NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE - Horror and Dark Fantasy Story Podcast (Audiobook | Short Stories)

This poem sprang from its title, a product of old-school random-generator email spam. | © 2024 by Sonya Taaffe. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there . . . | © 2024 by Ally Wilkes. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the tiny abbey in the province of Tasselt—the only abbey in the region with both an abbot and his monks and a dozen nuns as well (a temporary matter that had somehow become permanent)—the abbot, whose skin had gotten paler even as the veins beneath it had become more pronounced, and who preferred darkness to light of any kind, had taken over the West section of the abbey, with its many, darker rooms. | © 2024 by Bruce McAllister. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you haven’t seen it yet, you will. | © 2024 by Manish Melwani. Read by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This poem began as a letter from a grandmother to her grandchild. It warns of uncontrollable wickedness and gifts them wisdom for how to survive despite it. | © 2024 by Beatrice Winifred Iker. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I first saw them one evening in May. I couldn’t tell what they were: small, like kids, like me, but they rustled, raffia fronds for skin. | © 2024 by Victor Forna. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The question is, who dies at the end of this story? | © 2024 by Carlie St. George. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is something uniquely squalid and sad about estate sales. To traipse through a cluttered house, one of a teeming crowd here to bear witness to the end of a life and all that it held, not to pay respect but instead to lunge for whatever goodies you can find. | © 202 Daniel David Froid. Narrated by Ruth Wallman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The opening line is my riff on Bach’s chorale prelude “Come, Sweet Death,” one of his most profound. | © 2024 by John R. Turner. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It didn’t come as a surprise when AJ told me she wanted to open our relationship. We’d been an item for four years, but by the middle of the third year the two of us had long since checked out. | © 2024 by James Tatum. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a nice man with a smart phone camera approaches them. It is also the phone he uses to record his real real reviews of the tacos from the authentic food trucks in Brooklyn and the scenes of the noble and earnest people at the bodegas in Queens. Places where honest people hang out and where he doesn’t make friends with anyone. | © 2024 by Mark Galarrita. Narrated by Annette Oliveira. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the American saw me sitting on a stone in the river, his mouth opened and closed, a brown trout caught on a fishing line. He kept his eyes on me as he hurried to pull off his socks and shoes, as if I would vanish otherwise. | © 2024 by Shannon Scott. Narrated by Annette Oliveira. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This poem began as flash fiction, and was then whittled even smaller—perhaps ironic, given its subject. I wrote this to explore how we change in a relationship, how it isn’t always healthy or best for us—or necessarily consensual. | © 2024 by E. Catherine Tobler. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I like car journeys in the passenger’s seat. They give me time to think and rethink things beyond the shape of my life. I’m not allowed to play music, but I can in my head. Places blur. Memories tangle. Pitying voices from long ago garble in my ear on the thickened tongue of regret. “Muniza,” my husband says, eyes on the road. “Your skin is slipping.” | © 2024 by Fatima Taqvi. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we left camp, we were informed about the dos and donts for living in our respective communities, considering we were strangers. Happenings that we newcomers saw as strange should not be enough reason to contravene the laws of the land. | © 2024 by Oyedotun Damilola Muees. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chuck was wire-sick again, so he hobbled up onto Jerome’s porch one sunny afternoon, need curling his spine like a bent clothes hanger. Jerome was the guy who could get you whatever you needed, as long as what you needed was wire, or crank, or a pallet of Captain Chompberry cereal, or twenty cartons of stolen Lithuanian cigarettes. | © 2024 by Keith Rosson. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Joseph Adams here, publisher of NIGHTMARE. I recently had the honor and great pleasure of collaborating with Jordan Peele to edit the anthology OUT THERE SCREAMING: An Anthology of New Black Horror, and I'm pleased to present this story from the anthology for NIGHTMARE's listeners. So please enjoy "The Most Strongest Obeah Woman of the World" by Nalo Hopkinson, read by Robin Miles. To learn more about the book, visit johnjosephadams.com/OTS. This audio has been provided courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio from the book OUT THERE SCREAMING: an anthology of new black horror, edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams; read by a full cast. "The Most Strongest Obeah Woman of the World" is written by Nalo Hopkinson and read by Robin Miles. This story and audio production are © 2023 by Nalo Hopkinson and Penguin Random House LLC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

