Fiction

I took the rats with me when Ilona kicked me out because I knew she loved them. She’d hold them, caressing their pink tails as she fed them pierogi, their large front teeth scraping against the pads of her fingers. Anton was her favorite, a big black rat that she’d stuff between her breasts and carry around the apartment while reading about microeconomic determinants.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 166 (July 2026)

Fiction

A Nebraskan Choir

by Steve Toase

The engines echo across the emptiness of the plain like a chorale, individual melodies weaving together to create a tune in the voiceless air. We hear them miles away, aeons in the distance, giving us time to prepare for their arrival. By the scratch-wounded clouds of the sunset and the throat-clawing grasp of the grass, we will prepare the house for them.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 166 (July 2026)

Fiction

The Plague Comes from Chinatown

by Claire Jia-Wen

Author spotlight

Your companions drag the coolie girl to her feet. Some two-cent girl with rags for clothes and hair hanging across her face in tangled strings. Her eyelids flutter but do not open, revealing only the white crescents of her sclera. Blood trickles from a gash across her forehead. The ragged skin sickens you like the Devil. Her skull peeks through. This is a lynching.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 166 (July 2026)

Fiction

Patterns of Dentition in Transgender Adults

by Izzy Wasserstein

Author spotlight

The dryer groans to life, then begins thumping ominously. Maddie, already halfway out of her building’s laundry room, swears under her breath. The machine grinds and shakes. She slams the stop button, trying not to think about what the landlord might charge.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 165 (June 2026)

Fiction

NoMouth

by Marianne Kirby

The videos show people kissing. They press their mouths together and open their lips. Their tongues move, wet and intrusive, less like they are tasting each other than like they want to lay eggs in the protected throats of their lovers.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 165 (June 2026)

Fiction

What Grows Back

by Aishatu Ado

Author spotlight

I have told this story before, and I will tell it again, and each telling grows more teeth. Sometimes thirty-four, thirty-six. Sometimes they multiply faster than your science allows, like every word you made me swallow coming back to bite you.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 165 (June 2026)

Fiction

A Magic Kingdom

by Bruce McAllister

When I worked at Disneyland in the summer of ’65, it was strange enough even without what I found in the dumpster. This was the sixties, and the Magic Kingdom, no matter how many long-haired hippies it denied admission to, couldn’t escape the decade.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 164 (May 2026)

Fiction

Hollow Cast

by Sarah Grey

Author spotlight

In Sunnyhaven, we were all equally unique—and we’d been that way for years, the morning the New Girl arrived. Now, any of us would’ve admitted it: Sunnyhaven wasn’t perfect. There were no public parks or pools, no families walking their dogs down ash-lined greenbelts.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 164 (May 2026)

Fiction

We Are All in the Same Boat

by Avi Burton

Author spotlight

We pull in the first wrong thing at two a.m., under a choppy wind and reddening moon. It’s not discovered until two fifty-five a.m, after the great nets have been poured through the processing machines and seas of pelagic fish spill over the lip of the conveyor belt. It’s an apprentice who spots it.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 163 (April 2026)

Fiction

The Spiders You Swallow in Your Sleep

by Wendy Nikel

The image flashes only briefly on the television screen, but that’s all it takes. In that millisecond before Libby squeezes her eyes shut, the spiders are already at work in her mind, weaving sticky new synaptic bridges. They twist and shape the unlikely connections.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 163 (April 2026)