Fiction

The Taker

Most people give her a single eye. This is within the rules, so she accepts, with a quiet warning. They nod, not understanding. Others try to be clever, and give her an appendix, or a spleen, or even hair. These she does not bother to warn. They will return soon enough, she knows, offering a hand, or a foot, or even a leg.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 169 (October 2026)

Fiction

An Unavoidable Consequence of . . .

by Kurt Fawver

Author spotlight

The first child exploded in the parking lot of a nondescript fast food joint in one of the safest, most unassuming parts of our city on a clear summer evening. Beatrix Middleston (five years old, never stopped moving, loved butterflies and Spiderman and her cat, who she named “Dippers”), was skipping to her family’s car, one hand held in her father’s warm grip.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 169 (October 2026)

Fiction

Not Even a Fly

by Phoenix Alexander

Author spotlight

When I was eight years old, two things happened to me: I realized I wanted to hurt my cousin, and in that same moment God or the Devil or some other force in the universe kicked my consciousness out of my human body and into a fly that circled and alighted on her jam sandwich, circled and alighted, circled and alighted, tasting in the tentative way that flies taste.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 168 (September 2026)

Fiction

Useless Heart / Stopped Cold

by A. Artemis Chen

Your heart stopped cold when you were walking to school in knee-high snow the morning after your parents separated. Maybe because you didn’t zip that padded snowsuit all the way up and your fur scarf was in the wash and the windchill of -10°F nipped your neck and seeped down your ribcage. Maybe because all night you believed that things would be back to normal in the morning.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 168 (September 2026)

Fiction

The Red Veil

by Daniel Roop

Author spotlight

There was a door.

That’s the best place to start, I guess, given that there’s no good place to start.

Luke and I were drinking bourbon and smoking in his attic bedroom. He’d brought me to his family compound in northwest Wyoming right after we were discharged.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 168 (September 2026)

Fiction

Room 602 at the Hotel In-Between

by Georgina Kamsika

Author spotlight

There is a place that doesn’t exist. Or rather, the hotel exists only in the moments where existence itself hesitates: between one time zone and the next, between the breath then the decision, between the life left and the one not found yet. It appears at the stroke of midnight for those who are neither here nor there. There are travellers mid-journey, refugees between borders.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 167 (August 2026)

Fiction

My Parts, Collected

by Melissa A Watkins

My foot is hidden under a pile of fallen leaves in a ditch near the highway. My hand, a mile or so away, buried under a shallow layer of dirt in what will be someone’s tulip bed next spring. My head—I don’t know where it is. Strange. Surely it’s what I’m using to think? I focus and my hand lurches, shakes off a coating of soil, lifts onto its fingertips and straggles into the driveway.

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 167 (August 2026)

Fiction

The Dark Follows Me

by Quincy Lee

Author spotlight

CW: none. My friend and client Hana, before she passed away, used to tease me about my fear of the dark. Hana was DeafBlind, and when I’d come to her home to work with her in figuring out some new appliance, or going through the mail, or whatever errands she wished to take care of […]

In Nightmare Magazine, Issue 167 (August 2026)

Fiction

Annette Funicello Is My Dream Mouse

by S. L. Coney

Author spotlight

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)