Nightmare Magazine

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Fiction

Fiction

The Ascension of Magdalene

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.

Fiction

Student Living

“Student Living” is something of a love letter to the makeshift nature of living on a budget as a student. It’s bleary-eyed mornings and caffeine fueled nights with our faces slammed against readings and lecture notes. I wanted to write something that encompassed my love of that experience.

Fiction

Nightmare of a Million Faces

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.

Fiction

The Girls That Follow

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.

Fiction

Five Things That Go Through Your Mind After the Masked Killer Decapitates You with an Axe and Your Still-Living Head Has a Few Seconds of Consciousness Left to Gaze at Your Twitching Body

ONE: I told them it was stupid to rent the same cabin in the woods where that other slaughter took place, twenty years ago. I said I knew of a perfectly good bed and breakfast where nobody had ever been slaughtered, not even once.

Fiction

Oyili

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.

Fiction

First in Fear and Then in Pain

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.

Fiction

Anatomy of a Haunted House

This story came from a writing prompt about how “kitchen spirits are the friendliest ghosts,” which of course made me think about the other, nastier spirits lurking within the household. I love writing about haunted places, and have always been interested in the parasitic nature of hungry spirits and their victims. After all, what’s the point of a haunted house if there’s no one within to be haunted?

Fiction

Sell Your Trauma for Salvation

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.

Fiction

They Say

The first draft of this came out of my head in November 2016, for obvious contemporaneous reasons. As is often the way of stories, though, it took a while before I realised what I was really telling myself in the writing. I’ve been on a journey of self-acceptance for my neurodivergence these last couple of years, and part of that is trying to break myself of the cringing need for everyone to love and understand me: to learn, instead, that if I am to love myself, my true self, I have to accept that I will never be able to prove myself to some people.

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