TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 77, February 2019

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: February 2019

FICTION Quiet the Dead Micah Dean Hicks We Are All Monsters Here Kelley Armstrong 58 Rules to Ensure Your Husband Loves You Forever Rafeeat Aliyu The Glottal Stop Nick Mamatas

BOOK EXCERPTS Collision: Stories J.S. Breukelaar

NONFICTION The H Word: How The Witch and Get Out Helped Usher in the New Wave of Elevated Horror Richard Thomas Roundtable Interview with Women in Horror Lisa Morton

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Micah Dean Hicks Rafeeat Aliyu

MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks Support Us on Patreon or Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2019 Nightmare Magazine Cover by Grandfailure / Fotolia www.nightmare-magazine.com

Editorial: February 2019 John Joseph Adams | 153 words

Welcome to issue seventy-seven of Nightmare! We’re opening this month with an original short from Micah Dean Hicks, “Quiet the Dead,” the story of a haunted family in a town whose biggest industry is the pig slaughterhouse. Rafeeat Aliyu’s new short story “58 Rules To Ensure Your Husband Loves You Forever” is full of good relationship advice . . . if you don’t mind feeding your husband human flesh. We’re also sharing reprints by Kelley Armstrong (“We Are All Monsters Here”) and Nick Mamatas (“The Glottal Stop”). Our nonfiction team has put together their usual array of author spotlights, and in the latest installment of “The H Word,” Richard Thomas talks about exciting new trends in horror films. Since it’s Women in Horror Month, Lisa Morton has put together a terrific panel interview with Linda Addison, Joanna Parypinski, Becky Spratford, and Kaaron Warren—a great group of female writers and scholars.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, an science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two- time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist eleven times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.

Quiet the Dead Micah Dean Hicks | 6436 words

Stray spirits stirred in the dark. They lay like oil slicks across the asphalt, pulled their misty bodies in and out of the doors of Swine Hill’s pork processing plant, and drifted storm-like in Kay’s wake. Her every hot breath was full of the dead. The man had crossed her. Had shouldered into her on the crowded butchery floor where she leaned over a workstation and hacked through bone and bleeding pig meat. Had stolen knives and gloves from the locker that everyone knew was hers. Had taken a box that she had packed and had weighed it on his scale. He was new and young and didn’t know any better. But he had crossed her, and now Kay had to show him who she was. The ghost that haunted Kay moved through her blood like gasoline. It craved to fight, its need to blacken the eye of the world the only thing that kept it from slipping into death. She had struggled to ignore the ghost for a week, how it rose in her and covered her eyes with its hot hands, coloring everything she saw. But there was a reason the ghost had chosen her. Like always, Kay would let it have what they both wanted. Kay followed the man back to his truck. While he fumbled for his keys in the blue-white murk of the parking lot, Kay sucker punched him in the back of the skull. By the time he understood the dull thunder drumming along his head, by the time he knew that he was in a fight and could think to raise his hands to cover his face, Kay was already on top of him, digging her knees in his guts, her fists hollowing him out. The man shoved her off and found his feet, spitting blood and desperately crawling into his truck. Kay let him drive off, the whole violent pageant over in less than a minute. The ghost flared in her busted knuckles and aching shoulders, wordlessly sated. Around her, the wind picked up, heavy with the sob of the spirits circling the plant, lost ghosts who had only ever known pig work and wanted nothing else. From across the dim lot, the night manager broke through the steaming spirits, shouting at her to go. Kay fumbled an explanation. There wouldn’t be any more trouble. The man had brought it on himself. She needed this job for her brother and sister. “You’re gone,” the night manager said. “You’ve got no place here anymore.” Hearing the words they feared most, the gathered spirits gasped away to the edges of the lot. The manager left with them, leaving Kay with what she had done. Staring at his broad back disappearing into the dark, the ghost inside of her said that no one should ever speak to her that way. It was hot in her chest, ready to chase him down too. Kay sank to her knees and took deep breaths, holding in the vengeful spirit. Maybe she could talk to the foreman in the morning. Maybe she hadn’t let herself ruin everything again.