curses take root from root to root / is what they said / when they came for the tree /the tree that had shaded her since she was a baby | © 2024 by Adriana C. Grigore. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Her fingers, then, had folded around the clay, her mind entranced. Her fingers traced the soft wetness, pressed gently, pressed firmly, bent, rolled, pulled, pushed. The clay yielded to her rough-skinned hands like a willing lover. She had bent closer to the orange-red clay and closed her eyes. | © 2024 by H.B. Menendez. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I wouldn't survive a slasher film. When the killer comes to town and starts popping off fresh-faced coeds, I’d eat it before we hit Act II. I have a great affection for those initial victims who seem to linger hauntingly over the narrative. | © 2024 by Jessica Luke Garcia. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Annie slips into the club, she grins at Robert, all trepidation and excitement. She hardly disturbs the velvet curtains with her passing, so their weight surprises him. He pushes at the fabric to force his way in. The atmosphere is muggy and heavy. | © 2024 by George Sandison. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I was inspired by my body, and bodies in general. What it means for a body to exist in spaces that find it unworthy, unholy. And how sometimes, we also have to carry our ancestry, our birthplace, in these very bodies. So we have bodies weighted with history and ancestry, but still found sacrilegious. How does one reconcile that? | © 2024 by Somto Ihezue. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I work in a tall brick room with peaked cathedral ceilings. At one end of the room there is a brick-lined chute, chimneylike, that opens up out of the ceiling seventy-five or a hundred feet above a yawning pit in the floor. Every so often, without much warning, a body will fall from the chute and tumble through the air. | © 2024 by Andrew Stover. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My little brother once chased me through the house with an ax. He was joking, mostly. But it certainly didn’t feel like a joke at the time. He plunged forward with a guttural battle cry at the start of the chase. His face sanguine, veins pulsing with rushing blood. Through his anger, he still had enough control to throw in creepy one-liners. I don’t have a clear memory of what he said. Some insult à la Freddy or Ghostface? A classic along the lines of “I’m going to get you little girl”? Laughter. | © 2024 by Megan Kiekel Anderson. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pregnancy is an infestation. A hidden invasion. An invisible operative sneaks inside you, planting a package of foreign genetic material and forcing you to replicate it trillions of times. Soon, your hostage cell floats down your fallopian tube to the womb to feed on the blood-bed of your uterine lining like a vicious little tick. | © 2024 R.A. Busby. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Western texts date the discovery of vagina dentata to 1800 BCE, to the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, the oldest medical text in the world. Misalignment of the lower jaw is detailed, for which regular application of date oil is recommended. | © 2023 Ashlee Lhamon. Narrated by Tina Connolly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tuesday, June 7, 2022 14:02 GMT. There is movement on the pathway for the first time in 113 days, six hours, four minutes, and five seconds. My motion sensitive cameras flicker on. I see Maker. Maker is not alone. | © 2023 by Lynette S. Hoag. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even before my son was born, my village had made of me a black sheep. When I was young, I would slither between the grasp of the Elders and flitter into the jungle unabated. I would storm past the hills of fire ants to leap atop the trunks of fallen trees before catching ahold of a veritable vine like some kind of red-assed macaco. I did not see the forest for all its dangers then—the poison-skinned amphibians, the venomous vipers. | © 2023 by Woody Dismukes. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once upon a time, there was you and there was Jonah. “Jonah!” you would call out. “Jonah, it’s me! Let me in!” But he’d never let you in. Before you turned ten, the inside of Jonah’s room remained as opaque as the inside of his thoughts. And he would always, always make you wait. You’d stand there, bouncing on your toes. | © 2023 by Sharang Biswas. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki & Terence Taylor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dear Andy: The day I was arrested, someone bought the winning Powerball lottery ticket that was worth 1.2 billion dollars. I remember dreaming what I would have done if I had won. You might not believe me, but I’m being serious here. © 2023 by David Janisch | Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. © 2023 by Rachael K. Jones | Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. | © 2023 by Donyae Coles. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. | © 2023 by Pedro Iniguez. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. | © 2023 by J. Choe. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. | © 2023 by Nuzo Onoh. Narrated by Emeka Emecheta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. | © 2023 by Adam R. Shannon. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. | © 2023 by Isha Karki. Narrated by Ruth Wallman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Centuries of war, conquest, and foreign invasion have drawn and redrawn the map of Argia countless times, leaving the country’s boundaries ambiguous and ill-defined. It was in the summer of his fortieth year that Franz Sieber found himself in that contested region, escorted by a small team of mercenaries, guides, and translators. He had come in search of flowers. According to local legend, the outskirts of Argia were home to the Hyacinthus mercedes---a rare breed whose pollen plays a crucial role in the manufacture of certain microchips. ©2023 by Neal Auch. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. | © 2023 by Ozzie M. Gartrell. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. | ©Elena Sichrovsky. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. | ©2023 by Keith Rosson. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Rampart Hotel towered into the sky. It was hard to believe the building was once considered the flagship symbol for a new boom in southeast tourism---a boom that lasted as long as these things usually do. Now it was a distastefully modern thing with a square, flat roof somewhere in the grey clouds and a car park that was mostly empty. As Penrick made his way into the lobby and ordered an old fashioned, he wondered if the flagging status of the hotel was the reason it had begun hosting the jumping competition in the first place. | ©2023 by James Tatam. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Be honest, now. What did you think you would find? You have ventured all the way to this cellar, meaning you must have first braved the porch balustrade of milk teeth, skirting the welcome mat that parts down the center like a grin. Perhaps you chanced up to the second floor where the beds are heavy beneath the weight of fungal networks spun as fine as silk thread, or into the dining room set for two: plates flexing concave and convex like the thudding of ventricles. | ©2023 by Natasha King. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The day after the picture of your boobs gets sent around the school, a mosquito lands on your tongue and bursts like a ripe cherry. You are crying in the disabled stall of the girls’ bathroom where you took the photo to begin with. You hate that you’re back here, but it’s where you were that day four months ago because it’s the only private mirror in the whole school. It’s exactly the same. Paint-stained, clogged-up sink, graffiti all over the door that you’ve contributed to, no toilet paper on the roll. | ©2023 by Wen-yi Lee. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mom and Dad all but forced the games on me. It’s hard to believe now. All you hear about these days is how kids don’t want to play water balloons anymore, don’t want to do sack race, how every year there’s an increase in reported grass allergies, and how in just a couple generations we as a society are going to forget we ever knew how to climb trees. Everyone has those apps that track screen time. Everyone’s tried that thing where the whole family stacks their phones in the middle of the table for a weekly distraction-free dinner, or “DFD.” ©2023 by Kristina Ten. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One could, if necessary, hide between the studs in your wall. Shoulders, narrower than the gap. Back against the plywood of the exterior panel; chest, when fully inflated with breath, pressing against the lath and plaster. Room enough to disappear. This was mine before it was yours. Single story 1920s bungalow, three bedrooms, an unfinished basement and an attic crawlspace. Flower beds in the front. Garden space in the backyard. In the door frame of the second bedroom, lines scratched to mark the top of a growing boy’s head. | ©2023 by Erik Grove. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cinda begins the worst afternoon of her life by hiding in a closet. It’s spring break of her senior year of high school, and she’s rented a cabin with four friends using money she saved from her job at the bookstore, and it all feels terribly grown-up: the long drive into the mountains in the passenger seat of her boyfriend Travis’s car; the box of condoms Paulina not-so-secretly tucked in the glove box; the case of cheap beer and freezer bag of weed that Wally stowed in the trunk; the excursions and activities that Maeve carefully planned. ©2023 by Dominique Dickey. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I hold the crayon to the mirror, ready to swipe it across my reflection’s neck just as my husband, Tomas, instructed. Make a quick horizontal line, then break the crayon against the glass. Snap it like you would your reflection’s neck. I’ve chosen the shade closest to my skin tone because it feels fitting for the occasion, the brown that I’d had to explain to our kindergartener was not “the skin color” crayon. Not everyone has skin as dark as ours, and some have darker. I imagine similar conversations in other households, about other crayons. ©2023 by Katherine Quevedo. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

She comes early, forcing you to reschedule meetings from the car as Alan drives, white-knuckled. You don’t mind---sending contract notes while in labor is the sort of story the partners will tell for years. Delivery is an athletic event, but you understand those. You ran cross-country in college, before law school took over. You understand pain, how to bear down and force your body into submission. And then it’s over. They put her in your arms, swaddled and squalling, and she is exactly as you imagined. ©2023 by James L. Sutter. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The day her mother brought Mr. Nelson home, Martha faded into the wallpaper. It seemed the safest thing to do. Martha had never met Mr. Nelson, but she had met the others, and she knew what they could do to her. Had done to her. And her mother. It was possible that this one was different, but Martha did not want to take that chance. “Martha?” called out her mother. She was clinging to Mr. Nelson’s arm, Martha saw, and swaying a little. Just as she had with the others. “Martha?” ©2022 by Mari Ness. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices