Nightmare Magazine, Issue 108 (September 2021)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 108 (September 2021)

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: September 2021

FICTION Chanson D’Amour Orrin Grey Frost Bloom Gillian Daniels Still Life with Vial of Blood Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

POETRY Ode to My Brother’s Sadness Franklin Ard

BOOK EXCERPTS EXCERPT: The All-Consuming World (Erewhon Books) Cassandra Khaw

NONFICTION The H Word: The Missing and the Murdered---True Crime as Content Cynthia Pelayo Book Reviews: September 2021 Adam-Troy Castro

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Orrin Grey Gillian Daniels

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard About the Nightmare Team

Editorial: September 2021 Wendy N. Wagner | 356 words

Welcome to Nightmare’s 108th issue! I spend a good chunk of time every day outside alone or with only my dog, and I like it a lot. When I’m in the garden or taking a run, I feel completely absorbed in the world, connected to the creatures I see and the plants I’m near. I never feel lonely when I’m out in nature. The same cannot be said for the time I spend with other people. There are times when a person can be surrounded by friends and still feel deeply, deeply lonely. Part of that’s me and part of that is the simple fact that being with other humans is a challenge. Understanding each other takes real work. Connections require care and feeding. Relationships are sometimes just hard. That’s what this issue is all about: the challenge of relating to others, and the thousand different ways people can hurt each other. But more importantly, it’s about finding beauty in those moments, no matter how painful, bloody, or terrifying they become. Our first “unhappily ever after” is the short story “Chanson D’Amour,” a meditation on film, love, and violence from Orrin Grey. Our other full-length short is a vampire tale by Gillian Daniels: “Frost Bloom.” Both tales feature love stories with unexpected twists and turns, so we hope you enjoy following along. In the Horror Lab, poet Franklin Ard gives us a heart-breaking account of depression and addiction in “Ode to My Brother’s Sadness.” Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas examines the fraught relationship between art and viewer in her flash story “Still Life with Vial of Blood.” On the nonfiction side of the issue, we have spotlight interviews with our story writers and a book review from Adam-Troy Castro. The H Word column was penned by Cynthia Pelayo, who discusses the appeal of true crime fiction. For our ebook readers, we also have an excerpt from Cassandra Khaw’s new novel, The All-Consuming World. It’s another unsettling and horrific issue—but would you want it any other way? Have fun reading, and enjoy the nightmares!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Wendy N. Wagner is the author of the horror novel The Deer Kings and the forthcoming gothic novella The Secret Skin (coming fall 2021). Previous work includes the SF thriller An Oath of Dogs and two novels for the Pathfinder Tales series. Her short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in more than fifty venues. She also serves as the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed Magazine, and previously served as the guest editor of Nightmare‘s Queers Destroy Horror! She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family, two large cats, and a Muppet disguised as a dog.

Chanson D’Amour Orrin Grey | 3502 words

You wake with a start, your dream cutting off like a break in the film. If you could just remember it, you’d be getting somewhere, but it’s gone, the screen in front of you blinding white, the film spinning on its reel, the trailing end going flip flip flip as it turns. With a sigh, you shut off the machine, take that trailing bit of film, feed it back through, start rolling the whole thing again, from the bottom. The images on the screen move backward and too fast. Mouths silently chattering like monkeys. Figures doing a backward pantomime walk down hallways —or would that be up them? You suppose you should be grateful that Victor thinks he’s Tarantino. That he insists on filming on 35mm; on editing the old-fashioned way. “Shot, chopped, and scored,” as he’s fond of saying. It’s how you got the job. Most of the other film school kids don’t know how to cut real film anymore. Right now, it’s hard to appreciate, though. Your head aches. Your eyes are sandpaper; you can feel them grating in their sockets as they move. You could be hungover, but you’re pretty sure you haven’t had a drink in six months, and there’s an AA chip in your dresser drawer to vouch. “My dad drank,” is that your voice, telling Sara on the night you finally decided to go to the church basement with its creaky folding chairs and all its sad, rumpled people? “It wasn’t an occasional thing,” or is it when you finally stood up in front of those same people and let the story pour out, the parts of it you could tell, even then? “I’m not sure I ever knew him sober. But sometimes he drank more, and when he did, it was like a black cloud, you know? There wasn’t any love left in him. Just hunger that never filled up. And sometimes he’d take my mother into the bedroom, where they thought I couldn’t hear . . .” You slam the film to a stop. On the screen in front of you is a knife, its blade diamond-bright so that it catches the light and throws it back refracted, making a rainbow. The blood on its tip jelly-thick and ruby red. It’s day number you’ve-completely-lost-track of shooting One Night in Paris. They’ve stopped writing the date on the clapperboard, but you could do the math, if you needed to, because you know how many days over production is, because Noah shouts it five or six times a day. “Thirteen, now,” he shouts in his cute British accent at Victor or Ramon or Cecily or whoever happens to be standing nearby. “We are thirteen goddamn days over right now.” Is it thirteen, though? You must have nodded off in the booth, slouched in your chair. There’s a crick in your neck to go along with the pain your head and the grit in your eyes. After so many long nights of work, the energy drinks aren’t cutting it anymore. You count the tall, shiny cans in greens and oranges standing empty on the edge of the table. Six, now, in an hour? Two? Four? You can’t remember falling asleep in the booth. Can’t remember where you were in the film. Can’t remember waking up this morning. When did you come in? How long have you been sitting here? You had nights like this, when you were still drinking. Black nights like someone had spliced out a chunk of the film. Minutes maybe, maybe hours, maybe longer. “I swore I’d never touch the stuff,” your memory-voice is telling Sara or the crowd in the folding chairs. “It’s hard, though. The world is full of temptations, and anger is like love, it pulls you back, even when you know better. Makes you want to pick a fight. And when you pick a fight with booze, it wins.” After one of those nights, you woke up in bed with someone else. His skin was dusky and textured with the salt of a night’s sweat, the way your skin felt when you’d been swimming in the ocean. You hadn’t even bothered with a condom, because you’d been drunk and you guessed he didn’t care. You went back to the apartment, and you tried to explain it to Sara, but you didn’t have an explanation, not really. Deep down inside, you knew that every explanation was a lie that you told yourself. “A man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man,” was the old saw, but you weren’t a man, and you’d watched your dad. There weren’t two people in there, any more than there were two people in you. You did things drunk that you would never have done sober, but you were still doing them. That’s what killed you. Maybe if Sara had gotten mad, it would have been different. That’s what you wanted her to do. Get mad, throw you out, hit you, cuss you, break something. She just cried. Curled up on the bed, tighter and tighter, like someone had punched her in the stomach, and cried and cried until she was out of tears, until she was wrung dry, and then she just lay there. If you touched her, she’d twitch away, just a twitch, like a horse shaking off a fly, but it hurt so much more than a punch. “Things were never okay again after that,” your voice, but who are you telling? Who could you possibly be telling? Who can you trust, when you can’t even trust your own reflection? You push the film back one frame, two, three. The knife dipping down, the mirror in the background coming into view. There’s something written on it in violet lipstick. You can almost see the killer’s reflection. But the shot is preoccupied with the knife, and everything else is out of focus. The cans rattle off the table edge, into the trash can, off its sides, onto the floor. Your knee is against the table leg, and you’ve been jittering it. Moving it up and down like a pump jack in fast forward. You get up, pushing the chair back with a screech of its metal feet against the linoleum floor. Press the heels of your palms hard into your eye sockets to try to stop your eyes from moving, from rubbing. Push them deep enough so that maybe you’ll tear up, wash away some of the grit, but you have no tears left, just like Sara. Outside the makeshift editing booth, you walk down the hall, to the door at the end, where the taped-up sign says, “SOUND.” At least Edgar—he always says it like “eggar”—gets to use a computer, but from under the door, around it, through the glass, you can hear the Manhattan Transfer whispering their words of love. Victor had insisted on the song. Not just the song, that version. “It was a big hit in Europe in ’77,” you remember him telling Noah. “It’ll position us in Paris, in that time, in a way that the rest of our budget would never allow.” “You’re shooting in Toronto,” Noah had shouted, because by that point, Noah only communicated by shouting. “Why not just fucking set the movie in Toronto?” “What kind of name is One Night in Toronto?” Victor had shot back, as though that was the final word in the argument. You rap on the door, assuming that Edgar must have his headphones off if you can hear the sound, and when you get no reply you push it open. There’s the computer, blue and green lines dancing against a black background on the monitor, jumping with the notes of the song, ra da da da da. There’s Edgar’s headphone cable, pulled from its plug and lying on the linoleum. There’s Edgar in his chair, which at least has casters so he can roll around. His headphones are clamped over his ears, even though the music is spilling out of the speakers, not through the wire. His head is lolling to one side, the bulb of his right headphone touching his shoulder. You know what you’re seeing before you touch him, but not fast enough to pull back your hand. You’ve already crossed the room, your hand is already on his shoulder by the time the information travels from your eyes to your brain, from your brain back out to all the nerves and muscles and tendons in your body. When you touch him, his head flops back, the wound in his neck yawning wider, the bright red bib of blood all down the front of his shirt. For just a moment, you can see the reflection of the killer on the monitor in front of you, that knife sharp as a diamond.

Stop the film. Roll it back.

• • • •

You wake with a start, your dream cutting off like a break in the film. If you could just remember it, you’d be getting somewhere, but it’s gone in the streaks of rain that wash down the windows of the bus that you’re taking to work because your license is still revoked from the last time, even though you haven’t had a drop in months. On set, you got into a shouting match with Victor over something, and you remember picking up a bottle of J&B Scotch and chugging straight from the mouth of it, only to find that what met your lips was just colored water that the crew had refilled the bottles with so that the actors could slug back drinks in take after take. Had you known that, all along? Just taking the bottle as a show of defiance. Or had you truly forgotten, ready to jump back off the wagon you had climbed up onto so painstakingly? You don’t know the answer. Maybe you never did. What you remember is that it pissed Micah off because he had to refill the bottle to the exact mark. It was one of the visual cues, letting the audience know what moment in time the film currently occupied. “It’s a timeloop giallo,” Victor had said, his emphasis on the last word that of someone who is proud to know how to correctly pronounce it. “Slasher’s been done. Alien invasion’s been done. But think about it: the crux of the giallo is memory, right? Detective work. The character who saw too much, trying to piece together his or her mind’s contents of one crucial moment. What if we make that literal?” You’d seen the movies he was talking about, not to mention Groundhog Day and even Dead of Night from way back in ’45. Sara had tried to convince you to watch some show on Netflix about it— named after those dolls that fit one inside the other—but you never had the patience for TV. You’d get one or two episodes in, then burn out. The problem with Victor is that he was good. The Leather and the Flesh had gotten him noticed, and the timing was right for his kind of ’70s throwback flicks. He had the eye, and the ability to move sideways around actors until they let their guard down and gave him the performance he was looking for. He just wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, and he was too ambitious for his own good. Even if you had to admit that the timeloop elevator pitch was probably what got the studio to bite. You roll your head against the bus window and try to remember what day it is, but you can’t. You can’t remember the last time you slept in your own bed, though you think maybe that’s where you’re riding the bus from, because where else would you be coming from, on your way to work? Most nights, you sleep on the cot in the corner of the makeshift editing booth. You brush your teeth in the bathroom down the hall, squinting at your reflection in the mirror, the red veins in your eyes. You’re trying to bring this movie in under schedule—everyone is—but Victor keeps changing the goddamn script. “No more fucking writer/directors,” you remember telling Candace, standing outside on the loading dock, watching it rain while she smoked cigarette after cigarette, shotgunning them the way you’ve taken to gulping down energy drinks, replacing one bad habit with another. “If it wasn’t him, it’d be the studio,” she replies. She does makeup and hair—not the special effects, the gore stuff, that’s Robert, just the everyday bits—and she’s been in the business for a while. Maybe not more years than you’ve been alive, but getting there. She might have worked on one of the films this new one is emulating. “Trust me,” she says, “the studio is worse.” The window of the bus is cool from the rain outside. It soothes your headache. You can’t remember when you didn’t have a headache. You can’t remember when you weren’t keeping track of the days by the date scribbled on the canisters that they bring you the dailies in. There’s a plastic bag in the seat next to you; thin and generic, from some corner store. It says “Thank You and Have a Nice Day” on the side. Your hand is on it, and you can feel the two six-packs sweating inside. You don’t remember buying them, and there’s a moment when your heart skips a beat, but from the feel of the cans—too narrow, too tall—you know that they’re energy drinks, not beer. You close your eyes, and in the dark, you see what feels like a scene from Victor’s movie, your movie, everyone’s movie. A dark bedroom; a dresser with a vanity mirror flanked by round, incandescent bulbs. There’s a message on the mirror, written in purple lipstick, but it says your name. It says your name, then what did I do?