• • • •

Her car pushed through a foggy procession of ghosts on the cracked road. Most of them swept up to the pork processing plant, the only real employer left in town, desperate to throw themselves into its brutal mouth in death as they had in life. Her ghost rode like a headache high on her skull, little fantasies of violence licking at her brain. She’d found the spirit months ago, right before she dropped out of school. Everyone knew to avoid the haunted dressing room. A brutal spirit had claimed it as its own, rehearsing some violence that had happened there years before. For decades, the school worked around it, making the middle school and high school girls’ teams share a changing room, letting the angry ghost have its kingdom. For Kay, who had been squeezed and prodded her entire life, forced to share a room with a younger sister and to take care of her family after her father died, she loved that the spirit had made the world give it space. Whereas Kay had always been asked to give up what she had, to make herself small, and she’d always done it. When her mother left, abandoning Kay to take care of her siblings alone, she went into the dark of the dressing room, not knowing if she would come out again. She found the ghost waiting for her, crackling white-hot and beautiful. Kay embraced the spirit, and it plunged into her heart, filling her like venom, in her blood and spit and tears. When it rose within her, telling her that no one would ever hurt her again, Kay was already in love with it. Turning on her street, she pulled up to a dim house, the homes around them lightless and long abandoned. Blue sparks of TV light rippled over their front window. Old furniture crowded the porch, mildew-damp and scraped, the fabric matted with fur from stray cats. Her brother Oscar was asleep on the couch. He was white-haired, his face leathery and lined. He was the middle child at fifteen, but his strange ghost carried him through an entire lifetime in a day. He woke a piss- soaked infant in the morning, growing minute by minute until he could stumble into the kitchen, a gangly child in oversized clothes. For one perfect hour at noon, Oscar was a young man, smoldering and mysterious and sad. He could glimpse, for a few minutes at least, some other path his life might take, wanting to hitchhike out of Swine Hill and never come back. But before he could go, he put on weight, his hair peeled away, and his teeth yellowed with cigarette stains. By evening, Oscar stooped and trembled, grew short-tempered with his sisters, his back aching from a lifetime of work he hadn’t yet done. Finally he crawled into bed and waited for his thudding heart to kick and seize up, his whole body going rigid with pain. He cried out and passed away around four in the morning, only to return as a child again in a few hours. His life folded around him like a trap, the noon hour a keyhole that he could look through and see something better. His ghost chopped up and parceled out that feeling of freedom, giving him only the smallest taste of it each day. In the kitchen, the radio blasted music that hadn’t been popular in thirty years. The ghost of their father haunted the device, dead since Kay was a girl and her youngest sister was only an infant. The possessed radio did its best to love them through sound. It was her youngest sibling Mira’s closest friend. Mira loudly ate chips at the kitchen table, delighting in the explosions of sound coming from her mouth. She hadn’t spoken in two years. She’d come home one afternoon haunted by a ghost that wouldn’t let her speak, raising her finger and shushing anyone who asked her questions. She carried the weight of something in her, a secret that caught in her throat, desperately wanting to give it up but unable to. Mira’s silence was what finally pushed their mother to leave them. Kay’s ghost made her ache when she looked at Mira’s pursed lips, and she thought she understood why their mother had abandoned them. How could you fight something—how could you put your hands on a problem and make it right—when you didn’t even know what was wrong? Unable to tell her siblings how she was feeling, Mira made noise when she was upset. She coveted small ceramic bells, plastic whistles, and jars of pebbles she could roll between her hands. It wasn’t strange to any of them that their whole family was haunted. In a town so swollen with spirits, people were used to sharing themselves with the dead. Kay kicked the couch, and Oscar sat up, hacking into his fist. Mira came in, one hand rustling in the chip bag. From the kitchen, the haunted radio lowered to a static-laden mutter. “I quit today,” Kay said. Mira hugged her sister, breathing “Shhh” into her stiff shirt. Oscar was red-eyed and trembling, his body wracked with pain. He pulled his hands into his chest like bruised wings. “No one quits the plant.” “It’s not like Pig City is the whole world,” Kay said. Both of them only stared, their silence saying that it was the whole world. Here in this town that had been collapsing from the center out, where everything was falling apart, overdue, broken down. Where even what you had was a weight, their house and car worth less than what was owed. “You better beg for that job back,” Oscar said, knowing that soon it would be his time to go work for the plant, to take on the destiny written in his muscles and bones. Mira backed away and covered her mouth with a pillow, her eyes darting from Oscar to Kay and pleading for both of them to be silent, to know that talking only made things worse. Kay could feel her ghost rise in her, ready to fight again. She wouldn’t take lip here, not in the house she paid for, not from the siblings she fed and clothed and carted to the doctor. She had stayed when everyone else had left, and she didn’t owe them any more than that. “Go to your rooms.” There was heat in her voice, and her brother and sister shrank from her, afraid of what might be coming. “You have school in the morning.” At the top of the stairs, Mira turned and looked down at Kay. There was a tremor to the girl’s lips, and for a moment Kay thought she would finally speak, that her silence might crack softly open. While Kay waited, Mira covered her mouth with both hands, the ghost in her choking back whatever she needed to say.

