“Ape Opus” by Kate Lister Campbell / Salamander Magazine
“God knows my heart, no matter what you think you know.”
When I finished reading Kate Lister Campbell’s “Ape Opus” (7,100 words) in Salamander Magazine last week, I had a premonition: I saw it featured in the next Best American Short Stories anthology.
From my keyboard to God’s…I want to type “ears,” but I guess modem? God’s ISP?
The connection was obvious: This story of a woman’s religious epiphany, a full-on miracle, lining up squarely with my vision of Lister Campbell’s story’s success.
A little theme-creep, I reckon.
All that aside, this is a wonder of a short story. It’s already won Salamander’s 2025 Fiction Contest. So read it, please, now and often (via the link above).
The thing that’s miraculous about “Ape Opus” is its nearly flawless execution on every craft front. For me, it was the kind of story I knew I’d be returning to even before I finished reading it. Lister Campbell tackles a huge topic, maybe the biggest there is, and delivers us to a meaningful conclusion. She doesn’t shy away from hard questions or pointed conflict, but keeps returning to genuine empathy. And all of this happens without sacrificing the scale-balancing-need to temper the brilliantly light with the unfathomably dark.
Alright, foot off the gas, Shoutout, you’re coming in hot.
“Ape Opus” really works as a title. Titles are so frickin’ hard, as I’ve opined in these story appreciations before. They need to function as lures that tease us into a read. That’s job #1. Anything else, anything about them that deepens the telling of the story, is gravy. And Lister Campbell hands us the gravy boat.
In the opening paragraph we meet our principals; our main character Allison and her slightly older frenemy, Dawn—her husband’s boss’ wife. Allison immediately defines herself, in first person point-of-view, as:
“agnostic in the way of the highly educated—who knew what we couldn’t perceive with our limited senses and our near-primitive brains?”
The whole of this story—the story of all of humanity—is, you know, an Ape Opus.
We need to get halfway through the telling to get to a completely different understanding of the title. That comes by way of a trendy, new restaurant Lister Campbell concocts, which is a thematic stand-in for the unknowability of what God serves up and we blindly scarf down.
More on that in a bit.
After the introduction, we watch over Allison and Dawn’s shoulders as they visit the Santa Maria de Montserrat Abbey in Catalonia, near Barcelona, Spain. They’re there to sightsee (while their husbands attend a work retreat,) and visit the Black Madonna, a nearly-life-sized, twelfth century wooden statue of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child—a popular stop on many pilgrimages.
Dawn is the more religious of the two, but she’s also more cynical and aggrieved about the world.
Lister Campbell gets to foreshadowing quickly by establishing Allison’s mindset, before and during this trip:
“Lately, I’d felt an odd distance from the stream of events occurring moment to moment around me.”
We spend a leisurely few pages getting to know Allison and Dawn, enough to settle into what I assumed would be a low-key character study—a great, modest setting in which to mount the jewel of the religious epiphany. Before we get to it, though, one more foreshadowing breadcrumb:
“The Jesuits’ founder, Saint Ignatius, had become an ascetic after a night spent in prayer before this very icon. The Spanish-English brochure said Ignatius had quit his military career and laid down his sword and dagger at the Black Madonna’s feet. What it didn’t mention—and which I Googled—was that he’d already taken a cannonball to the leg and was looking for a new occupation in life.”
This after learning that Allison had recently lost her job and was ripe for a new occupation, too.
The epiphany, when it comes—while she’s standing before the Black Madonna—is brief and dramatic:
“Then, I was aware of nothing but a hot crackling in my palm and a surge of energy that travelled to my brain, down my sternum, through my solar plexus and into my uterus and genitals. After a moment, I severed the connection […] When I opened my eyes, the Madonna was no more or less beautiful, and in this way seemed to dismiss me. I walked down the exit stairs.”
The rest of the story (nearly four-fifths of it) tracks Allison and Dawn’s experiences and relationship, along with that of their husbands, in the aftermath of this event. The realizations both women make, along with their choices, are gripping. I haven’t read a story built around the idea of religious fervor that’s as affecting as this one is, I think because of the ingenuity of the structure: It is the agnostic who finds herself in the throes of that fervor, which generates a reaction bordering on contempt from the other, Dawn, who is a believer.
Being immersed in that piquant dynamic—not to mention the shading added by the equally compelling husband characters and the boss / underling drama at play there—gives us a lot to roll around in.
But the story gets to another level when we reach Anagram, the trendy restaurant I mentioned early, at the story’s halfway point. It’s effectively a set piece for another one of a few waves of emotion and second-sight that overcome Allison post-epiphany. And its conception couldn’t be more intriguing.
The restaurant’s menu is a series of, you guessed it, anagrams—the names of all the items on offer are scrambled—so that most of the patrons are ordering blind. Take a shot at “Ape Opus,” for one.
This is more than a punny / funny joke. As I read it, it’s a metaphor for our spiritual journey in the world; we wrestle with the complex mysteries of life arrayed before us, order up our futures—often on faith alone—then wrestle with the reality of what we’re served.
The “staging” of Allison’s second epiphany-moment in Anagram, which includes bizarre lighting that washes the space in different colors, plays like it could be another odd element at this particularly theatrical restaurant. But it quickly becomes apparent that the colors are part of Allison’s subjective experience of her personally profound miracle-moment, a kind of full-room mood ring thing. When paired with her intense description of that revelation—a completely unexpected and God-like feeling of omnipresence in the room—the effect is both cinematic and overwhelmingly, heartbreakingly human.
After the bombast of all that, Allison relates this:
“I felt utterly alone, except for the presence of Dawn. Somehow, I still felt as if I were a part of her.”
Why?, I wrote to myself in the story’s margins.
The story’s close answers that question. Allison and Dawn are two sides of the same coin. They aren’t done with each other after the Big Show at Anagram, and the confrontation that’s ahead of them pits the fact of Allison’s revelation against the death-grip Dawn has on the idea of the power of faith.
The breadth of the story is crystalized in the image of Allison’s recently deceased father’s rosary beads, which she keepsakes. He worried them through his end-stages, and Allison does the same with them, for comfort, when she’s deep in her miracle moment. The paint on them flecks off revealing cheap, white plastic.
That may be Kate Lister Campbell’s take on the church, but her take on spirituality is the exact opposite: it’s everything, everywhere, all at once. You can go there with her for the low, low cost of 7,100 words of your time.
Do that now, here. Or wait until the next edition of Best American Short Stories hits the shelves, God willing.
Salamander is a nationally recognized, internationally distributed biannual magazine of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and works in translation. It was founded in 1992 and aims to publish work by writers deserving of a wider audience at any stage in their careers.
Salamander was housed in Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts from 2005-2026, and is currently on hiatus while seeking new sources of funding. They’re holding off on new submissions while they seek out new avenues of support and collaboration.
You can subscribe to their newsletter at the base of their home page or follow them on Instagram or Bluesky for updates on what comes next.
Check out more of Kate Lister Campbell’s great work on her website.
Many thanks to Kate Lister Campbell and Salamander Magazine for delivering “Ape Opus” to us, like a transporting beam of light from on high.
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