Stop. Reverse.

• • • •

You wake with a start, your dream cutting off like a break in the film. If you could just remember it, you’d be getting somewhere, but it’s gone. The cot is hard beneath you, and you hurt all over. You’ve got that leaden feeling in your arms and legs that you get when you’re getting sick, but your brain hasn’t quite realized it yet. You can’t afford to get sick though. No time for it. You remember that Micah has those little fizzy vitamin C tablets, so you get some off of him when he’s on break next, pop one, then two, then three into your mouth, let each one fizz and bubble and burn on your tongue. The witches in old stories had it right. The cure won’t work if it doesn’t hurt a little. Stealing a few precious minutes, you lie back down on the cot and stare up at the ceiling. You’ve tacked a poster to the acoustic tiles. John Travolta and Nancy Allen looking not down at you and not quite at each other, caught in the purple hues of what looks like a folding mirror that duplicates their images. Victor would have a name for it, something he picked up in film school. Mise en abyme—but that’s not quite right, that’s when a picture has a picture of itself in itself. Like those Russian dolls—a doll inside a doll inside a doll, ad infinitum. Your head is just full of handy Latin phrases today. What day is it? How many days has it been? Three nights, your vertebrae tell you. Three nights, your shoulders, your hips, your back all say. The cot isn’t comfortable, and your body knows it, misses its bed, with its soft things that cradle you when you sleep. Why haven’t you gone home in three nights? Work, you tell yourself. Every day they stack canisters next to the table, and every day you edit them. “We don’t have the budget for a long shoot,” Noah says, his calm exterior just starting to crack. Candace has an umbrella that she lends you as you walk to the corner store for more energy drinks and maybe some Excedrin to chase the pain away. “The caffeine kicks the acetaminophen in the aspirin,” Candace said when she suggested it. “I take it for my migraines.” You also buy a pair of sunglasses, even though it’s been raining for days, because you lost yours somewhere. The kid behind the counter points to your sleeve as you’re sliding your card into the machine. “Is that from the movie?” he asks. He knows you because you come in at least once a day to stock up on what you jokingly call your “medicine.” You look down at what he’s pointing at, see the rust-red stain on your sleeve, by your wrist. “We’re making a giallo,” you say. “What’s a giallo?” the kid asks, and you just make a stabbing motion as you head for the door.

Stop. Reverse .

• • • •

You wake with a start, your dream cutting off like a break in the film. If you could just remember it, you’d be getting somewhere, but it’s gone. The bed is cold, the room so dark that you can’t see the walls. You imagine you’re on the soundstage at work, that the walls have actually been rolled away, and you could get up from the bed, walk off into the darkness, and disappear. There are only two pools of light in the room. One shines down on you from a bulb in the ceiling with a dimmer switch that has been turned almost all the way to the click. The other is the dressing table at the far side of the room, with its equally-dim incandescent bulbs all the way around. You keep telling Sara to change the bulbs out—“What the hell good is a dressing mirror you can’t see?”—but she says she likes it. “Keeps the room romantic,” she says. Said. Past tense. Back when you both talked. When breakfasts weren’t cold, hurt silences that you didn’t know how to bridge. Everything you said she replied to in a way that you couldn’t fault, but you could also tell there was no feeling in it. The passion had been blown out not with one massive gust, but with the slowly accumulating breeze of your fuck ups. Then there were no breakfasts anymore. You just bought something to eat at the corner store before you got on the bus. “I just want to talk,” you said to her. “So talk,” she replied, putting her hand on yours, but you didn’t know how. Your mouth was suddenly gummed shut, until finally she turned away, disappeared into the bedroom. Where you are now, waking up, but the bed is cold, which must mean that she’s not beside you, right? It would be easy to turn your head and look, but you don’t. Instead, you stand up almost mechanically from your side of the bed. Swing your legs over, lever yourself upright, then stand. There’s the darkness where the walls ought to be. If you walk toward it, will it recede, like on the soundstage? Can you walk off the set that way and disappear forever? Too afraid to try, you walk toward the pool of light around the dressing table, instead. There’s a message on the vanity mirror, written in Sara’s purple lipstick. The message seems familiar, it says your name and then, what did I do? You’re dressed as if for work, not for sleep, but your clothes are covered with something dark and sticky and stiff. As you walk toward the mirror, you can almost see the killer’s reflection.

Stop.

• • • •

You wake with a start, your dream cutting off like a break in the film. If you could just remember it, you’d be getting somewhere . . .

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, amateur film scholar, and monster expert who was born on the night before Halloween. His stories of ghosts, monsters, and sometimes the ghosts of monsters have appeared in dozens of anthologies, including The Best Horror of the Year, and been collected in Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings and Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts. He can be found online at orringrey.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Frost Bloom Gillian Daniels | 4521 words