• • • •

The spirit simmered inside Kay all night. It reminded her of everything in the house that she already couldn’t afford to fix, the broken hot water heater and leaking refrigerator and sighing toilet. This house full of inanimate things that had failed her personally and spitefully, most of them so full of the fragments of lost spirits that there was no repairing them. She thought of the manager who had fired her without listening to her side of things, and then of the man she had thrown down on the asphalt, how he would probably clock in to work tomorrow and take her place on the butchery floor, grinning with busted lips. And she thought of Mira holding in her secret, a splinter of glass buried deep in her skin, something that Kay couldn’t pull free no matter how much she promised, or begged, or threatened. With no one else to fight, the ghost fought Kay. She rolled in her bed, punching into the mattress and tangling in the sheets. She banged her hands on the bedposts and knocked her shins against the wall. The next morning, an orchard of bruises bloomed over her chest, shoulders, and arms. Her eyebrow was gummy with blood, her eyeball swimming in a red haze. The ghost filled her pounding heart, swollen and heavy and full of salt. Mira was up already, pouring cereal for the three of them. The radio cut back and forth between morning shows, big-hearted and boisterous and happy they were awake. Mira dropped the gallon of milk, its round mouth glugging out onto the floor. Kay felt the ghost rise into her throat, wanting her to shout at her sister. Instead Kay went to find Oscar. He sat child-sized and blinking in bed. The room stank, his floor a sea of clothes in every size. He said he didn’t want to go to school, meaning that he didn’t want to get out of bed and live through his disappointing life again. Kay forced a baggy shirt over his head, his small hands pushing her away. She sat him down for breakfast and pulled a dress shirt out of the dryer. Blue streaks broke across it like veins. Either Oscar or Mira had left pens in their pockets, staining everything in the load. Her ghost grabbed her insides and shook, rattling her, demanding that she scare them, hurt them, that she make this moment big enough in their minds that they would never forget again. Kay bit down hard on the inside of her cheek and held the dryer until she felt calm, blood mixing with the sweet milk taste in her mouth. She put the ink-spotted shirt on anyway. The bus honked, and Kay pulled her siblings outside. The yards around them were overgrown, the houses empty and faded of paint. There had been no neighbors in years. The bus idled on the street, its door hanging open like a mouth. Oscar’s shoes were still untied. He tripped and fought with the snarl of his shoelaces, crying softly from the newness and discomfort and size of the world, knowing that nothing better was to come. Kay tried to help him, but Mira grabbed at her arm, urgent and full of need. Kay took her sister’s round face in her hands, her knuckles swollen and raw from the night before. “Mira, love,” she said, looking into her sister’s pleading eyes. “I’m trying not to kill you.” • • • •

From anywhere in town, you could hear the sounds of the pig plant. Stand in your yard on a still day, and under the calls of birds and rattle of old cars would come the distant, barely heard beep of forklifts, the shaggy moans of eighteen-wheelers climbing the ridge, the suck of air through narrow vents. And behind the machine sounds came the slam of knives on butcher blocks, the holler and wail of voices buried inside its concrete heart, the squeal and snarl of hundreds on hundreds of pigs catching the smell of blood in their snouts. Kay called Pig City and asked for the manager. Maybe she could join a different crew working in another part of the factory. It was vast, big enough to swallow the whole town. Surely it still had room for her. Someone new answered the phone, his voice an echo in a well, distant and deep and strange. She asked him for her job back, but the man seemed confused, telling her that Pig City wasn’t hiring right now. Kay wanted to drive to the plant and make them listen to her. She imagined sitting in a cold office, being read dry paragraphs of company policy and made to beg while a bored supervisor played solitaire on his computer. Her ghost tightened in her jaw at the thought. She couldn’t sit for that. She would explode, give her ghost the fight it craved, make everything worse than it already was. Kay wore her stained shirt and drove around Swine Hill in her father’s old car, going from store to store to ask if they were hiring. She stopped at a hardware place selling rust-pocked and dirty tools bought secondhand from estate sales. She waited thirty minutes for someone to return to the desk at the riverfront hotel, the carpet sandy and smelling of mildew. She asked for the manager at the town’s one remaining grocery store, a man who slid paperwork to her from inside his glass booth, hands crossed over his chest like she had come to carve him out, to take everything he had. Every place she went said that they weren’t hiring, that they hadn’t hired anyone new in a long time. Kay asked for applications anyway. Over and over, she was told to try the pig plant. “I can’t work there,” Kay finally said. She stood in a small bridal shop. The gowns were dusty, everything sun-bleached and out of style. In tall mirrors circling the shop, the ghost of a young girl moved through reflections of the space. When the ghost girl touched a dress in the mirror, it would tremble on its rack. The owner—maybe the ghost’s mother or sister or daughter, the resemblance strong even though she was much older—pointed to the door. “I can’t hire you. This is a family business.” Kay looked between the woman and the ghost in the mirrors. “You don’t have a family.” “You’re haunted,” the woman said. “Don’t act like you don’t understand.” “I know the difference between a ghost and a person.” Kay thought of her father’s spirit inside the radio, how its volume swelled to fill the kitchen when Mira walked in, her sister clapping and stomping her feet. “I know when I’ve lost something.” “If you aren’t buying anything, you should go.” The ghost pounded in her head, making Kay dizzy. It didn’t want to go. It wanted to stand in the middle of the store and take up space. It wanted to tip over the racks of clothes and snap the limbs from manikins. It wanted to put a foot through the mirrors and confront even the dead. Kay took one of the woman’s yellowed business cards and wrote her own name and number across it. “Call me if anything changes,” she said. Her angry spirit threw itself against her ribs and sternum, making Kay’s breath catch in pain.

