There’s an eye in the back of my husband’s head. It opens only after he’s fallen asleep, lid splitting silent as a dream in the night. My husband’s eyes are amber, no brighter than a penny in the sun. The eye on the back of his head is different. It looks out at me through his dark hair, pupil white and glowing.| Nightmare Magazine
Zan’s supervisor tossed the glass square onto their rusting desk. A glass-rendered construct of a silver ticket hovered in the air, text shimmering. Zan held their breath as they re-read it until they were sure their credentials were correct.| Lightspeed Magazine
Defense Attorney John Yurasov: Earlier you referred to this trial as a circus. Can you explain what you meant? Defendant Michaela Xiao: I don’t mean it was corrupt. Though that’s very possible. I just mean that the conclusion was always foregone.| Lightspeed Magazine
Hannah’s first impression of Colden Hills Music Camp is that, for a place with “hills” and “music” right in the name, it’s too flat and way, way too quiet, and the one thing she initially thinks must be a weird rustic flute propped up against the side of the welcome cabin turns out to be just an extra-straight stick.| Nightmare Magazine
The buffet was infinite. It existed in a pocket dimension, via some sort of technological jiggering of the sort that you have heard about before and, unless you are totally anal, don’t want to hear about now.| Lightspeed Magazine
Dispatch #1. [INAUDIBLE] . . . but hopefully I’ve got the recorder working now. This is Dr. Nathaniel Letheford, Director, Alliance for Military Neutralization and Eradication of Sensitive Incidents and Atrocities. I have been inserted into conflict zone W-924/B for sample collection.| Lightspeed Magazine
The first version of the story I wrote for a friendly contest in a writing group. I used a pair of prompts---a set of words to use---from which I picked joint, monolith, stole, Jeep, and perhaps one more; and the idea of something that has lost its symmetry. A flat tire on a Jeep in the desert came to me almost right away.| Lightspeed Magazine
Once upon a time, on a spaceship traveling through the divide between galaxies, a married couple was bickering about whose job it was to clean the mouse shit that’d accumulated in the reactor tubes.| Lightspeed Magazine
Used to be, you’d buy paper offerings and burn them to provide for your ancestors. Spirit money ensured they were taken care of in the underworld and wouldn’t have to roam the pitted streets of the afterlife suffering from starvation or homelessness. In this way, you could help your late loved ones avoid the terrible fate of becoming hungry ghosts.| Nightmare Magazine
The hearth is a trope of holiday songs and stories. It’s a warm place in a cold time, and families gather around it---for love, laughter, storytelling, a cup of cheer. This short story is an attempt at redefinition. I’m taking the familiar and approaching it from an unfamiliar, upsetting angle.| Nightmare Magazine
I think a lot of people live their lives very small. We internalize barriers that don’t exist. I think this is heightened by tech, which would have us sit in chairs all day, reacting to nonsense. The human mind can expend only so much energy, and we sap a lot of it scrolling pointlessly.| Lightspeed Magazine
The grow pods clung to a red, humped ridge about a twenty-minute hike west from the habitats. Inside one of their plastic domes, a farmer named Oliver Judd nestled potato starts in the ground with nimble hands. It was tricky work in a forty-pound outside suit.| Lightspeed Magazine
The first and last time Calvin asks me about ghosts is on our fourth date. He wears green because I told him it was my favorite color. His hair is freshly cut, and his jaw still bleeding from a hurried shave. I smile at these small things he’s placing before me as an offering.| Nightmare Magazine
Buddhism teaches that life is a cycle of suffering and rebirth, and the only way to escape it is to achieve enlightenment. I’ve always found that theme interesting, especially in how it plays into creating Buddhist characters in wuxia/xianxia stories.| Lightspeed Magazine
It had all gone very well, Brooks told himself. Very well indeed. He hurried along the side corridor, his black dress shoes clicking hollowly on the old tiles. This was one of the oldest and most rundown of the Smithsonian’s buildings; too bad they didn’t have the money to knock it down. Funding. Everything was a matter of funding. He pushed open the door of the barnlike workroom and called out, “John? How did you like the ceremony?”| Lightspeed Magazine
For such an infamous book, the original edition Dévorer is decidedly ordinary. It is a small, clothbound book, written in French. It is one hundred and forty-seven pages long. It was privately printed by its author, Edgar Addison, in the final years of his life.| Nightmare Magazine
The bedbug bite is unlike any insect bite I’ve experienced before. You’re covered in these welts, and the cumulative effect of their itching is the inability to concentrate on anything other than that sensation. If horror is about extremity, then this story is about extremity of sensation.| Nightmare Magazine
In the morning room everything is bright and clean, florals and pastels. My wife says it looks tacky and childish, but after some pleading, she agrees not to touch the decorations. The faint lavender-colored walls I hang with dried pressed flowers in clear-plastic frames. The couch is the most expensive thing I ever bought.| Nightmare Magazine
“Glory Hole” is a horrific, although incredibly intimate, look into the ways in which we punish ourselves in ways we think we deserve. What was your inspiration for this story? What was the writing process like, and was it any different from the ways you’ve written other stories? I wrote “Glory Hole” shortly after suffering […]| Nightmare Magazine
Important Note About Kindle Periodicals/Unlimited Subscriptions Nightmare is withdrawing from the Kindle Periodicals Program on Kindle Unlimited due to the draconian terms and conditions. If you’re a subscriber via Kindle Unlimited and wish to continue your subscription (and we really hope you will!), you can subscribe directly via our website or via Weightless Books; all […]| Nightmare Magazine
Little is more crushing than the idea that no matter what you do, you are only capable of destruction, and everyone knows it. I wanted to weave that fear into this story, and to push tenderness and violence up against each other. How can we understand one without understanding the other?| Nightmare Magazine
You know the one about the Gun. The Gun goes where it wants to. On Thursday morning just after recess, the Gun will walk through the front doors of Thurman Elementary, and it won’t sign in at the front office or wear a visitor’s badge.| Nightmare Magazine
On the island of Manhattan, there’s a building out of time. I can’t tell you where it is, exactly. It has an address, of course, as all buildings do, but that wouldn’t mean anything to you. What I can tell you is that the building is called The Oakmont.| Fantasy Magazine
Muna shuts the storeroom door as quietly as she can. Holding a just-waxed bundle of letters to her chest, she sticks out her head to check the bookshop floor. If she walks between the shelves on the far right, she can slip out unnoticed in ten heartbeats. The main door of the bookshop is propped open, the sun shining after what feels like a year of sodden clouds and sludged streets---she can’t wait to feel its warmth on her skin.| Lightspeed Magazine