I would call her beauty “otherworldly,” but that doesn’t really describe her cheekbones like scalpels, the ice that rimes the bird’s nest knots of her hair, or her ghost-cold touch when she visits me. “Beauty beyond description” or “the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen” just means the viewer, personally, finds her pleasing. What does a description like that tell you about the bored, dark dip of her eyes, the curve of her lip, and the forward thrust of her nose? What does it say of her many, small, pointed teeth that hang over her blue lips, darker than the bruise-purple undertones of her skin? I’m pale, too, but in a worm-white sort of way. Not like her. She is not me. I’m a mess, a being of meat and sweat and desire. I don’t know her name or if she has one or if a human tongue can wrap around it. I just know I hunger for her. When she climbs in through my bedroom window—second floor, nothing nearby but a tree branch to tap on the glass—her lips are so cold, they burn. She won’t come anywhere near my mouth. Her frost kisses are for my throat and then a trail between my breasts. Where she grazes me with her fingers, I feel the pain one gets from trying to hold onto an ice cube too long. Her bites aren’t as cold, but they hurt more. She has teeth like razor wire mounted in her indigo gums. She always reopens the same wound on my thigh, nursing from a knotted, scabbed mess of flesh. The blood she takes from me splashes red on her chin, falls in drops on her naked breasts and white, gleaming, rounded stomach. She’s not a vampire, because vampires bother to seduce people. “I wrote you a poem,” I tell her. “Do you want to see it?” I reach over the edge of my bed for my laptop, which sits on the wooden floorboards that I haven’t swept. “Do you think you are worth anything to me but that which I can devour from you?” she demands. She presses two fingers beneath my chin and tilts my face upward. “Do you think that I worship you the way you sweat and simper over me, Tara?” I shiver with pleasure to have her full attention, to have her say my name. She asked me what it was the second time she came to visit and that was the first and last thing she wanted to know about me. At least I know what I give to her is worthwhile. Her face is a little more flushed every time she visits. Her stomach was once concave with ribs sticking out like she was an underfed puppy. Now, she has a belly that becomes more distended after she drinks from me. I know this because when she grudgingly allows me to kiss her, afterward, I get to squeeze that curved stomach. It’s a little softer and it makes me want her again. I’ve offered her to feed on me as much as she likes, but she says, “No. I won’t have my food dead from blood loss. It takes far too long to find one of you who’s willing.” When she leaves, patches of frost bloom on the floor with every bare footstep and then melt into droplets. She pushes the window up, then the screen, and finds the tree branch. Her weight is a real, solid thing when she’s on top of me, but the branch never groans under her. Afterward, I go to the bathroom. I hiss as I tend the wound, cleaning and bandaging it over. I feel a little weak for an hour afterward or so, but when I sleep, it’s deep and peaceful. I wake up happy, or as close to happy as I’ve been. She reminds me of when I used to go to synagogue as a child. I would skip Torah study and sneak away to the library. There, I read a story, a sort of midrash, a Jewish folktale. It was about angels and how their essence was of fire. This was as opposed to humans, who were, at the end of the day, something God made from dirt. Angels used to walk among humans and co-mingled, which I suspect means they fucked, and had children who were “monstrous in aspect.” I would say that that’s who I think the woman is, but she drinks blood like a vampire. I think she’s more of a creature of air and ice than fire mixed with earth. She’s not molten and wild, but cold and sure. She visits, abuses me with words, and drinks. It’s terrifying. It’s almost like love, but without the mundane ordinariness of cohabitating. I don’t have to tell her about the dullness of entering data at my tech firm job or what podcasts I like to listen to over the course of long, tired days. I don’t have to tell her to turn off the lights before she goes to bed or ask her to help me unload the dishwasher. As a phantom lover, she is perfect. I’m satisfied with this, I tell myself. It’s a sweet lie that only becomes bitter when I admit it really is a lie. When I say, however, I deserve this, that feels more true. That’s the correct answer. I’m a potato lump of a human, worthy only as livestock for such a perfect being. Her visits are the most exciting thing about me nowadays. My friend, Denny, is the only one I feel like I can talk to about any of this, but even then, I can’t go into much detail. I want her to be my secret. I tell him I have a casual thing with a girl. That’s all he needs to know. The only reason I can talk to him at all is because we both used to drink so much back in the day together. We both survived a rough time. He came to the United States from Lancaster when he was a “young wanker” touring with his band. They kicked him out when he kept getting drunk instead of showing up for practice. Like me, he’s obsessive, doesn’t like leaving the house, and thinks humans are the worst thing to happen to the planet. “If we had any sense, dogs would be in charge,” I tell him in the park. We meet on a bench and drink coffee from paper cups. Denny laughs with his whole, gangly body, shaking like an underfed horse. “Absolutely. Might be ‘ruff,’ though. Get it? Rough?” I squint at him. “No,” I say as dryly as I can. “I don’t get it. Can you explain it to me?” Denny laughs it off, as usual. He thinks I’m aloof and sterile, free of mess, which is funny to me. I don’t want to ruin this clean image he has. “Things not going well with the girl you like, huh?” “I can’t say I can read her that well.” “Well, follow your heart, and all that. Tell her how you really feel. True love will guide you. Or something.” He sips his coffee. Then he looks around and, like we’re in some sort of PSA about not drinking, he takes out a flask from his coat pocket. He pops the cap and tips it over into his cup. I huff. “Are you serious?” “Vodka is always serious. It’s Russian, and they’re all serious, right?” He giggles and his face, for a moment, looks as young and brave and stupid as when I first met him. Something about him reminds me of my aunt, Rose, and the sweetness of her face after she drank down some wine. I then remember how awful things were with her near the end. It makes me ache inside. “Don’t you have to get back to work?” “Exactly.” He grins. “Makes the day easier. I don’t have any big meetings, anyway. Want some?” I sigh. “Sure. If she visits again tonight, it will be like liquid courage. Then I can tell her.” “She doesn’t call ahead? Rude.” He tips a little into my coffee. He’s right. It does make the rest of the day easier, so I decide to take Denny’s other advice, too. She thinks I’m a worm, anyway, so what do I have to lose? When she comes into my window, her long nails crusted with dirt and ice that isn’t anywhere on the ground, I take her hand and pull her right into my bed. I kiss her and her lips are hot ice. She gives a hiss like a feral cat and then rolls on top of me. She pins my wrists to the pillow and snarls in my face. I kissed her too soon. “Sorry,” I murmur, blood thudding in my skull. “I just wanted you.” “Of course you want me,” she spits. “I’m so much more than a creature like you could ever hope to be.” “Yes,” I whisper. I can feel every nerve in me light up. “I like you. A lot.” She smiles in the light of my bedside lamp. It catches the curve of her lip and the uneven, jangled mess of her teeth. “Of course you do.” When she bows her head and bites, I shiver. Then she drinks from me. “Oh God,” I murmur. “Thank you. Yes. Thank you so much.” I feel my thigh vibrate as she laughs. This is good, I tell myself. When she sits up on her knees, there’s blood across her lips and printed on her chin. She wipes her mouth messily and runs her fingers into that knotted hair of hers. Some of the blood sticks there. “I used to drink a lot,” I blurt. “I don’t as much, anymore.” She tilts her head and touches her mouth, smearing some of the blood onto her fingers and then sucking it away like it’s jam. “Haven’t met a human who drinks blood.” “Not blood.” I sit up, too, feeling shy. “Vodka, usually. Or gin.” Her lip curls. “I’ve met many humans who drink those. I can taste it in the blood. It makes it warm.” My face gets hot with anger. Of course, logically, I knew there had to be others, but I don’t like to hear it. “Would you want me to drink some, too, then?” She shrugs one shoulder. “If you like.” She turns away and I see that her hair is a little smoother, less knotted. Did she comb it out for me, I wonder? That thought makes me glow. I pull her back toward me to see better, which makes her wince. She thinks I want to kiss her again. With a withering sigh, she presses that bloody mouth to my temple and pulls away. She leaves. Her icy footprints on the floor catch the low haze of my bedside lamp. I wonder, horribly, if at some point she’ll leave and won’t come back. I go to the bar the next day with some coworkers. I text Denny to say I’m there to socialize and assure him I won’t drink too much. He texts back to say he’s proud of me for getting out of the house. A few minutes later, the bartender puts a second gin and tonic down in front of me. Then a third. The word he wrote, “proud,” now has a sting to it. I swallow it down too quickly. Then I order another. At nine, because it’s a work night, my co-workers and I all call a Lyft. We laugh together. I make them laugh harder when I pull up my top and bra to flash cars. They squeal with horror and joy. “You’re so fun!” I glow. Yes, I remember this. I remember being fun. The Lyft drops me off first and I wind my way into my house. When she climbs in through my window, I’m waiting for her in nothing but black underwear. I take hold of her hair and pull her in for a kiss, hot and spit-slick. I’ve caught her off guard. It takes her a moment to kiss back, and when she does, I open my eyes a little to see she hasn’t shut hers. “Come here,” I say. “Drink me.” “Yes,” she says, quietly. She crawls down and obliges me. When she opens the cut up on my thigh, I wrap my legs around her head and keep her there until she struggles and slaps my leg. Strange, I think. I always thought she was stronger than I was. The ice maiden sits back on her haunches, panting. She seems distressed. “Are you sick?” “What?” “You’re different.” One corner of her mouth lifts in a sneer, but there’s no humor in it. “What’s wrong with you?” “I drank a little,” I say. “Like you asked. Didn’t you taste it?” “Yes, but I didn’t ask.” “You might as well have,” I snap. “Now, go ahead. Have another drink.” She glances toward the window, still open a crack, and then back at me. I smile at her. “It really must be hard to find someone willing, right? It must be so hard for you.” With more bravery I feel than when I’m sober, I reach out, and squeeze her blue hand. When she casts her eyes down, in what might be embarrassment or shame, her lashes are beautiful. I know that when I get hungry, I feel less substantial. What must it be like to only drink blood maybe once a day? She must be hungry all the time. “Come here,” I say. She crawls to me. “My little lamprey,” I say to her, and I know this must be love, or at least something close to it. When I wake up, it’s morning, and of course, she’s gone. My head throbs and I feel grim and angry. There’s also a text on my phone from Denny asking me how the bar went. I decide I’ll reply later. I take the day off work to get over my hangover and, when my head’s clear enough, start planning some redecoration. I’m lucky enough to have a small house with a finished basement. There’s carpeting, perfect for someone who literally has cold feet. I move a futon down there and check the mini bar, which hasn’t been full for a long time, so I head to the liquor store. When she arrives that evening, I’m in the bedroom again. I’ve already polished off a box of wine by myself and everything has a warm glow. “Hey,” I whisper. “Good evening,” she says without inflection, as if it’s a chore to speak to me. She proceeds to crawl beneath the blanket. I stop her. “Come here.” She huffs. “Fine,” she says. I kiss her, messily, and hope she doesn’t mind the fact I taste like cheap wine. “I want to show you something.” A line appears between her eyebrows. “Why?” “It’s a surprise,” I say. “Come on.” I pull her down the stairs. Watching her negotiate the steps is like watching a deer try to figure out an escalator. When we manage to get down there, I’m satisfied to have her cling to my arm as she looks around. She squints at the mirror on the wall in my living room. Her blue reflection squints back. Then she touches it, nervously, and I realize she’s from a world that doesn’t have much to do with mirrors. I take her down a second flight of stairs to the basement. There, I show her the futon. “Ta-da,” I say. My cheeks hurt from the force of my grin. She scowls at it. “What’s wrong with your own bed?” “Nothing,” I say. “I just think that this could be your room.” She goggles and falls back against the wall, arms outstretched. “You’re not going to keep me here,” she says, quickly. “I refuse.” “Alright.” I keep my hands raised in front of me to show I don’t want to hurt her. “Calm down.” “You can strip the earth of its gold and wall me in, but I’ll tunnel out.” Spittle shines on her teeth and at the corner of her mouth. “It was just a suggestion!” I grab her icy shoulders. She doesn’t fight me. Like I saw yesterday, she’s weaker than I thought she was. She hisses at me and I stop. “I sleep where I like,” she says, haughtily. “I won’t be trapped again. Before you, the man—I never asked his name—he kept me in his garage.” I watch her jaw tighten as she clenches her teeth. “I had to break a window.” She rubs her knuckles and, because the basement is brighter than my bedroom, I finally see the tracery of pale scars there. “You don’t have to break any windows now,” I say to her. “Come here.” I cup her cheek. She deigns to give me a kiss in all her queenly glory. Usually, I think about the way her mouth tastes when we kiss, and try to document the undulations of her tongue. Today, my senses blunted with wine, I just focus on massaging her shoulder. To my surprise, she begins to relax. I can feel her back soften. We lay together on the futon. I ask her again to drink my blood twice. I don’t pass out because the euphoria turns my vision into a luminescent fog. I wonder if her saliva has some sort of sedative and I’ve become addicted to it, but I’m not sure. Evidently, her stomach is more full than usual—two days in a row drinking twice as much as she normally does. She lingers in the mess of sheets, gets comfortable, and lets her eyes shut. I wrap my arms around her to cuddle, but even unconscious, she squirms away. Annoying, I think. I think back to what the ice woman said about gold. She seemed to think I knew that it did something to her. I began to think about werewolves and silver. Feeling much more sober, I go upstairs to check my phone. Denny’s sent me another text, one that fights to be casual when I bet, in real life, he’s panicked. I always return my texts quickly. Once, I went on a week-long bender and didn’t respond to him at all. He found me on the floor of my house and cleaned me up. He’s never asked to be thanked for that. My aunt Rose drank a lot, too. She took care of me when my mom died, and my dad couldn’t keep it together. She was moody, sometimes, but drinking just made her hazy, confused, and warm. She watched the Home Shopping Network when she did that. That’s how she blew through her savings and then most of mine ordering necklaces and rings off of the TV. “Twenty-four carat,” she would say happily after she got off the phone. When the package with the jewelry actually turned up, she always looked surprised. “Guess I bought myself a present,” she said before packing it into her jewelry box. After I learned about her using my savings when I was eighteen, I didn’t yell at Rose or anything. I just moved out. She called me sometimes to cry and apologize, but I never called back. It seemed easier that way. I get lonely when I think of her, because I did love her. I just didn’t trust her anymore. When she died, she must have had me in the will, because that box of jewelry came right to me. I would sell it, but gold’s not worth very much. I find it in the hallway closet and start to pick through. Gold chain after gold chain, necklaces dappled with small diamonds, and bracelets touched with rhinestones. I go back downstairs and stare at the woman. Don’t leave, I think to myself. I’m nothing and no one, but please don’t leave. I think it so hard that I hope she doesn’t wake up with the force of the thought. When she wakes, it’s hours later. The sun is coming down from the stairway and stretching a window of light across the floor. I watch her stir. She does the most human thing I’ve ever seen her do: she wakes up foggily. She looks around, confused, and then seems to remember where she is. She finds my eyes. “I’m leaving, now. Thank you for the bed.” “Stay,” I say softly. “Please. You can sleep and eat here.” I point at my bare thigh. She shakes her head. “It’s better if I don’t stay. I don’t think like one of you.” She looks up at me with her cat eyes. “I’m not one of you.” “I know,” I say and open the box. During the last few hours, I connected each necklace, each bracelet, into a long, winding chain of gold. When she sees the heap, she screams. “Get that away from me!” She scrambles away like a spider. She’s quicker than me, like a fox running from a trap, but I’m human, a creature made of heavy earth. I fall on her and she can’t get up. I take her hand, just to make sure. My fingers have the gold rings on them. She rolls her eyes back and screams, the sound splitting my ears, but I don’t let go. I watch in wonder as her own hand blackens where the gold touches it. Smoke rises from her skin like steam. When I release her, I start to laugh. “You have to stay, now,” I say, tears in my eyes. “I won’t be able to keep you otherwise, but now I can.” She’s in tears, too, but they run from her eyes in green streaks. She cries a sort of slime the color of emeralds. I reach out, run my finger down her face, and am delighted to watch her flinch away. I pull the finger toward me, the tip slippery with green, and taste. Like the smell of evergreen, something forested and strange, just like the rest of her. She watches me, shaking her head. Instead of words, she lets out a low, animal growl. I wrap the golden chain over the door and leave her locked downstairs. She howls when I close it. Lucky me, the noises from the basement are indiscernible to the neighbors. If someone asked, I’d say I have a television down there and like to watch horror movies. I don’t go down there every night. If I feed her too little, she gets desperate; too much and she gets too strong too quickly. Instead, I let her go hungry for a few days before I come back. She’s gentle when I do this, almost sweet. I make sure to bring her a gift once in a while. A dress that looks beautiful on her but that she wears uncomfortably. A comb for her knotted hair. A book, so she isn’t too bored, though more often than not, I find she’s torn it apart page by page. Slowly, she becomes more domesticated. She’s breaking. Something about that fills me with the same kind of warmth as a finger of whiskey. Whenever I let her drink from me, she looks up at me like I’m giving her mana from heaven. “I love you,” she whispers one evening. “Good,” I say, before standing and pulling my jeans back up. “What do you say?” She wipes her mouth and demurs. “Thank you,” she says, and offers her mouth for a kiss. I sigh, luxuriating in her obedience, and return it. Of course, I’m afraid that she’ll eventually find a way out. She’ll tolerate the touch of gold long enough to break the chain. Something. The important thing is that she continues to want more, always, and that she stays right here. The thing is, though, I can’t be home all the time. She may be able to satisfy herself with blood, but I can’t. I have to go out to get groceries and more liquor. Now that my job has let me go for showing up to work drunk, money is tighter, and I can’t get it delivered anymore. One day, I come back with my arms full of wheat bread, scratch off tickets, frozen dinners, and bottles of vodka, gin, and wine. Nothing seems off, at first, and I go through the front door like usual and unload my bags in the kitchen. It’s only when I go back through the front room that I hear him say my name: “Tara.” It’s a terrible, gurgling whisper. On the floor is Denny, his throat torn open. Red turns his white shirt pink. His eyes are wide and wet. He lays, spread eagle, in front of the basement door, which is open, now, with all the chains perfectly in place. He came to check on me when I didn’t answer his texts. Because of course he did. Maybe he felt guilty for giving me the sip of vodka that changed the course of my days. Maybe he remembered finding me where he is now, laying on the floor and trying not to choke on my own vomit. Denny must have heard her screams from the basement. I sit beside him as his breath slows and he stills. It’s too late to call an ambulance, I tell myself. Maybe it isn’t, but I’ve never been as kind as Denny. I mostly wonder what I should do with his body. Why did she choose to kill him but not me? She had all the chances in the world. Yes, I wore gold rings, but she was quick. She could have slit my jugular with her long, sharp nails. I wonder if she did love me in her own, strange way. She said she didn’t think like humans think, after all. Or maybe she just didn’t think I was worth it, and that her beauty, in its perfection, would be better, more pristine, if it were not tarnished by her being the last thing I saw before I died. Instead, I live with her memory, burning cold in the back of my brain, frozen, un-aging, otherworldly in her beauty, and only for me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gillian Daniels writes, works, and haunts the streets in Boston, MA. Since attending the 2011 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, her poetry and short fiction have appeared in The Dark Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others. She writes reviews for The New England Theatre Geek Blog. Follow her on Twitter at @gilldaniels or gilliandaniels.com. She also makes comics, writes theater, and definitely wants to see pictures of your cat.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Still Life with Vial of Blood Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas | 1185 words