• • • •

She didn’t want to see Mira and Oscar at the end of the day. Oscar would ask for things. New shoes, groceries, movie rentals to help him forget himself for a few hours. Mira would snap her fingers to get Kay’s attention and then stare at her, as if waiting for Kay to speak for the both of them. Afraid of what she might do, Kay couldn’t face them until she calmed down. She left the car in the driveway and walked into the old downtown, the most haunted part of the city, hoping that at least here she wouldn’t see another living person. All of downtown’s boutiques, banks, and bars had closed decades ago. Block after block of brick buildings had the windows broken and had rubble filling their dusty rooms. During the day, kids and wild animals roamed here, breaking bottles and fighting in the ruins. At night, the ghosts reigned, full-bodied and physical, trying to recreate the world they had lost out of ash and gossamer and dust. Unlike the ghosts haunting the plant, the downtown spirits had lost everything they cared about. They were dangerous to approach, desperate for blood and skin and pain to wrap themselves in, for some reminder of their lost lives. Kay hoped the ghost inside her was enough to chase away any curious spirits, that it wouldn’t stand to share her with another. It was easy to forget the danger, to assume the worst had already happened. She found what had once been a bar, the stools split to kindling and the tilted counter stripped down to particleboard. Kay sat back against the wall as dark fell, wondering what she would do. The sun went down, and the past came back with all its heat and longing. The bar transformed with the coming of the dead. Warm lights flared across the ceiling. The counter unfurled with sheets of flawless copper, still gleaming as if they hadn’t been pried free and sold for scrap twenty years ago. The walls bloomed black and glittering, like she was inside the sky. Doors popped open and the bar expanded into the condemned and dismantled spaces around her, taking on its old life. While spirits streamed through the doors, music washed through the bar, the songs old and horn-heavy and full of loss. Kay hid in a back booth and stole drinks, sucking down whatever the burning liquor was and watching the phantoms laugh and flirt and dance. If she closed her eyes, Kay knew she would be able to smell the mildew and rot, to taste the dust coating the back of her throat, but for now she drank and pretended it was real. After a few hours, her siblings found her. Mira went straight to the ghostly jukebox, putting both hands on the fabric of its speaker, feeling the music in her ears and skin. Oscar lowered himself stiffly into her booth, nervous of the crowd, these ghosts who might trick you into thinking they were people. He’d been tricked before by the promises of the dead, and if there was anything more they had to offer him, he didn’t want it. The spirit of a waiter, his broad hands little more than cigarette smoke and insect husks, put drinks down on the table. Mira and Oscar downed glasses. Kay worried that neither of them should be drinking, but it seemed like only alcohol. Surely it was nothing, just rain, car exhaust, the scraps of memory. Oscar grew paper-skinned and bony, the clock inside him winding down. He watched the specter of a woman dance alone by the bar. “Do you think we’ll haunt the town when we die too?” he asked. “Do you think we’ll always be here?” Mira looked back and forth between her siblings, waiting for one of them to answer.

• • • •

It was almost noon when they awoke in the ruins, sunlight filtering through the broken ceiling and warming their faces. The floor was uneven dirt, the joists long since rotted away. Their clothes were wet from lying in the mud. Kay licked her lips, dry and tasting of iron, like rust rimmed her mouth. Mira fell forward and vomited. She heaved silently, white foam pushing through her crossed fingers. Oscar, a long-legged teenager at the height of his powers, laid a hand across her back. But then he belched and fell to his knees, coughing up what might have been mop water, frothy and purple and smelling of mildew. Kay felt something wrong in her stomach and throat. She hit the ground, holding her belly with both hands and blowing out muddy water. Gray, jelly-like orbs erupted from her throat and bounced over the ground. Dead tadpoles with black eyes. When she understood what they were, she threw up again, until her throat burned and her stomach had collapsed into a tight knot of muscle. Mira swore each of the dead tadpoles to silence. Oscar pulled Kay to her feet, laughing at the sheer vileness of everything. “You’re a shitty mom,” he told her. And Kay, even though her ghost sparked at the criticism, couldn’t help but laugh too. She wiped her mouth and walked out of the ruins with them, headed home to look for chalky antacids and leftover antibiotics from the free clinic. Coming to the fork that would take them back toward their house or north out of the city, Oscar looked toward the horizon. He only had a few more moments before the weight of everything would come pressing down on him again. This might be his chance to escape into some other life. But Mira fell and threw up again, lying miserably by the side of the road. Oscar scooped her into his arms and carried her home, feeling himself grow slower and more beaten by the minute. Kay stood in the yard while Oscar carried their sister inside, listening to the factory sounds coming down from the ridge. Things would be fine, she told herself. Hadn’t she always found a way to take care of them?

