watkins—a soft, charming older woman who never understood me no matter how much I loved her. She couldn't comprehend why passages from A Separate Peace sparked all these abstract thoughts in my brain. If you didn't get out of the book what you were supposed to get out of the book, you weren't doing the assignment.

  Cliff's Notes were a godsend. It wasn't cheating; those little yellow booklets taught me how and what the rest of the world expected me to think.

  The most revealing unit was the peer editing. Historically the most evil, thankless experiment, the class broke into groups of three and anonymously co-edited three similarly anonymous papers. Let me tell you: fifteen-year-olds pull no punches. (Had we known that one of the papers we hacked to pieces was written by our Vietnamese friend for whom English was a second language, we certainly would have acted differently ... talk about embarrassing.) As a saving grace, Mrs. Watkins went over the papers and put her own, compassionate, real grade on top of the peer grade. No pressure, right?

  This assignment would have made Hitler sweat.

  Ever the overachiever, the paper I turned in was a thirty-five page handwritten fairy tale edited down to four typed pages with non-existent margins. My biggest fear was that I had abridged so much that the readers wouldn't be able to follow the plot. But I shouldn't have worried—my ruthless peers gave me an A.

  Mrs. Watkins gave me a B-.

  I was as surprised as you. And more than a little confused—if the purpose of peer editing was to successfully please my readers, then what was the problem? I knew from our experience with Trien's paper that had the grammar been an issue there would have been machete evidence right there in red and white. I was never popular enough—even among the Nerd Clique—for the grade to have been a gift, that was certain.

  Baffled, I whispered an inquiry after class about the lowered grade.

  "I gathered it was supposed to be a fairy tale,” she said casually. “But it wasn't appropriate for children."

  I may not take any of that nonsense now, but I was not one of those kids who walked around with a “Question Authority” T-shirt. Hell, at the time I was still too shy to ask for extra ketchup at the McDonald's counter (a fact with which Tom Piccirilli takes great pleasure in torturing me). There was no way I was going to put up a fight.

  But my brain was screaming.

  Had she never actually read the original Grimm's “Cinderella” ... the one where the evil stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to squeeze into the slipper? Or “The Goose Girl,” where the disloyal maid unknowingly suggests her own punishment in the form of being placed naked into a barrel full of nails and dragged down the street by two white horses?

  Apparently not.

  Mr. Hendrick may have been a jerk, but at least he was well read.

  Not knowing what else to do, I took the grade and waited for my life to get better.

  Eleventh Grade

  Thanks to the luck of the draw, Mr. Hendrick decided to teach eleventh grade English Honors that year. I dreaded every moment ... and blocked out most of them.

  I do remember that I read William Goldman's The Princess Bride that year as an independent movie tie-in project. I was amused to report that Goldman's universal truth was ironically: Life Is Not Fair.

  Mr. Hendrick and I fought over whether the book was written before or after the movie. He finally ended up taking points off, probably because he thought I should have hunted down the original S. Morgenstern version instead of Goldman's “abridgement."

  Our very last assignment was a poetry analysis. It wasn't even for a grade—we either got a check or a check plus. The purpose was to test our skills to see if we were ready for AP English the next year.

  Because of the Advanced Placement program, there was no English Honors offered in our school in the twelfth grade. If you didn't go into AP, you had to settle for College Prep English with all the “normals."

  Of course, I had already made up my mind—I had no intention of wasting my senior year stressed and overworked while reading books I didn't like and writing papers teachers hated all to exempt the easiest 4.0's in college to procure.

  I may have been reticent, but I wasn't stupid.

  Only four people in the class received one of Mr. Hendrick's parsimonious check-plusses. I was one of them.

  Oh yes, shy girls can still be smug.

  Twelfth Grade

  Mrs. Smith's College Prep English Class of 1993 was like one of those TV sitcoms where the nerdy chubby girl is surrounded by jocks and pretty girls who can't read. The first day, someone asked Mrs. Smith the eternal question of what we needed to do to exempt the exam. Her answer: “Don't piss me off."

  Yes, ma'am. Piece of cake.

  I didn't have it so easy in my other classes—my schedule was crammed full with AP Chemistry, AP European History, AP Government and Economics, and AP Calculus. I figured I'd just sit in the back and do my Calculus homework and cruise through the class without a care in the world.

  Mrs. Smith sat me in the front row, right beside her desk.

  I rebelled by turning in four-page papers when the minimum requirement was one, and yelling out the answers to the classroom every time she gave us a pop quiz and then left the cubicle to go smoke a cigarette or flirt with her favorite administrator.

  We read A Tale of Two Cities, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Canterbury Tales. I loved them all. When I was bored in class I simply flipped around in the Literature book, enraptured with T.S. Eliot, e e cummings, and the short stories of Ray Bradbury and Roald Dahl. Sure the class was crap, but I actually had fun.

  All the “normals” thought I was crazy ... and I let them.

  (I still do.)

  The only snarl Mrs. Smith and I had was during the Chaucer unit. I got back my paper to find the word “microcosm” circled, with “plagiarized?” written above it in red pen.

  Microcosm was a word we had learned in our ninth grade spelling books. At least, it was a word the English Honors kids had learned. When I asked Mrs. Smith about it, she told me that there was no way I could have come up with that word all by myself; I must have seen it in the Literature book and subconsciously memorized it and stolen it for my own.

  Riiiiiiight.

  It's not like she was ever going to expend the energy to get me in trouble, so it was never a big deal. But I have to admit, I'm still wondering how one plagiarizes a word.

  Reading it, learning it, and using it again properly ..
. isn't that how you learn vocabulary in the first place?

  Graduation

  I ran into Mr. Hendrick again in the bowels of the Coliseum when everyone was lining up before graduation. Having acquired a teeny bit more gumption, I walked right up to him and said, “You know, you made me hate English."

  In retrospect, that was a horrible thing to say. Just because it was true didn't make it okay.

  He came up to me later after the ceremony and apologized, but I shrugged him off. I didn't have to like English—I may have been writing since I was eight, but my parents had told me in no uncertain terms that English was not an acceptable college major. We had toured colleges up and down the eastern seaboard the summer before and I had tried to make it work, looking at journalism and mass communications and any other career path that might have had to do with the written word.

  Ultimately, parental pressures and budgets decided for me. I stayed at home, worked like a madwoman, and went to the State University. I ended up majoring in chemistry, but only because I was good at it.

  I dropped out of college after three years—ironically enough, after all those AP classes I had enough credits to get a degree. Technically, they call that graduating.

  Funny how life works out.

  I never had a proper writing class until 2003—ten years after high school—when I was accepted into Orson Scott Card's Boot Camp. Not much slimmer but oceans braver, it was all I could do not to burst out laughing when Scott instructed us all to NEVER pursue an academic English career. He maintained that kowtowing to professors and “learning” how to write was the worst thing a writer could ever do.

  Mom always said that everything happens for a reason.

  A universal truth if ever there was one.

  So here I am—a girl who mixed up the alphabet, who brought together an international SF Legion of Superheroes to benefit victims of the worst natural disaster in history, who had the privilege of assembling a book of facts on one of the most popular paranormal romance series of all time, and who publishes silly stories about herself in a horror magazine for the Best Boss Ever.

  I've taken up permanent residence outside the box, and spray paint rainbow graffiti on it in my spare time. My family is belowstairs in the genre ghetto; my misfit siblings post on a board called Shocklines, my honorary Uncle is Orson Scott Card, and my guardian angel is Andre Norton.

  Even the shyness has come a long way—I now have a life goal of acquiring as many friends as humanly possible. I'm not as brave as I still could be; there I'm still a work in progress. But I have actually walked into a room and said, “The party can start now."

  I have had to fight upstream in order to do what I'm doing right now. But I think because of that, I appreciate every aspect of my very long list of jobs. I carpe diem, noctem, and every hour in between. Every opportunity is a miracle. Every publication is a gift like no other.

  It's a pretty amazing life.

  I wouldn't have it any other way.

  * * * *

  Oh, bugger.

  That's the end of the essay.

  I guess that means I have to go finish that short story now...

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  Artist Credits

  Paul Bielaczyc

  Cover & Interior art—The Sum of His Parts

  At the 24-Hour

  Projector

  Sufficiently Advanced—————-

  Michael Bielaczyc

  CAIN XP11: The Voice of Thy Brother's Blood

  The End of Crazy

  The Gunslinger of Chelem

  Pyramus and Thisbe

  Don't Show Your Teeth—————-

  Justin Stewart

  Cover Design

  Apex Parting Shot—SONOROUS

  By Paul Abbamondi

  Whether it's teeming with worms or bunkered by crawlies, it's yours. You found it, stuffed awkwardly between half a hollowed tree trunk and a grouping of mossy rocks. Not entirely sure what it is, but you've got a quarter notion that it's some sort of old musical instrument, judging by all the holes. Flute or piccolo or some type of instrument you don't even know about.

  It was silver, that much you knew, for the dull gleam of it in the afternoon light brought you to it. The silver was faint and faded, with yellowish circles dirtying its body. All around, the trees were hushed, as though awaiting your next move.

  Were you really going to play it?

  You shake it free of nasty things, noting the blowhole at one end and several in the middle for fingers to cover. Don't worry, you're alone. You have no skill, but that doesn't matter. Really, no one's going to care if you want to play it, even just to hear a note or a badly produced whiff of air and spit.

  So you wipe it clean with the end of your shirt, dirt smearing off in thin streaks. Cleaning its insides is nearly impossible, but you do your best and forget about any remaining mud or ants trapped within the thing. Yes, that's right, you forget about it. There are letters and numbers etched into its shaft, like a serial code of some sort.

  EXPMNT346787.

  You raise the instrument sidelong to your face, wet your lips and blow, timidly at first, then with all you have.

  Nothing.

  Not a sound besides your sputtering breath, a bit short at that.

  You check the instrument over again, turning it in your hands and holding it up in the light as if that might do something. There doesn't seem to be any noticeable cracks or breaks. You try again, now determined to produce a sound.

  Nothing.

  You hold out the instrument before you, wondering why you wasted your time on such a broken thing. No wonder it's been left out in the woods. Junk, certainly.

  Then you hear it. Faint, at first, but increasing in volume, like the slow beat of a drum, tapping at the inside of your chest. It thumps and pounds, then drones on in an unnerving fashion. You whirl, wondering where the sound is coming from, or rather, where it is heading.

  Off in the distance, beyond your vision, a dark blur rushes toward you, unshapely yet massive. It appears to be hairy with long necks, or arms or legs or branches protruding from its center mainframe. Now there are things thumping to the dirt around you, falling from trees and the sky. Squirrels, birds, bugs, leaves. All dead and still, some hitting you as they come down, others dropping hard to the earthen floor.

  The growling grows louder. You can almost taste it, a burning sensation of ash and stale bread, or bile twice swallowed. But you cannot see it. Something is moving—charging—but it's too fast for your eyes to focus on. You think you see a gleaming ring of silver around its neck, maybe with holes in it. Maybe even an amber light blinking away, as if to proclaim: danger, danger.

  What do you do?

  You run, of course, sprinting with all the might in your legs, ever knowing that you're just a human and that thing is certainly not, and that before long, it'll catch up with you. It heard its call, some sonorous sound bringing it forth, stirring it from the shadows. What happens when it catches up with you, though, is a mystery, one you'd rather not fathom.

  And so you run, without sound.

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  Paul Abbamondi reads and writes speculative fiction compulsively. His short stories have appeared in Shimmer and Aberrant Dreams, among other fine publications. Visit his blog at wistfulwritings.blogspot.com.

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