In 2006, I did an internship at the Museo Universitario Leopoldo Flores in Toluca, Mexico, my hometown. The museum itself was built on a hill, almost inserted in the rock that serves as canvas for some very interesting pieces of art. Our biggest mural—a behemoth of twenty-two thousand square meters—had to be seen from a window. It shaped my way of understanding art and artists. A little over ten years later, I emigrated to California, where I witnessed fire season for the first time in my life. This story was written during one of those painful times for my community, as a way to turn the experience of watching the world in sepia and smoke into words and art. —NGG-R

Brief Notes on the Art of Juan Cavendra

There is something about Juan Cavendra’s art that makes me want to close my eyes. The same something that forces me to keep them open in order to grasp a slight portion of the vastness that is every single piece of his artistic production. A something I cannot label with a single word, and have not been able to name despite years of close study of Cavendra’s work. If there is one thing I feel comfortable1 writing about these pieces, it is that they are of an utmost beauty. It is the kind of beauty that paralyzes2 and confronts the individual with thoughts of their own extinction. That beauty that is, at the same time, joy and agony. A kind of beauty that cannot be processed with a rational mind.

Lot 3 Juan Cavendra The Sky Is Made of Smoke, from the series Fire (1984) Signed on front, signed and dated on back Oil on canvas 490cm x 716cm

“I love gloomy days, but not gloomy fire days. The sky is made of smoke,” Cavendra wrote on the back of his hand the morning he started working on this painting. A wildfire had been burning for days, and several acres of forest near Cavendra’s home had disappeared. Despite authorities’ warnings, he refused to evacuate, and instead decided to stay and paint six large-scale canvases during his voluntary confinement among the flames. This particular piece is not only prominent, it is loud in its play of light and darkness. Smoke and flames transform the black background into a sepia and ruby atmosphere, and then burst from the canvas. The fire dances and goes up; meanwhile, a single figure crawls from the center of the frame into the spectator’s point of view. The figure is so black, it almost shines3 like a dark, victorious sun.4

Lot 4 Juan Cavendra They Sound Like Rain (1999) Signed and dated Lithography. Seven unique prints unnumbered. Artist’s proof 21cm x 15cm each

The seven prints that compose this piece may look like a single work copied several times. An untrained eye could irremediably fall for Cavendra’s trick of light and color. What appears to be a bony human face5 stares deeply into the spectator’s eyes. Deep shadows overwhelm everything else in the frame. Even the eyes appear as if engulfed by darkness. But one must pay attention to what happens in those shadows, the subtle changes, the small figures, the shimmering eyes inside the eyes, the legion6 that lies in there. These prints are, indeed, like raindrops. So similar and yet so different. A treat for the imagination.7

Lot 13 Juan Cavendra Untitled (ca. 2020) Unsigned Sanguine on human skin Variable size

Much has been said about this piece that I have simply called “Still Life with Vial of Blood,” although it does not show such a vessel. It depicts, instead, a pile of human remains anatomically perfect and very much similar in proportion to Cavendra’s own body as it is shown in the series of self portrait photography Diary of My Scorched Life8. The difficulty of conservation for the peculiar technique used in this piece of art has made it almost impossible to determine its size, which has varied from a dozen centimeters, to almost a meter wide. It is a shame that Cavendra stopped working and disappeared from the art scene after producing this amazing piece of art, which is certainly his best—and hopefully not his last.9

1. I don’t feel comfortable. At all. 2. That is true. I can’t move. Or maybe I can, but I don’t want to. I prefer not to. 3. No. Seeing that thing is like going blind, like falling into an infinite well I will never stop falling into. On the other hand, taking my sight off of it is like a sudden winter, like falling into a cold slumber of gray light. 4. Apart from Cavendra himself, only two people have been owners of this piece. Both died in fires. The first one was determined accidental; the other, arson. In their suicide note, the second owner wrote: “This is the diary of my scorched life. From flames I come. In flames I go. Look at them dance.” 5. That’s not human. That’s not human. That’s not human. 6. They’re coming. They won’t stop. 7. Several people have owned those prints, which have not been together as a whole piece of art since they were created by Cavendra. Each and every single one of those owners have, according to their mental health providers, in what can only be described as “a whim,” attacked a member of their family with some kind of acid. Each and every single one of the victims lost an eye in those gruesome acts of hatred. How can that be a whim? 8. A series of hundreds of photos show Cavendra tied, naked and covered in blood in a barely lit room. Tiny dark figures engulf the background, coming right towards the camera. He looks uncomfortable. He doesn’t dare to move. 9. He didn’t go away forever. He’s there. He’s that thing. He’s coming, too, from the flames. Look at him dance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas is a Mexican immigrant and a graduate of the Clarion West class of 2019. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, and anthologies like The Apex Book of World SF 3 and She Walks in Shadows. You can find her at nellygeraldine.com and on Twitter as @kitsune_ng.

Ode to My Brother’s Sadness Franklin Ard | 434 words

The first draft of this poem was written in a haze of grief not long after my brother took his life in 2010. The only thing I could do to keep functioning at the time was take refuge in writing, and so I scribbled these verses down without thought to form. For reasons I’ll never fully understand, the music of R.E.M. was, and still is, a balm for my soul—something soothing about the bright tones that also carry undercurrents of sadness and dissatisfaction—and references to R.E.M. lyrics found their way into this piece as well. —F.A.

he walked in old boots and shivered because you were with him like an animal that didn’t want to be touched some teeth looking thin

my brother shot himself in the pine trees beside his house because he had some time alone and he couldn’t tell time or tell anyone anything

your tongue gorges and tells too many lies infatuations that never blossom or that burn heatless dripping candy-colored wax on furniture

he knew the elbowrooms and secret rambling mind of bees about distance and no one had time for his blanched and careless words about things he’d do someday R.E.M. professed to know him better than he knew himself like the time in the backseat of a car behind a vacant house he tore his shirt as she fucked him drunk the speaker crooning I need this

why’d he have to let you in the dragon the warbler the weevil the coat unfurling a bullet’s crater

could’ve hugged could’ve said he is my brother this is his face these are his limbs this is his voice this is his way of leaning all his weight on one leg and he carries a pistol this is my brother and what a night that must have been wracking his brain over the decision the pleasantness of wind the aftertaste of an overcooked roast the walk the useless watch the thought of mom at home watching television the last panic trembling voice someone stop me

rain fell on him the hot sting of a phantom limb a shovel a leaf a feather and then the night became an embarrassed creature nothing lasts forever not gold perfume pretty flowers yet he gardened orange roses like comets under a black diamond sky

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Franklin Ard is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and holds an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. He is currently lead editor at Headless Hydra Press, a publisher of tabletop role-playing game supplements, and formerly served as editor-in-chief of Oracle Fine Arts Review and managing editor of Stonecoast Review. For over a decade, he has taught college- level writing in a variety of contexts, from beginner composition to doctoral dissertation writing, and he oversees the University of South Alabama’s Center for Academic Excellence. He and his wife, Stephanie, live in Mobile, Alabama, where they enjoy the humid frog weather. Find him online at www.franklinard.com and facebook.com/franklinardwriter.

The All-Consuming World Cassandra Khaw | 4761 words

Maya has died and been resurrected into countless cyborg bodies through the years of a long, dangerous career with the infamous Dirty Dozen, the most storied crew of criminals in the galaxy, at least before their untimely and gruesome demise. Decades later, she and her diverse team of broken, diminished outlaws must get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission and to rescue a missing and much-changed comrade . . . but they’re not the only ones in pursuit of the secret at the heart of the planet Dimmuborgir. The highly evolved AI of the galaxy have their own agenda and will do whatever it takes to keep humanity from ever regaining control. As Maya and her comrades spiral closer to uncovering the AIs’ vast conspiracy, this band of violent women—half-clone and half-machine—must battle their own traumas and a universe of sapient ageships who want them dead, in order to settle their affairs once and for all. Welcome to The All-Consuming World, the debut novel of acclaimed writer Cassandra Khaw. With this explosive and introspective exploration of humans and machines, life and death, Khaw takes their rightful place next to such science fiction luminaries as Ann Leckie, Ursula Le Guin, and Kameron Hurley.