• • • •

Kay slept through the afternoon, sick to her stomach and throat burning. The house was still but for the radio spitting static in the kitchen. Like her sister, Kay would never understand what it needed from her. She thought about trying the plant again, knowing that she couldn’t go another week without working. She might look for work in the little towns dotting the highway to the east and west, but didn’t think she’d have much luck. They were as poor and rundown as Swine Hill. Her ghost fed on the fear and heartbreak within her, wanting to throw itself at the problem, but the problem was airy and vast, like trying to fight the star-pierced sky. She went downstairs and fell onto the couch beside Oscar. They watched TV for a few hours, the radio’s volume climbing to a shrill whistle from the kitchen. It was starting to give her a headache, her ghost moving heavy as lead inside her skull. “Have you seen Mira?” Kay asked. It was almost dark. Oscar balanced a glass of water on his chest, watching his stomach rise like bread, scratching through his thinning hair. “Would you hate me if I left too?” he asked. “Maybe things would be easier for you without me.” Kay ignored him. She had seen the old men in town, how the chemicals from the plant ate into their skin. Every night, she could look at her brother’s face and know that he at least would never leave them. “Did she go out with friends or something?” “I wouldn’t call them friends,” her brother said. “She has a group she hangs around. But they mostly talk to each other while she listens and covers her mouth. One day, she’s going to split wide open.” “Do you think it was something really bad?” Kay asked. Their mother had thought so, her guilt over not protecting Mira eventually driving her to leave. Oscar sighed, his sagging shoulders saying, I hope not. “It might have been something small. Even little things can hurt if you hold them in forever.”

• • • •

Kay was rooting through the pantry for pasta to boil when the radio exploded into sound again, announcing that Mira had come home. The girl’s jeans were muddy and she was missing a shoe. She had a faint chemical smell, like she’d been swimming in Swine Hill’s polluted river with its shimmering, iridescent water. Her cheeks were flushed and hair messy from running wild through the neighborhood. She stared at Kay, full to breaking, one finger bobbing in front of her mouth. Kay’s ghost felt hemmed in, crushed with other people’s needs, wanting to make the world stop. She closed her eyes and tightened her fists, nails cutting into her palms. “Tomorrow, you’re going to find that missing sneaker. I can’t keep buying you new clothes.” Kay took a pad of paper and pen from the counter and pushed them into Mira’s hands. “I know we’ve tried this already. But I need to understand.” Mira put the paper down, shaking her head viciously, but Kay forced her to take the pen. Mira made a shaky line, looking hopeful for a moment. But then her hand twitched. She started again but couldn’t make a letter, just long lines that fell off the page. Holding the pen in her fist, she went back and forth over it, crossing out what she had almost written. The effort had brought her to tears. “I’m listening,” Kay said. “What else can I do?” Mira ran up to her room and blew a whistle over and over, shrieking through the plastic until her wind gave out. When Kay finally came upstairs, shivering with hate, Mira stood at the bathroom sink. The girl reached into the back of her mouth with two fingers, like she was trying to grab the ghost that prevented her speech and pull it out. Kay wondered if she should go to the school and ask the teachers if they knew what was going on with Mira. But they might not even talk to her. They hadn’t loved Kay before she’d become haunted, and, afterward, when she’d argued and walked out of class, fighting with other students and refusing to do her work, they told her that she was unteachable and asked her to leave. With all that history, Kay didn’t know if she could strap down her angry ghost and walk into the school for help. And what if they blamed her, said that whatever happened to Mira was her fault? She’d tear the whole place apart. She went to find Oscar, hoping he would talk to the principal for her. It would have to be at the right time, in the early afternoon when he looked mature but not yet defeated. From the kitchen, she heard the crystalline splash of a glass shattering. The radio jumped up to max volume, something electronic and poppy and fast, like their father’s ghost was trying to hide what the girl was doing. Kay ran in to find Mira standing on the counter, shaking with silent sobs, dashing their mother’s wine glasses onto the floor. The tile glittered with shards. Beneath Kay’s skin, the ghost swelled until it filled her lungs and blood, her cells effervescent with violence. She wanted to shake her sister, to make her cry, to pry her mouth open and grab her by the tongue, to force her to give up whatever it was that she was holding back. Kay crunched across the broken glass in her old work boots and reached toward her. Mira, too sad to care that Kay might hurt her, leaned forward and said “Shhh” as loud as she could, a thread of saliva blowing past her finger. For a moment, Kay could see herself grabbing Mira and throwing her down onto the broken glass and tile, hitting her across the back and screaming at her, beating her sister until the words finally flamed from her mouth. Instead, Kay turned and ripped the radio from under the cabinets. She jerked it out of the wall, and before the light could fade, before the last notes of the song had settled from the air, Kay smashed it down on the floor with both hands. The radio cracked in half, the old tile splitting beneath it. Kay hammered it down on the floor again and again, until it was a mess of broken plastic and dangling wires. When she was done, she held its guts in her hands, the lights on its face dead, the spirit of their father blown away into the dark. Mira hopped down and ran. Kay snatched at her sleeve, but her sister tore her shirt and pulled free. She was out of the house before Oscar could stop her, leaving the door swinging open to the night. Outside, ghosts swept over the streets, their mouths stretched open in silent calls. Oscar stood at the stairwell watching Kay. He wore one of their father’s old shirts, his hands balled in the fabric. His look said that she had done something much worse than breaking a glass or misplacing a shoe, something beyond losing her temper or even hitting them like she had done before when she’d given into her ghost’s rage. She had broken off another little corner of their family, the one thing that was unforgiveable. They would always be smaller now. He laid an old hand on the railing and pulled himself back up the stairs without speaking to her. The house would be quiet from now on, a different place. Maybe the silence would be what finally drove him out to face his future. He went up to his room and lay in bed, waiting in the dark for the circling knot of his ghost to tighten around him.

