The May 2009 issue of Apex Magazine features three stories of characters navigating a changed or changing world.

“Hideki and the Gnomes” by Mark Lee Pearson has the haunting quality of a dark fairy tale murmured in the flickering light of a dying fire. Yet it is entirely modern. Hideki looks on as, one by one, the moons in the sky disappear or are destroyed, wreaking havoc all around him. As his world deconstructs, technology moves backward and Hideki takes action. But it is unclear whether he has taken the right course.

Using structural repetition and a portentous countdown from twelve moons, Pearson offers a puzzling but intriguing picture of apocalypse.

As the protagonist in Peter M. Ball’s “Clockwork, Patchwork and Ravens” says, “Downside is not a place where fairytales happen.” But this young man with his metal arm and clockwork heart, and the tinkerer who rebuilt his battered body with scraps and old tech, are doing their best to act heroically. Randal helps care for Rose, whom his benefactor, Jackson, has rescued from a Downside alley. The Corvidae, a gang of genetically altered bird-men, disfigured her, apparently in an aborted attempt to make Rose into something like themselves. Now they’re angry, croaking and cawing at the windows and clawing at the doors to retrieve what they see as their stolen prize.

Ball creates a fascinating setting in Downside, a Dickensian, post-apocalyptic underworld in which the vicious Corvidae leap from the page with their horrifyingly believable mannerisms, and Jackson’s patched together charges valiantly hold their own. The characters are eminently sympathetic:  the “half-man” Randal, though insisting that he doesn’t love her, sees in Rose’s ravaged face both beauty and a kindred spirit. Jackson, teller of fairy tales and mender of broken people, stubbornly refuses to allow the threat of violence to stop him from his work. “Clockwork, Patchwork and Ravens” is a riveting story told in beautiful language, and I look forward to reading more of Ball’s work.

And finally, Jason Sanford shows us what the world is like “When Thorns Are the Tips of Trees.” Miles remembers a time when he and his best friend, Brad, played together as children in their suburban neighborhood. But now the neighborhood is mostly abandoned; the swingset overturned, and the playhouse rotting. Brad, Miles’ mother, and his friend Elleen are all dead, victims of a bioengineered phage activated through human touch. Miles communicates with these loved ones by piercing his hand on the thorn trees that sprang from their bodies when they died, but knows that he is only speaking with static echoes of their souls.

Elleen seems different, though–more connected with current reality–and he visits her often. On one of these visits, he is confronted by a pack of “thorn die,” half-naked people in the final throes of the disease, some of whom are mad with desire to touch him, but whose leader has bigger plans.

“When Thorns Are the Tips of Trees” offers a fresh take on the double-edged nature of the promise of scientific discovery. The phage may have been intended for good, to bring “beauty and eternal life,” but its result is physical and social destruction that perhaps only the infected have the courage and understanding to rectify. Although I would have liked a clearer understanding of the stages of infection, as well as how and why some of the infected differ from the others, I found this to be an intriguing and meaningful story expounding the importance of growth, change, and letting go.