Out now from Erewhon Books.

Ayane

The fuck am I doing here, Rita?” Her voice is the boreal wash of moonlight upon the bulwark of their ship-in-orbit: a reduction of the fantastic, ‘ tepid when it could have been of a devouring temperature. It is modulated, disinterested. But like fuck Maya is going to complain. Any contact with Rita is superior to the absence of such. “Getting Ayane home.” “Home?” Maya grins like a hunting dog, all peeled-back lips and a shine of teeth. For a joke, she’d had the points of her canines filed about three years ago, when there’d been nothing to do but mug retirees, those poor fucks who’d wanted nothing but to jolt their marriages out of hospice with a hit of no-gravity space. Instead, what they got was Maya, Rita, and their tin-can private liners cleaned out of valuables. “You’re getting soft.” A hiss of static. “You’re getting distracted.” “Fair,” says Maya. Don’t want to have this party cleared out before it even gets started. She looks over the tableau. Cross her dollar-store heart, there’s nothing Maya loathes more than this shoulder of rock she’s ascending, which is saying a lot given her sentiments about the asteroid itself. She recalls when this place was moondust and noxious ice-melt, inhospitable by every interpretation of the adjective. But no one cares when it’s just clones on ground zero. Work, die, mulch the corpses, brine the proteins in the appropriate solution, bring them back. Rinse, repeat in the name of capitalism, amen and all that crap. “Wish we still had Johanna,” says Maya. “She could have walked Ayane right into the ship and none of us would have had to lift a fucking finger.” Usually, Maya has a laugh like something that needs to be put down. Today, though, it arrives in a casket, a few little croaks escaping the lid. No, no thinking about Johanna, Maya tells herself. Easy to let the memory of Johanna—she of the “don’t even fucking worry about this,” the “I got this,” the “no need to take risks when we could just sit back and settle this from afar, let’s just get a drink, y’all,” “I’ve got this”—effervescing through their lives burn away to the image branded on the backs of Maya’s eyelids. Easy to see meat instead of a smile. No, no. Fuck that. And still: “Fuck. Do you miss her? I do.” No answer. “I’m fucking talking to you here. Say something.” But Rita doesn’t answer. Well, fuck her, Maya thinks, walking her attention away. No need to defibrillate that dead horse. She studies her environment. This place was better when it was a refinery, when it was still being reworked for human occupation. At least, it had been honest. Now? The slope she is standing on is leprous with non-union brothels, casinos, back-alley chop shops, tenements so thick with the unloved and the underserved, their laundry drips from thin windows like foam along the maw of a rabid animal. “Fuck you,” Maya mutters. Light—blue-white, like the pith of a neutron star, like hope, like the halogen eye of a surgical lamp glaring into the wet nook where Maya’s heart is housed—suddenly flares through her overlay, searing patterns into her retinas. Maya ducks around a pillar before the cerebellum attempts to strategize. Half a second later, a surveillance bot lopes past, Doberman ears astride a trumpet of a muzzle, no teeth or tongue in sight, only a violent light belling from an octagonal aperture. Maya locks her breath in place until the clicking of its needle-point feet evanesces. “The first rule is you never talk about it,” giggles a man’s voice, so close to the curve of Maya’s voice, she almost jumps. “Fuck. Right. Off.” Maya snarls, propels herself from the wall, the cracked masonry flaking under the impact of her palms. Fuck Rita and fuck the ghost she’d saddled Maya with. Explosives don’t need personalities. Least of all when they come with such baggage. But there he was anyway. Same fucking smile with one corner craned unnaturally high. Same eyes, gleaming jellyfish-blue-green. Same heft, same shoulders. Same as the day that Maya found him in Rita’s quarters, grinning like a cat. Fuck everything, Maya thinks to herself. Her fingers find her holsters, thumbs cocking the safety back, fists closing over enameled grips. There we go. Breathe, Maya. Can’t believe that bot almost got the jump on her while she was caroling her grievances, blathering at Rita like the two of them were gene-patented starlets sitting pretty for the camera. If Maya had just gotten the mods Rita offered her, traded up from her repository of wetware, this wouldn’t ever have happened. The somatosensory implants were triple-tested, lab-approved, and it’s not like Rita would have installed bottom-of-the-barrel shit in her brain. They need each other. Mad scientist and mad-dog mercenary. Like jam and cheese, guns and their holsters, god and glory. Forget that it would mean Rita acquiring unmitigated access to her grey matter. It’s not like Maya can hide anything from her. Onward she goes, Maya practically somnambulating down the narrow lanes. How many times had she died in one of these alleys? How many times had she been jumped, carved open, split open so someone could harvest organs for the rich and the sick? She keeps her fingers at the triggers as she strolls along up until she halts in front of a door six feet wide and twice as high. Maya lets go of the hand- cannons and digs the heel of a palm into the door, considers being discreet for about half a second, before she laughs coyote-shrill and goes fuck it. She kicks the door in. Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck everything for the umpteenth time. A man, massive like an iceberg and twice as cool, looks calmly up from his terminal. He drums a finger against the plastiglass screen. Loose windows melt—holo-vid playlist, a two-for-one pizza advertisement—together in to. a plain, cold, ivory payment app. He takes no notice of Maya’s ghost, just makes a moue of his thin mouth. Maya wonders about the shit he’d seen. Those eyes are deader than hers. “Sixty bucks for latecomers.” Johanna would have had him fight for us, Maya exposits through a private com-link. Rita doesn’t take the bait, but that’s okay. Behind Maya, her crypto-geist keeps gibbering, unperturbed, hotfixed to ignore all interruptions. His image lightbleeds for a second, stutters, then stops: an infinitesimal failure that nonetheless curls Maya’s lips in simpatico. You can’t trust tech these days. “If this is your first night,” says manifest destruction, “you always have to fight.” Rita and Maya sitting on a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. If there was a schoolyard, that’d be what the kids would be singing. It’s fortunate that this day and age has surrendered homophobia to the firing squad of basic human decency, because Maya would have had to gun down the bigots otherwise. Not that she wouldn’t have shot them up anyway for being terminally wrong. Rita and her, they don’t have that kind of relationship. Never did. In another place and world, where the air isn’t spuming poison and toddlers aren’t bar-coded, who knows? Not in this life, though. Not even close. Maya has never been that kind of anything and Rita can’t stand being touched. But the two are tight as thieves on death row, knife and vein, gun and bullet. Maya will do anything for Rita, and she’s reasonably certain that Rita will break at least a few cardinal laws for her in return. Which is more than anything Maya deserves right now, and they both know it. That’s why Maya is strutting into the bobbit worm’s jaws, with nothing but a ghost for backup, riding on a wing, a prayer, and enough combat know-how to win all four world wars. “Next contender!” an announcer howls. Maya grins like a shark. Oh, she thinks, the sound unspooling between neurons like a tendon snagged on the tooth of a Great White. Oh, yes. That she can do. But it is still so strange to her that they built this chapel to archaic media, to offer their sweat and their worship to a fictional credo, an analogy for poison, no more sacrosanct than the urine crusting on the walls outside. Men can sail through constellations, for fuck’s sake. Do they need a god cobbled from lobotomized debris of retro cinema? She tosses her head like a bull. The venue stinks of piss and blood and sour sweat, of mutual admiration expressed by men who’d never been taught how to love. A wound dug into irradiated basalt, the place is seven kinds of building violations, with only one way in and out. No accoutrements. No fire exits. Just a vending machine pregnant with ancient soda and naked bulbs snaking across the ceiling, bleeding black wires over their heads. Maya remembers when they grew vat-kids here, the inflorescence of viscera; arms and legs fruiting along wire; skin like sails closing over naked skeleton. The ones who didn’t make it would be clumped in the corner, waiting to be reprocessed. She remembers waiting, watching with her nose compacted against cold glass, wanting, hoping, yearning; sick with prayer as she counted each attosecond, dead fucking certain such vigils weren’t worth shit, but what else was she supposed to do? Back then, her emotional health was the only currency she possessed, and she would have bankrupted herself to make sure Rita came back for another round of living. “Quick and easy,” comes Rita’s voice again. “Just like we planned.” Crack. Maya hears the sound of a jaw being broken, seconds before the crowd detonates into screaming. She prowls closer, already squirming out of her jacket and kicking off her shoes, a grin cocked like a loaded shotgun. Her data banks wake up at the influx of noradrenaline in her bloodstream, presenting options, triangulating opportunities. That grin of hers swells until it is like the last church standing at the end of days and inside, the parish is worshipping war. Maya smooths both hands over the velvet of her skull. “Yeah?” she says under her breath. “Don’t you fucking dare,” says Rita, proving she doesn’t really know Maya at all. She’ll do it the old-fashioned way. Maya dismisses her overlays, sets her notifications on silent as Rita’s messages began to pile like a six-car crash. Oh, she’s pissed. Maya can tell. But she doesn’t care. All she can hear right now is the holy-holy-on-high hymn of violence singing through the strings of her being. All she can process is its siren invocation. It has its hook in her, pulling her onward, and she is so okay with where they’re going. Since she’s here, she might as well have some fun. The light drags fingers along Maya’s muscled frame, reads out a scripture of scars and stitches, the places that only Rita has touched, scalpel carving sonnets into sinew. Illuminated by bloodlust, Maya shoulders past two skin‐ heads and out into the ring. The men—they’re always men, she thinks with a scream of a laugh—go quiet. “Well?” Maya says, slamming a fist into the square of an open palm. “No shirt.” The guy who speaks up is a pot-bellied twerp with jeans that don’t fit his ass, goggles welded to cherub-cheeked face. Maya spreads her arms wide. “You want to see my tits? Is that it? That what you’re saying? You wanna see my tits? You want to motorboat that mess?” She knows it’s not, but she loves taunting shitheads like him. No one ever knows what to do when she shows up, avenging angel constructed in the micro. Five feet two when she deigns to have good posture, all tight lines and a helmet of black hair cropped close to the skull, face like a veteran’s tall tale. Maya’s countenance is a gossip reel of cicatrices, indentations where the skull stoved in and was shoddily rebuilt: you repair what you can when you can’t justify buying new. Sometimes, Maya wonders if she’s ever been “conventionally beautiful,” ever had a shot at the fantasy of domesticity, the white picket fences on a blue sky– tumbled planet, a kid who wouldn’t mind a clone for a parent, but fuck that and fuck this especially. The man—someone’s dad, Maya is so sure of it, some‐ one’s dad looking to reinvigorate his middle-aged spirit—exchanges looks with his peers, nervous. “I meant the guns.” “You want them?” She doesn’t give him warning. She doesn’t charge exactly, but she does accelerate, going from zero to fifty in three strides, closing the gap