• • • •

Kay drove through the neighborhood for over an hour, braving the edges of downtown with its raucous ghosts, going to the school and the gas station and the old park with its rusting hulks of playground equipment swallowed by grass. The roads were misty with the spiral of tattered spirits blowing up toward the plant on the ridge. With her windows down, Kay could hear the groan of hundreds of fans spinning in the concrete and steel arteries of the factory above. Of course, in this town where everyone living and dead eventually found their way up to the plant, where else could her sister have gone? The guard—either not remembering that she had been fired, or not caring—glanced once at Kay and waved her through the gate. Her spirit smoldered deep in her bones. The size and solidity of the plant, the way it had anchored itself so deeply into the earth, was an insult to the ghost. For casting Kay out, the spirit wanted to pull the factory down brick by brick. Pig City was a different place this late at night. Most of the living workers had gone home, only the cleaning crews remaining in their alien white hazmat suits, hosing the walls and floors with corrosive foam. Like a blizzard, little chips of flashing white and flurries of wind, ghosts uncountable streamed in and out of the plant. Kay scrounged a dirty jumpsuit from a locker and pulled it on so that no one would notice her, then went down the tiled hallways, in and out of maintenance areas and the butchering floors, looking for her lost sister. Ghosts hurried past, some of them solid enough to pick up files or spare parts or cleavers. They mixed up everything at night, rearranging the factory to look like it had when they were alive, but all of them from different decades and working against one other. The pig houses were the loudest part of the plant, their iron corrals deafening with piercing cries, snotty grunts, and the windy breathing of hundreds upon hundreds of pigs. The narrow aisle was slick and stank of urine, drains gurgling at her feet in the dark. The heat of their breath was all around her. Deep in the center of the pig house, under a swinging lamp with a naked bulb, Mira struggled to open one of the pens. The animals crowded around her with heavy, mute eyes. They smacked their mouths open and shut, as if they too were trying to speak. When Mira noticed Kay watching her in the dim light, she pulled off her remaining shoe and threw it at her. It was a small and desperate gesture, a silent signal that Kay should not try to stop her, that she should go back home. She wrapped her thin arms around the bars of the gate and struggled to open it. Kay knew she should grab Mira and carry her away before security found them. The plant was sacred. The police would put Mira in the haunted downtown jailhouse no matter how young she was, a place where anything might happen to her. But if Kay did carry her sister home, things would only be like they had always been. Worse, now that Kay had broken the radio. She had brought silence to their house. What would it take to break loose the secret inside of Mira? What was it that had lodged in her throat, this spiny truth that couldn’t be swallowed or spat up? It would take a whirlwind or a flood to shake it free, the sky wrestling the earth until both collapsed in each other’s arms. Mira retreated a few steps when she came close, but Kay went for the pigs instead. Her fingers found one of the locking pins in the dark and pulled it loose. She threw open a gate, stepping into the press of swine and shoving them out with the toe of her boot. Was she really helping her sister, or was she only giving into her ghost again, letting it wage another unwinnable war? Mira, crying from the loss of the radio or from her unknowable secret, opened the double doors of the pig house. Kay unlatched gates and let the pigs pour out of their cages and swell to fill the dark. She worked quietly to give Mira what she wanted, not knowing any other way to help her. They drove the herd of pigs into the parking lot. The smell of wet pine forest, rotten wood and earth, and the sticky fish scent of the river came to them in the wind. The pigs pushed toward the world of smells, stopped by the towering chain link fence that circled the plant. Knowing what was there just beyond the metal links only made it seem farther away. This was too small for what Kay’s ghost wanted. A fuck you to the town, but a quiet one. Her ghost tore into her, worked up and needing a fight, letting out all its pain. Kay looked up at the cement walls rising into the sky, covering the moon and stars. She spat blood and held her side. The world was too sturdy to be pulled down by her two hands. Eventually, it would crush her flat. But Mira ran amongst the pigs, their skins rippling with wind they’d never felt before. They raised a call over the plant, voices shrill and strange. Mira buried herself in the wet gasp and murmur of their inhuman voices. In the pig song, punctuated by the shouts of workers and the lazy whine of coming sirens, Kay could almost hear something splitting apart. Spirits gathered overhead, flattening themselves out like shrouds billowing on the air. Under the sky-cracking noise, Mira opened her mouth and began to speak. Her voice was low, only breath behind it, the whispered tail of words unraveling something within her. So quietly Mira spoke that even her ghost couldn’t hear her, couldn’t raise her hands to stop everything from slipping out. With the lights of a police cruiser winding up the road and the cold glow of flashlights moving toward them from the plant, Kay shoved the pigs aside and fell to her knees beside her sister, pressing her ear to Mira’s mouth. The warm skin of the shrieking pigs folded around them. “Tell me,” Kay said. Inside, her ghost stilled and listened too, its need to avenge breaking with love.

