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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 © 2021 Nightmare Magazine Cover by http://www.nightmare-magazine.com Published by Adamant Press 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.

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