before he can process what’s about to hit him. She winds a punch, biosynthetic muscles bunching in a hallelujah of intent, and slams reinforced knuckles into the man’s nose. “Come and get them.” Maya turns as the man drops first to one knee and then the next, hands over his face, blood ribboning down his front. She slaps her chest a few times, like some unmodified ape, some babyfresh human without a security protocol in the world, and walks a winner’s swagger around the circle of waiting faces. “Come on. Who the fuck is next?!” The fourth rule is simple: only two guys to a fight. And yeah, okay, maybe old cinema isn’t that bad because hand to mass-market heart, this is Maya’s favorite rule in the world. Maya is wiping the detritus of someone’s face from her hands when she walks in, the click-click of her stilettos as familiar as that old ventricular jingle. “What the fuck, Maya?” “Needed to get your attention somehow,” Maya grins through bloodied teeth. Someone’s gotten lucky. But Maya heals fast enough that it doesn’t matter and fuck, does it feel good to feel. Letting go like that is a blessed act. It’s been years now since she could chart a room in blood and broken bodies, groaning heaps of meat all around. Maya’s missed this so much, crypto-geist bearing witness or not. Ayane looks like the last cold gulp of water before the sun goes supernova, taller and leaner even than Rita, so pretty that it actually hurts to look at her. Every inch of her is feder ally sanctioned, independently purchased. She could stop a truck with a punch. She has. But you couldn’t tell. Not with that dress filigreeing her curves, the material a gold so pale it is practically ice, diamantine along the hems and where the fabric sits along the small of her perfect back. “You could have called,” says Ayane in her exquisite contralto; woman couldn’t do ugly even if you paid her in hope. Two hundred twenty-five point three seconds, a notification tells her. Two hundred twenty-five point three seconds until the dogs come howling. Guess Rita didn’t care for the silent treatment. Good. Maya’s got time to kill then. She grinds her heel into the back of a man’s hand, enjoys his groan, the way the metacarpals sag under the pressure. She adjusts the set of her feet. Crunch. Phalanges pop from the palm. “You wouldn’t have answered.” “No.” Ayane flips a curl of dark hair over her shoulder, her smile gone savage. The light doesn’t just love her, it obsesses. How else to explain the way it wraps her up in a champagne nimbus so she, for one shining moment, looks like some goddess come to salvage the day. Either way, Maya knows better, and Ayane knows better, and anyone who has ever heard of the Dirty Dozen knows better than to pray to Ayane, Badass Bitch-Goddess of Automated Ballistics, because sure as hell, the only thing she holds holy is metal. The two meet eyes. “Probably not,” says Ayane, as though Maya needed the clarification. “Get the fuck out of here, Maya. I’m just trying to run a business.” “This really what you want?” A staccato gesture at the night’s losers. “MCing for paunchy old men, keeping them entertained for the rest of your life. I remember when you were retro-fitting ageships, Ayane.” “That never happened.” “Fine. Okay. Technically, it didn’t happen. But you’re probably the closest anyone’s ever gotten to doing such. Why give up glory for these middle-aged freaks?” “It’s a life,” counters Ayane. Her casual numinosity is frankly offensive. It is empirical, how stunning she is, a fact that exists external to the hypothesis that beauty is qualified by the beholder. Maya had not consented to having her breath shanked from her by something as egregious as Ayane retreating into a halo of artificial light, and she is pissed at this misstep by the universe, pissed she hasn’t become inoculated to such bodily treason, that Ayane after all these years still could have such an effect. No wonder Audra picked her. “Fuck that.” “Fuck you,” says Ayane. “You really going to be a bitch to me without fucking asking why I’m here? You know I wouldn’t fucking be here unless it’s important.” Her gesticulations are no longer modulated, broad and cartoonish. Maya exerts just that much more pressure on the man’s limp wrist: the bones might be dust but there are still nerves to grind. “You know that. You know I don’t get up in the morning unless it’s paid in planets.” “Or if Rita said so.” “Yeah.” A shrug. “So?” “Is she alive?” “The fuck you think?” “If she is, then whatever you gotta say is fucking worthless,” says Ayane, beginning to leave, her postural language clear: Maya and her mission have already been dismissed. “If she’s alive, I know she’s got you on a leash and I am done, Maya. I don’t want to have anything to do with that fucking junk-cunt.” “Not even if I told you we know the Minds are coming after ex-con—” “I don’t want to hear it. What do you not get about that? I don’t fucking care anymore. Fuck them. Let them take down the club. Let them blow me up. As long as it doesn’t involve you and that little psychopath, I’m fine with it. I’m done, Maya. I’m done with your bullshit. After everything that has happened? After what fucking happened to Johanna? How the fuck do you expect me to be anything but done?” Ayane flashes a look sleeved in more hurt than Maya’s ever seen in her life. That pain. It distends in her, a broken rib harpooning the angry riposte that she meant to come out. Instead, Maya says: “What happened to Johanna was a freak accident.” “You could have saved her.” “It was her or the rest of us. If I’d tried, we’d have all died.” “I don’t fucking care what Rita said about this. I know you could have saved her but you didn’t.” “And what if Rita wasn’t wrong about what she said? What if she was right about the rest of us dying if I had tried? What the fuck then? Would you trade all of our lives for Johanna’s?” Ayane says nothing at first, gaze raised to the roof. The light bleaches nuance from her face, elides the fine lines and faint shadows which taxonomize one as human, leaves her architectural and alien. “Yes. Shit. Absolutely. In a fucking heartbeat.” “Good thing it wasn’t your fucking call then.” “Yeah, I guess it is,” she says and turns her back on Maya. “Because I’d still trade all of you for her.” “And you go off on Rita for being pragmatic. Jesus fuck, Ayane.” “We’re done talking.” “No, we’re fucking not. Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Ayane doesn’t answer, just keeps with her goddamned trajectory. Bad fucking idea. Snarling, Maya wades out from the patch of groaning bodies, kicking aside an asshole who had the audacity to be in her route. Bone snaps from the impact and he gurgles an objection, and still Maya does not give a shit. She’s only got eyes for Ayane as the latter slinks on, long legs and ruined dreams poured into a candleglow-gold dress, not even a revolver in sight, can you believe this fucking mess. “Ayane.” Thock of hammers pulled back, so sudden that Maya doesn’t have time to register that she’s the one who has both guns out and is sighting down the muzzles, aim-algorithms fritzing from proximity to Ayane’s jammers. Like it matters, though. Maya can shoot the tongue off a mouse at one hundred paces. “Do not fucking walk away from me.” Take the high road, Rita had said. Be kind. Be polite. Be mindful of accreted trauma. Don’t pull out weapons, pull out examples. Tell Ayane all the things you think Johanna might have said about this. For once in your life, be subtle. Because if you aren’t, we’re fucked. Ayane hates you, but she wants me dead on arrival. All that advice, all of Maya’s resolve to do it right for Rita, unfortunately sleets away like cheap paint at the audacity on display. How fucking dare she? “Or what?” Ayane tilts a cool look over her shoulder, visible eye irising wide so the halogen catches red in its heart. Maya can’t hear it, but she can sense the machinery around them working, calibrating distance and trajectory, a theory of future motion. “What will you do? Are you going to shoot me? Gun me down like every single one of your problems?” “The first rule—the first rule—” Maya’s pet poltergeist giggles itself into a static-squeal, a broken record stuck on a loop, just like everyone else in this piece-of-shit world, Maya included. The amount of time Maya has to escape is attenuating to nothing, but who gives a shit? Her rage stampedes over common sense. She spits a noise at Ayane, not a curse, nothing intelligible, a little yowl that is all the way animal, kicked-puppy hurt grown big and savage on a lifetime of disappointments. “I saved your life, and this is how you repay me?” “So fucking what? I saved yours too. Repeatedly. We’re even. Now, fuck off.” Maya is torn between shooting Ayane between the eyes and shouting for her to listen, binary impulses clawing at the halves of her soul. Rita is the one that should be here. Not Maya. Maya’s just the muscle. It doesn’t make sense that she’s standing here, yammering through a mine field full of broken dreams, trying to figure out what words go where instead of how many bullets to pump into bone, and not standing six inches behind Rita’s shoulder, like the good guard mutt she is. “Why won’t you just fucking listen?” “Because you can’t say anything that will change my mind.” Pneumatic hiss of machine-arms rising from their nests. A hundred beetle-black gatling guns wake up and point smoking death at Maya, sensors glowing white dwarf-bright. And Maya, artillery at the ready, feet squared, muscle gathered, grins and thinks, Final-fucking ly, something I understand. “You need to go,” Ayane says, solid and final as a tomb‐ stone, ringleader in a circus of cold steel. “Nuh uh.” Maya grins, bouncing her weight from one heel to the next, excitement vibrating inside her. She dances a few steps closer, flicks a port open in her mind. Data pours from her soul in strobic rivers of booze, blood, and bad decisions. Better safe than sorry, Maya thinks as she checks the timer. Eighty seconds. “Suffocation. No desertion,” giggles the crypto-geist. He is irradiated now, he is incandescent. He is the nuclear phosphorescence of a thermobaric explosion, the first gleam of muzzle flash, a solar flare igniting: his edges blur to white in Maya’s perception. It is too late to leave already. How the fuck did she lose all that time? But again, who cares? Clone bodies are expendable. “Fuck off.” “Who are you talking—” It’s then that Ayane finally wises up, switches modes so she isn’t just scanning the physical but also the digital. Her eyes go wide, go black, go red, go shitshitshitshit. “Maya. What the fuck did you do? What the fuck did you do?!” Maya doesn’t answer, just grins, just mad-dogs Ayane with a cocky lift of her chin. Eagerness crashes through her on a wave of dopamine, preparation for what comes next. No one leaves a pretty corpse, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go out on a high. Twenty seconds. The data-ghost lights up like an intergalactic celebration as he ignites a virtual cigarette, the blaze of the cherry going thermo-fucking-nuclear. A beacon is a dipstick is a beacon, by any other name. The air hums with data packets, five thousand high-priorities every second, all laden with override protocols so the creche doesn’t get distracted. Come here, come here, come here, the disintegrating crypto-geist croons. Rita is still trying to get through but Maya’s do-not-disturb protocols keep those concerns neatly muted. Anyway, she doesn’t have time to comb through Rita’s hysterics. Maya gives it ten, maybe fifteen seconds, before it all goes asshole up. “You’re a fucking cunt,” Ayane hisses. She doesn’t run. She doesn’t shoot. She’s been in the business too long to tell herself lies. She’s dead. They’re both dead. This whole place is dead. Best she can do now is upload a functional copy into the Conversation, get a new start somewhere kinder. But that isn’t going to happen either, is it? Not with what Rita and Maya have done. Sorry, sweetheart, Maya thinks to herself. It’s just business. “Fuck you too.” Maya blows Ayane a kiss, before she crams a gun into her own mouth, sucks in one last breath of shitty reprocessed air, and splatters her brains on the wall.