©2019 by Micah Dean Hicks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Micah Dean Hicks’s debut novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones is forthcoming in 2019 from John Joseph Adams Books. His story collection Electricity and Other Dreams—a book of dark fairy tales and bizarre fables—won the 2012 New American Fiction Prize. He won the 2014 Calvino Prize judged by Robert Coover, the 2016 Arts and Letters Prize judged by Kate Christensen, and the 2015 Wabash Prize judged by Kelly Link. His stories and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines ranging from The New York Times to The Kenyon Review. Hicks teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. You can find him on Twitter at @MicahDeanHicks and on the web at micahdeanhicks.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight We Are All Monsters Here Kelley Armstrong | 6427 words

So disappointing. After decades of movies and TV shows and books filled with creatures by turns terrifying and tempting, it was a guarantee that the real thing could never live up to the hype. We knew that. Yet we were still disappointed. When the first stories hit the news—always from some distant place we’d never visited or planned to visit—the jokes followed. Late-night comedy routines, YouTube videos, Internet memes . . . people had a blast mocking the reality of vampires. The most popular costume that Halloween? Showing up dressed as yourself and saying, “Look, I’m a vampire.” Ha-ha. Then cases emerged in the US, and people stopped laughing. While vampirism was no longer comedy fodder, people were still disillusioned. They just found new ways to express it. Some started petitions claiming the term “vampire” made a mockery of a serious medical condition. Others started petitions claiming it made a mockery of long-standing folklore. There was actually a bill before Congress to legislate a change of terminology. Then the initial mass outbreak erupted, and no one cared what they called it anymore.

• • • •

I first heard about the vampires in a college lecture hall. I couldn’t tell you which course it was—the news made too little of an impression for me to retain the surrounding circumstances. I know only that I was in class, listening to a professor, when the guy beside me said, “Hey, did you see this?” and passed me his iPhone. I was going to ignore him. I’d been doing that all term—he kept sitting beside me and making comments and expecting me to be impressed, when all I wanted to say was, “How about trying to talk to me outside of class?” But that might be an invitation I’d regret. So I usually ignored him, but this time, he’d shoved his phone in front of me and before I could turn away, I see the headline. The headline read, Real-Life Vampires in Venezuela. The article went on to say that there had been five incidents in which people had woken to find themselves covered in blood . . . and everyone else in the house dead and bloodless. “Vampires,” the guy whispered. “Can you believe it? I’d have thought they’d have been scarier.” “Slaughtering your entire family isn’t scary enough for you?” He shifted in his seat. “You know what I mean.” “It’s not vampires,” I said. “It’s drugs. Like those bath salts.” I shoved the phone back at him and turned my attention back to the professor.

