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

My mother sits at the kitchen table in the moonlight, gazing at her folded hands. “Has your father returned with Lilah?” | © 2024 by Sam W. Pisciotta. Narrated by John Rubinstein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Nightmare Short Shots episode features "I Am One of Bluebeard's Dead Wives" by Bella D. Bonne (© 2024 by Bella D. Bonne), narrated by Roxanne Hernandez and "A Long Time Afterward" by Sonya Taaffe (© 2024 by Sonya Taaffe), narrated by John Rubinstein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On an unmarked road somewhere in the Appalachians, a midnight blue Cadillac rolled to a stop, gravel popping under tires, headlights peering out into the discord of dusk. | © 2024 by Russell Nichols. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We hear you laughing as you speed by on the interstate. In spite of what you might think of us, we are a proud town. We don’t need your understanding. We don’t explain. You couldn’t handle the answers. | © 2024 by Cody Goodfellow. Narrated by Nan McNamara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Nightmare Short Shots episode features "Painted Surfaces" by Guan Un (© 2024 by Guan Un), narrated by Arthur Morey and "Witches Sabbath" by Lisa M. Bradley (© 2024 by Lisa M. Bradley), narrated by Nan McNamara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nine years, fifty-two days, seven hours until hyadeic convergence. Kayla watched the hot, empty cake pan smoke on the kitchen counter. It was her husband Henry’s birthday, and she’d planned a little surprise for him. | © 2024 by Erin Brown. Narrated by Nan McNamara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Haw Par Villa in the rain was a splash of garish color. The dark red footpath, glistening wet. The ornate tiered gate that greeted visitors with a carving of a tiger, etched in gold and blue. | © 2024 by Megan Chee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Nightmare Short Shots episode features "Automaton Boy" by Sara S. Messenger (© 2024 by Sara S. Messenger) and "Phantom Taste of Apricot on My Tongue" by Richard Leis (© 2024 by Richard Leis), both narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The soldiers start rounding up us factory girls just before sunrise. | © 2024 by Thomas Ha. Narrated by Susan Hanfield and Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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