Copyright © 2021 by Cassandra Khaw. Excerpted from The All-Consuming World by Cassandra Khaw. Published by permission of Cassandra Khaw and Erewhon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer whose fiction has been nominated for the Locus and British Fantasy Awards. Their short stories can be found in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Uncanny Magazine, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy.

The H Word: The Missing and the Murdered---True Crime as Content Cynthia Pelayo | 1060 words

Death is a business. Some of the highest grossing podcasts are dedicated to covering true crime, and those podcasts are downloaded millions of times each month, and often rank in best of year lists. There are even true crime specific podcast categories that make it easy to select from which hosts, topic, and murder you would like to listen to during your morning’s commute, or as you prepare dinner for your children. We can define true crime as nonfiction media that recounts a crime. True crime is available in a variety of media. There are true crime books, movies, television programs, cable and YouTube channels, TikTok videos, podcasts, social media accounts devoted to true crime—beyond a memorial account—and more. There are even true crime themed experiences, such as true crime conferences, true crime cruises, and true crime subscription boxes in the form of murder mystery games. Many true crime podcast hosts gross millions of dollars a year (the hosts of My Favorite Murder, for example made fifteen million in 2019, according to Forbes). Beyond generating income from advertising, many of these podcasts also host Patreon pages, where, for a monthly subscription, you can gain early access to episodes and additional true crime content not readily or widely available for the general public. There is an entire industry behind true crime. There are parents who lost children and adults who lost siblings to crime that have written about their experiences and now they participate in the true crime convention circuit, reliving the violence that punctuated their lives, but that violence is in part what contributes to their income. There are the experts, attorneys, law enforcement officials and more, that have become pundits of murder and hold celebrity status in these circles. Murder is not only monetized, it’s addicting. Each and every day, many of us consume true crime with an obsessive fervor. We pick apart the movements of the victim and their associates, the motivations of those close to the victim, clues, suspects, and the gory and gruesome details of murder scenes; placement of the body, blood splatter analysis, how much blood was lost, location of their belongings, clothes on or off, hairpins missing or in place, location of the cell phone, are the victim’s limbs intact, if so how positioned, what is the level of bruising on the skin, what stage of decomposition is the corpse in, time of death, and more— if there is more evidence to analyze. For the missing, there are often few clues to determine much beyond there was once a person and now that person no longer exists. What remains are faded missing persons posters, yellowed or frayed along the edges, pictures stored in databases, cabinets or on police station bulletin boards. Other pictures remain too, those framed in the homes of family members who are torn with grief to their deathbed and beyond, for they do not have answers, and many will die without the answer as to what happened to their loved one. The murdered and the missing are restless ghosts in many ways, and those living that believe in justice are as well, tortured by their loss. In part, that is why I consume true crime. I need to know how the victim died, and why they died. I need to know if they felt pain in that moment of death. I need to know if they were scared and alone. I need to know everyone and everything involved with their death or their missing persons case, and I do not know why. Why should I have access to anyone’s suffering? Why should I have access to those brutal final moments in a victim of crime’s existence? Is it right or wrong to turn to this type of content as entertainment? And regardless of what some may think, true crime is entertainment, even though it offers some consumers the perspective of an investigator, tasked to solve or understand the crime. Therefore, our relationship with it is often explained away to others as “Well, I just want the crime solved,” or, “I’m just trying to understand how something like this could have happened.” Regardless, when it comes to true crime, those of us that consume it must acknowledge some responsibility that we are spectators to a victim, peeking into their family’s grief and suffering. I consume true crime, primarily in the form of documentaries, books, and podcasts. I am fascinated by violence, motivations for violence, how some criminals lack empathy, and the drive some people have to destroy humans. I’m not a clinical psychologist, but on my way to completing my PhD in Psychology, and by day I work to understand businesses and how people work and function within those organizations. Therefore, I am generally curious about people and how they fit within societal structures. It’s difficult for me to comprehend why people do awful things, even though I have seen death and know it too well. Ultimately, what I have learned is that there is no reasoning or applying logic to a killer. They do not think like me. They are, in a way, made of another human design, one that stalks, hunts, and inflicts pain for their amusement and satisfaction. But I am curious by not just the motivations of killers, but how many of these killers function within society without those around them knowing they are murderers. These people exist among us and are able to seamlessly slip into their predator persona and execute brutal crimes of abduction, assault, rape, murder, dismemberment, and for some, cannibalism. They then step back into society, undetected. That easy transition should make us all grow cold, that killers are not snarling, lurching beasts, but your neighbor next door that shovels your driveway, or the parent in your child’s classroom that you wave hello to and share weekend plans with during afternoon school pick up. For many of us, we live and breathe and function throughout the world with this carelessness that we are safe, but if my obsession with true crime has taught me anything, it is that we are far from safe, because a murderer can be living next door, can be at the check-out lane next to you at the store, or can easily live with you, and you may never know.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Cynthia “Cina” Pelayo is a two-time Bram Stoker Awards nominated poet and author. She is the author of Loteria, Santa Muerte, The Missing, and Poems of My Night, all of which have been nominated for International Latino Book Awards. Poems of My Night was also nominated for an Elgin Award. Her recent collection of poetry, Into the Forest and All the Way Through, explores true crime, that of the epidemic of missing and murdered women in the United States, and was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award and Elgin Award. Her modern day horror retelling of the Pied Piper fairy tale, Children of Chicago, was released by Agora / Polis Books in 2021. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Columbia College, a Master of Science in Marketing from Roosevelt University, a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is a Doctoral Candidate in Business Psychology at The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. Cina was raised in inner city Chicago, where she lives with her husband and children. Find her online at cinapelayo.com and on Twitter @cinapelayo. Book Reviews: September 2021 Adam-Troy Castro | 1128 words

A View from the Bridge

Hairpin Bridge Taylor Adams Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook ISBN: 978-0063065444 William Morrow, June 15, 2021, 320 pages

One Taylor Adams has staked out a territory for himself: the woman-in-jeopardy thriller. He is very good at it. A couple of years ago, he published a suspense novel, No Exit, about a woman trapped by a blizzard at a rest stop in the mountains, who spots an abducted child in a cage in the back of another motorist’s van and, with no way to contact authorities, finds herself wondering which of the other motorists parked there is a killer. It was propulsive, inventive, and non-stop thrilling, excellent at the trick of introducing a fresh complication every few pages. I read his subsequent novel, Hairpin Bridge, which is even more deceptively simple in its conception. About all it has in common with the first is the now-tiresome necessity of taking the cell phones out of commission. We are, I guess, stuck with this, forever. I compare Hairpin Bridge to a thriller I still count as one of the all-time best I’ve ever read, even though the author has his rancid aspects elsewhere: Intensity by Dean Koontz. That one contrived to be about one isolated woman against one serial killer, with all other human beings either absent or irrelevant. I have no problem telling you that it is magnificent, even though the author was elsewhere a guy whose excesses had to be tolerated, or not. I mean it when I call it magnificent. Hairpin Bridge reminds me of that one because the math is initially similar: one (1) resourceful woman against one (1) murderer. (I say “initially” because you the reader find out early on that said killer might have a confederate. I will not provide firm data on whether he does or if any others ever show up. This is the opening situation, one woman and one killer.) A Vietnamese-American woman named Lena Nguyen has lost her mentally ill twin sister, apparently to a suicide leap off the titular structure. She suspects that Raymond Raycevic, the highway patrolman who encountered her sister less than an hour before the estimated time of death, knows more than he’s telling. For various reasons, some self-serving—she was estranged from the identical twin in question—She contrives to meet up with him, on that bridge, for what she sells as an exercise in closure, a conversation about what happened that day. All is businesslike, at the onset. But Lena intends a more hostile conversation. It is, of course, crazy to meet up with a suspected killer on an isolated bridge (on a closed road, yet), for a conversation that will segue to accusations of murder, especially when he’s a bodybuilding cop and twice her size, but she’s after the truth and she is not unprepared. Their confrontation lasts about three hours. It rapidly progresses from the stilted and well- meaning, to irritation as Lena pokes holes in Raycevic’s story, to profane argument, to violent confrontation, with Lena’s own life in immediate peril—as she of course knew it would be. Her own behavior cannot be interpreted as anything but insanely reckless, almost suicidal. But the narrative of that three hours, interspersed with blog entries about her relationship with her troubled sister and the plans she has made for her confrontation with Raycevic, is intense and unrelenting, as the power balance between the two keeps swinging, at times wildly, from one extreme to the next. There are, in those three hours on the flat expanse of the bridge, exchanges of gunfire, bursts of vehicular mayhem, and episodes of outrageous gaslighting, as Raycevic tries to persuade Lena that what she’s doing is crazy, a premise that it is not entirely unrealistic. The book is still mostly that conversation, and the internal thought processes of both characters. And I haven’t even mentioned yet that the bridge is threatened by a forest fire. Yup, that’s on the horizon, and headed this way. Adams treats any threat to the tension level like a personal affront that must be assaulted with extreme prejudice, a habit that sometimes renders the story exhausting. But damn, if it isn’t fun to see Lena Nguyen take on this crazy challenge.

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And now, covered in brief, two other works that crossed your friendly columnists’ line of sight this review period: Big Dark Hole: Stories (Small Beer Press, July 2021) is the latest collection of short stories by that writer of sometimes exceedingly strange fiction, Jeffrey Ford. Among the works to be found within are “The Thousand Eyes,” about a man who follows signs to a hidden show by a folk singer who is intimate with death; “Hibbler’s Minions,” a dust bowl legend about a circus that is devoured from within by the performers of a flea circus; “The Match,” about a college professor who is informed by the college administration that to keep his job he will have to wrestle an angel; and “Sisyphus in Elysium,” about the titular personality, who is here provided a break from endlessly pushing that stone uphill. Ford’s stories are often wry even when they’re horror-adjacent, and he has a knack for tossing in additional premises, that render his bizarre narratives even stranger. Nothing But Blackened Teeth (Nightfire, October 2021) by Cassandra Khaw is a lush haunted house story, about various friends—with a bitter backstory that has, for some, resulted in estrangement—gathering for a celebration in a Japanese mansion, on the eve of a wedding. The mansion was built on the bones of a murdered bride and has a haunted reputation, which is of course intended by the rich guy responsible for throwing the party as part of the fun. What follows is not “fun.” The supernatural mayhem does eventually arrive, but this reader found his greatest pleasure in Khaw’s portrayal of a gathering of friends who have grown so apart that it would probably have been healthiest for them to stay away from each other, whether the gathering between them was in a demon- haunted house or an inflatable bouncy castle. Even before the supernatural manifests, this is intensely bitchy.

• • • •

This column should go online simultaneously with my first post-quarantine convention appearance, as Author Guest of Honor at Fencon XVII, September 17-19 at the Sheraton DFW airport in Irving, Texas. I hope to see some of you there!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Adam-Troy Castro made his first non-fiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands And Other Stories. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun (Japan), and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd-Laßwitz Preis (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection, And Other Stories (Skyboat Media), which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour In Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” Adam lives in Florida with a trio of revolutionary cats.

Author Spotlight: Orrin Grey Devin Marcus | 799 words

I love giallos—I love that this story is centered around a giallo. Therefore, I loved this story. It actually reminds me a lot of the movie Berberian Sound Studio, also based around a series of murders and the filming of a giallo. Is there a particular giallo that colored “Chanson D’Amour,” and do you have any recommendations in the genre for our readers to check out?

In the past few years, only gradually and starting with the obvious ones by guys like Argento and Bava, I’ve grown into a big fan of gialli, and I think that growth, and seeing them really kind of hitting a renaissance of popularity right now, is mostly what informed this story. But it also had to do with an “a-ha” moment for me about the relationship.

For me, reading this, the true horror of the piece comes from the fact that, given the fractured nature of time in this story, it’s impossible to tell chronologically when the narrator has killed Sara. The video editing lingo thrown in really helps this effect. What made you want to mess with the perception of time in this story?

So, I think this actually goes back to the answer to your first question a little bit, but I think the idea of messing with the perception of time grew out of the realization of just how often gialli are reliant on memory; specifically, the protagonist struggling to remember some small detail they’ve seen that will somehow make the solution click into place. So, while they’re a detective story, the solution is often already there inside their head, they’re just trying to find a way to make it come into focus.

I grew up listening to Manhattan Transfer as a kid, and seeing a reference to their cover of “Chanson D’Amour” really buttered my biscuit. What is it about the song that made it a fitting title for this piece, and why did you specifically choose Manhattan Transfer’s cover?

I was first introduced to “Chanson D’Amour” via the soundtrack of I, Madman (1989), and the version that plays on it is the Manhattan Transfer. It’s just playing on a radio in the movie, but I found it so evocative, so perfect, I knew I had to do something with it. When I was doing a little research into the song, I learned that it was a big hit in Europe in 1977, which gave me an excuse to actually mention the version by name in the story, as a way for the insufferable director character to be grounding his movie to the time and place that the gialli was thriving.

Visiting your website, I was delighted to see that you’ve been spending June creating an evocative Kaiju with a brief description every day of the month. #Kaijune is an amazing hashtag, and everyone reading this should go through the archive right now! We’ll wait. OK, now that everybody is back, I’ll ask what inspired you to participate, and which of your daily creations is your favorite?

I’m a big fan of kaiju films, and for the last year or two I’ve enjoyed the #kaijune contributions of various artists I follow on Twitter. I don’t know what it was that caused me to realize this year that I could play along by jotting down some tweet-length flash fiction each day, but once I had the idea, I’d pretty much already committed myself to the project before I could think better of it. As far as picking a favorite . . . I think I might have to go with the one I did for “Crowned.”

What do we have to look forward to from you coming up?

Well, lately I’ve been keeping busy with a lot of freelance writing for tabletop roleplaying games, several of which should be hitting either shelves or Kickstarters in the near future. The only one I can mention the name of right now is Iron Kingdoms Requiem from Privateer Press, which had a very successful Kickstarter earlier this year and should be on shelves any day now. As far as fiction goes, I recently wrote an occult cyberpunk novel for Broken Eye Books that’s being serialized on their Patreon (bit.ly/36JLSUm), with the third and final installment due out in the next few months. And I’m hoping to have a fourth collection of short fiction out through Word Horde, who have published all but my first collection so far, sometime in 2022.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Devin Marcus is a freelance proofreader and editor living in Portland, Oregon. Outside of his day job proofreading and printing at a golf scorecard company, you can find him at Aphelion Webzine, where he’s the resident Short Story Editor. Additionally, you can send him cool horror-related stuff on Twitter @DubbleOhDevin. Author Spotlight: Gillian Daniels Xander Odell | 1176 words

You walk a fine line with “Frost Bloom,” a near perfect blend of addiction, abuse, consent, and the ways we blind ourselves to the unpleasant truth. What was the hardest thing about writing this story?

The ending! The beginning came very naturally at the time, possibly because I wrote it while I was half-asleep. It sat for weeks before I returned to it. I alternate between projects, but I wanted to return to that passage. I had to work to figure out where it would go next and how to land it. I knew the central relationship between the characters was not going to go well and that Tara’s anxieties and chemical dependencies were going to make things worse.

Tell us something about the inspiration behind the ice maiden creeping through the window. What prompted you to explore this particular theme?

I think a lot about the power dynamics of the immortal/human relationships in monster-centric stories. These fictional relationships often have happy endings these days, but not always. A failed romance both guts and fascinates me. For the ice maiden, I wanted to write a figure who was a little too alien to be fully understood by a random human and naïve enough to assume that all humans are fools.

Horror is an intimate genre. Here we see that intimacy in the little details, how gold was the anathema instead of silver, Denny’s gurgling breath, the tears in Tara’s eyes when she says “You have to stay now,” the seemingly throwaway description of “pulling my pants back up.” Were such details part of the bones of the story or were they tucked into place like bits of skin?

Absolutely part of the bones. I read for details that makes fiction pop, and I want to put that into my writing. This story felt like assembling a collection of things that interested me: I wanted to explore the idea of dark and twilight fairies/faeries avoiding sunlight and extremes, embodied by the richness and apparent luminous quality of gold. For contrast, I wanted to add bits of sudden and intimate violence. I also wanted to better understand the complicated self-loathing Tara has about what both the ice maiden does to her and what she eventually does to the ice maiden. For Denny, it was important to me that he be a human connection for Tara and a pawn in a situation he doesn’t and ultimately will never understand. Honestly, I named him Denny after the restaurant chain because I associate it with comfort food and the drunk, midnight crowd you stumble into when there’s nowhere else to go at night! Even though he’s a bit player here, like the other details in the world, he’s still important.

In your eyes, who is the monster here? Who is grooming whom?

I want to hear the interpretations people have on this one. Mine, simply, is that this is an abusive situation even if the shape of that relationship and power shifts over time. They both do monstrous things and, sadly, I think they’re both capable of acting better. I wanted to complicate the idea of a “perfect victim” which, in real life, is what a lot of our culture seems to demand when someone has been abused. If you survive a terrible situation, a lot of people don’t seem to think you’re worthy of sympathy unless you’re always on your best behavior. That’s both unrealistic and cruel. The truth is that people are complex, especially if they’re working through their own pain. You can have something terrible happen to you, like Tara being initially preyed upon, and then turn around and still be responsible for doing something awful to someone else. As for who’s grooming who, I think of “grooming” as something that specifically happens between a child and an adult in a parental role. I wrote the ice maiden as an ancient being who’s frozen at a particular level of maturity. Regardless, there’s a clear power imbalance that she and Tara spectacularly fail to negotiate. If this were a story with a happy ending, I think they might have figured their relationship out early on and managed to avoid hurting each other as much as they do.

I was as intrigued by the story and the dysfunctional undercurrents as I was to learn of your interest in romance fiction. What sparked that particular love?

Before and throughout the pandemic, I’ve gravitated to enormous extremes in fiction: the happily- ever-after comfort of romance novels and the everything-is-awful world of horror fiction. I’m an anxious person and will sometimes go to the last page of a book I’m reading just to make sure the characters are okay. And I know they’re fictional, but I get so invested! With romance and horror, though, I rarely do this. Romance stories usually end at an optimistic point with a couple sorting out their problems. The ending of horror is more varied—possibly because horror is more of an amorphous element than a concrete genre—but there is the expectation that things are going to go very poorly for everyone involved, even if one or two characters manage to survive. With both archetypal stories, there’s the comfort of knowing what to expect and being able to enjoy the journey. If a happy ending is guaranteed for a Regency romance, for example, the hero can get kidnapped by highwaymen, be forced into a terrible engagement, and get locked in a cellar—almost anything bad can happen before the happy ending. With horror, you already know things are going to get as bad as they can, and for me, playing in that fictional space can feel eerily secure.

Your short stories are all over the internet. What can eager fans look forward to in the coming months?

“Eager fans”! This question delights me. I always appreciate that kind of support. I’d love to find out what I’ll be publishing next, too. I’m hopeful I can make another sale this year. I have a personal rule to always have a handful of submissions out for poetry, short fiction, and my novel manuscript, and I think that bullheaded persistence has been an asset in getting published. Otherwise, I’m always posting art and fiction excerpts on my Twitter (bit.ly/3iv1mRJ), Instagram (bit.ly/3zjShlD), and definitely Patreon (bit.ly/3rkm1fa). In the last, most of the posts become public/free within a couple days. And of course, I announce sales and convention appearances on my website (bit.ly/3rkLjda). ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Xander Odell lives in Washington state with their husband, sons, and an Albanian miniature moose disguised as a dog. Their work has appeared in such venues as Jim Baen’s Universe, Daily Science Fiction, Crossed Genres, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. They are a Clarion West 2010 graduate, and an active member of the SFWA. Find out more at writerodell.com or follow them on Twitter at @WriterOdell.

Coming Attractions The Editors | 121 words

Coming up in October, in Nightmare . . . We have original short fiction from WC Dunlap (“Caw”) and Jon Padgett (“Flight 389”). Our Horror Lab originals include a poem (“Every Night and All”) from Sonya Taaffe and a flash story (“I Summon You”) from Dale Bailey. We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a book review from Terence Taylor. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got new fiction on the way from Adam-Troy Castro, Julianna Baggott, and Steve Toase. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

Here are a few URLs you might want to check out or keep handy if you’d like to stay apprised of everything new and notable happening with Nightmare:

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Subscribe www.nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe Subscriptions and Ebooks The Editors

If you enjoy reading Nightmare, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. All purchases from the Nightmare store are provided in epub, mobi, and pdf format. A 12-month subscription to Nightmare more than 45 stories (about 240,000 words of fiction, plus assorted nonfiction). The cost is just $23.88 ($12 off the cover price)—what a bargain! Visit nightmare-magazine.com/subscribe to learn more, including about third-party subscription options. We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors, and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Nightmare ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. Buying either of the half- year Bundles saves you $3 (so you’re basically getting one issue for free), or if you spring for the Year One Bundle, you’ll save $11 off the cover price. So if you need to catch up on Nightmare, that’s a great way to do so. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/store for more information. Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard The Editors

We already offer ebook subscriptions as a way of supporting the magazines, but we wanted to add an additional option to allow folks to support us, thus we’ve launched a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version If you enjoy Fantasy, Nightmare, and/or Lightspeed, our Patreon page is a way for you to help support those endeavors by chipping in a buck or more on a recurring basis. Your support will help us bring bigger and better (and more) projects into the world.

Why Patreon? There are no big companies supporting or funding our magazines, so they really rely on reader support. Though we offer the magazines online for free, we’re able to fund them by selling ebook subscriptions or website advertising. While we have a dedicated ebook subscriber base, the vast majority of our readers consume the magazine online for free. If just 10% of our website readers pledged just $1 a month, the magazines would be doing fantastically well. So we thought it might be useful to have an option like Patreon for readers who maybe haven’t considered supporting the magazine, or who maybe haven’t because they don’t have any desire to receive the ebook editions—or who would be glad to pay $1 a month, but not $3 (the cost of a monthly subscriber issue of Lightspeed). Though Fantasy, Nightmare, and Lightspeed are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one account. Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy the work Adamant Press puts out, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Patron? Well, you get the satisfaction of helping to usher the creation of cool new short fiction projects into the world! Plus, the more support we get, the better we can make the magazines and compensate our authors and staff. By becoming a supporter via Patreon, you help fund our growth and continued publication of two award-winning magazines. Of course, if you’re already one of our ebook subscribers (thank you!), you are already supporting us. This is for those who prefer to read the issues each month on our free websites, or wish to support our efforts more generally. By becoming a supporter, you are also bestowed a title, such as Dragonrider, or Space Wizard, or Savior of the World and/or Universe, thus making you instantly the envy of all your friends.

Thank You! If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. We hope you’ll consider becoming a backer on Patreon. That URL again is patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams. Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines —and our other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you. About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Editor-in-Chief Wendy N. Wagner

Publishing Company Adamant Press

Publisher John Joseph Adams

Associate Editor Arley Sorg

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Gabrielle de Cuir

Art Director Christie Yant

Assistant Editors Lisa Nohealani Morton Xander Odell

Editorial Assistant Alex Puncekar

Reviewers Adam-Troy Castro Terence Taylor Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreader Devin Marcus

Webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios