If you read just one of the three stories in the April issue of Apex Magazine, make it “Waiting for Jakie” by Barbara Krasnoff. With the help of just a little extra anxiety medication (”who would begrudge it”), an elderly Holocaust survivor journeys back decades and thousands of miles to step into the consciousness of her younger self. She is the young woman, skinny and irreparably damaged, newly freed from the concentration camp. And then she is the child, standing by in innocence the day the soldiers came to her uncle’s estate. All of her selves–old woman, young woman, and child–come together at the critical moment, in the hope that this fractured human being might be made whole. 

Krasnoff tells this poignant tale of brokenness and hope through her first person protagonist, in each of her incarnations, even dipping briefly into the first person plural (”we”) at one point. The shifting viewpoint is a gutsy move on the author’s part, but necessary to convey the shattering effect of the character’s experiences. The reader may feel some slight dizziness in moving between one point of view and another, but these shifts never jar or detract from the journey of the sympathetic protagonist. In fact, they contribute to the air of authenticity Krasnoff has created.

The only thing missing from this beautifully rendered story is the protagonist’s name. She may have been no one to her Nazi tormentors, but I would like to know the name of this character I’ll not soon forget.

If you long for the bygone days of the Golden Age of science fiction, you might sympathize with the protagonist in Jamie Todd Rubin’s “Hindsight, In Neon.” Known as “the last SF writer” throughout the story, he spends his time drinking endless cups of coffee in a dreary diner that may exist only in his imagination. There he laments the unrealized promise of great ideas first proposed in science fiction and the end of literacy to his agent, who in reality, may or may not be present.

This tale’s noir sensibility and references to notable science fiction works may be appealing to some readers. And the world in which “the last SF writer” lives may not be far off. But “Hindsight, In Neon” offers little in terms of story arc or character development. Nothing happens. Everything has already happened and from the protagonist’s view, efforts at rectifying the mistakes of the past are futile. He is a stubbornly morose creature, determined to continue complaining, and to doing nothing to change his situation or that of the world. The character undergoes no transformation over the course of the story; nor does the reader’s understanding of him grow. At the end of this piece, I was left feeling frustrated, and a little depressed.

Jeffrey D. Kooistra’s “Love, Dad” is the epistolary tale of a man who gives up family life to embark on a 20-year mission to Alpha Centauri. Ken and his wife, Sandy, soon regret their decision to divorce and keep up a correspondence as their daughter grows up admiring her dad from afar. This could have been poignant had the ending not been somewhat predictable, but is overall an enjoyable read.