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Produced by Skyboat Media, and under the direction of Grammy and Audie award-winning narrator and producer Stefan Rudnicki, our podcast features audiobook-style recordings of two of the four stories we publish each month in Nightmare, released more or less on a weekly basis. To subscribe (free!) to the podcast, you'll either need our podcast RSS feed and put that into your favorite podcast client, or you can just subscribe via iTunes.
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.
It felt a little like fucking. Reminded Magdalene of the first time she’d ever let a boy get a hand up her skirt, long before Ben but he didn’t know that, she wore white on her wedding day. Couldn’t even remember his name, that boy, just that he’d died in The War.
When the sun plunged beneath the horizon, the striations of red clouds looked like gashes raked across the sky; flayed wounds ready to rain blood on a thirsty desert. Anastasia Mendez offered her left forearm a glance. The lacerations crisscrossing her skin had mended.
When he tells me to feed her, I do. And I do despite her cries, and despite the rattle of her chains echoing through the basement. The basement of the old house that once belonged to his father before I pointed a hunting rifle at his face and pulled the trigger.
Kachi stroked the yellow python-eye hidden between the cheeks of his buttocks with a distracted finger. The familiar round smoothness of the hard orb calmed his mind as he stared dispassionately at the mangled corpse sprawled at his tiny, blood-coated feet.
I wouldn’t describe it as waking up. If you’ve been in a car accident, you know the violence. One moment, your life feels the size of your body, muscular years of loves and hurts wrapped around a thousand calcified tasks, a routine that bears you up even on the mornings when nothing makes sense. Then your days break open with the sound of rupturing metal. You splinter like a windshield. It’s an awakening, of sorts, but it’s not like waking up.
When you get to the body, it’s still warm. Maybe because you’re exhausted, because your joints are feverish and your chest feels like it’s scraped dry, for a second, the face in front of you morphs and you see Ru splayed out inside the bathtub instead. Her wrists are splotched with welts, her eyes milked over with a knot of veins, but it’s the head that makes you rigid: Ru’s skull hangs to her chest, like something impossibly heavy is squatting on her neck.
The drums sound at first light but you are already awake. Today is the day you will finally meet the Goddess. She’ll either embrace you, ripping you apart and reforming you into a being of magic and flame, as mercurial as the sea, or She’ll withhold her blessing and never again will you walk upon land. You take a breath and hold the humid, tropical air deep in your lungs before releasing it and dressing in your ceremonial leathers. You knot the leather straps around your chest, replicating the geometric patterns favored by your beloved cousin, Sindr. The one who disappeared.
The call comes when Kaitlyn is at Little Star—the cafe on the corner of Third and Main—picking up lunch for the marketing team: two Caesar salads and a cream cheese avocado bagel sandwich. She answers her phone as it’s her turn to step up to the counter. The voice on the other end of the line says, This is Father Lawrence, chaplain from the Chillicothe Correctional Institution. She already knows what he’s going to say next.
Jeffrey, chin glazed in grease, leans his head over my cubicle wall and asks me what I’m working on. He slurps something from his bento box—the one with his name supposedly written in kanji on the side—and noodles hang trembling from his lips. Jeffrey’s the senior sales associate, which technically makes him my superior. He’s wildly unsavory for a number of reasons; the fact that he insists on eating at his desk every day is pretty high on the list.
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