• • • •

Two years later, I was still living in a college dorm, despite having been due to graduate the year before. No one had graduated that term, because that’s when the outbreak struck our campus. Classes were suspended and students were quarantined. The lockdown stretched for days. Then weeks. Then months. The protests started peacefully enough, but soon we realized we were being held prisoner and fought back. The military fought back harder. The scene played out across the nation, not just in schools, but every community where people had been “asked” not to leave for months on end. Martial law was declared across the country. The outbreaks continued to spread. Given what was happening in the rest of the world, soon even the college’s staunchest believers in democracy and free will realized we had it good. We were safe, living in separate quarters equipped with alarms and deadbolts so we could sleep securely. Otherwise, we were free to mingle, all our food and entertainment supplied as we waited for the government to find a cure. One morning I awoke to the sound of my best friend Katie banging on my door, shouting that the answer was finally here. I dressed as quickly as I could and joined her in the hall. “A cure?” I said. Her face fell. “No,” she said, and I regretted asking. I’d known Katie since my sophomore year, and she bore little resemblance to the girl she’d been. I used to envy her, with her amazing family and amazing boyfriend back home. It’d been a year since she’d seen them. Three months since she’d heard from them, as the authorities cut off communications with her quarantined hometown. She’d lost thirty pounds, her sweet nature reduced to little more than anxiety and nerves, unable to grieve, not daring to hope. “Not a cure,” she said. “But the next best thing. A method of detection. We can be tested. And then we can leave.”

• • • •

A method of detection. Wonderful news for an optimist. I am not an optimist. I heard that and all I could think was, What if we test positive? At the assembly, I was the annoying one in the front row badgering the presenters with exactly that question. “What would happen if we had the marker?” That’s what it was—a genetic marker. Which didn’t answer the question of transmission. Two years since the first outbreak, and no one knew what actually caused vampirism. It seemed to be something inside us that just “activated.” Of course, people blamed the government. It was in the vaccinations or in the water or the genetically-modified food. What was the trigger? No one knew and, frankly, it seemed like no one cared. Those who had the marker would be subjected to continued quarantine while scientists searched for a cure. The rest of us would be free to go. Well, free to go someplace that wasn’t quarantined. The next day, the military lined us up outside the cafeteria. There were still people who worried that the second they got a positive result, the nearest guy in fatigues would pull out his semi-automatic. Bullshit, of course. The semi-automatic would make noise. If they planned to kill us, they’d do it much more discreetly. To allay concerns, the testing would be communal. As open as they could make it. I had to give them props for that. They took a DNA sample and analyzed it on the spot. That instant analysis wouldn’t have been possible a couple of years ago, but when you’re facing a vampire plague, all the best minds work day and night to develop the tools to fight it, whether they want to or not. My results took eight seconds. I counted. Then they handed me a blue slip of paper. I looked down the line at everyone who’d been tested before me. Green papers, red, yellow, purple, white and black. They didn’t dare use a binary system here. So we got our papers and we sat and we waited. When Katie came over clutching a green slip of paper, she looked at mine and said, “Oh,” and looked around, mentally tabulating colors. “They say the rate is fifteen percent,” I said. “There are seven colors. That means an equal number for each so we don’t panic.” Once everyone was tested, they divided us into our color groups. Then we were laser-tattooed on the back of our hands. I got a small yellow circle. When I craned my neck to look at the group beside us—the reds—they were getting the same. So were the blacks to my left. I exhaled in relief and looked around for Katie. A woman announced, “If you have a yellow circle, you are clear and you may—” That’s when the screaming started. From the green group. I caught sight of Katie, standing there, staring in horror at the black star on her wrist. I raced over. A soldier tried to stop me, but I pushed past him, saying, “I’m with her.” A woman in uniform stepped into my path. “She’s—” “I know,” I said. “I’m staying with her.”

• • • •

It wasn’t a particularly noble sacrifice. That circle on my wrist meant I could leave at any time. She could not. I had nowhere to go anyway. My family . . . well, let’s just say that when I got accepted to college, I walked out and never looked back and don’t regret it. I won’t explain further. I don’t think I need to. I would stay with Katie because she needed me and because I could and because—let me be frank—because it was the smart thing to do. I’d heard what the world was like beyond our campus. I was staying where there was food and shelter and safety and a friend. Assemblies and a parade of officials and psychologists followed, all reassuring the others that their black star was not a death sentence. Not everyone who had the marker “turned.” Those who did were now being transported to a secure facility, where they’d continue to await a cure. There were private sessions that day, too, with counselors. During those, I sat in one of the common rooms with the other yellow suns. Yes, I wasn’t the only one. We all had our reasons for staying, and most were like mine, part loyalty, part survival. We sat and we played cards, and we enjoyed the break from being hugged and told how wonderful and empathetic and strong we were, when we felt like none of those things. Night came. Before today, the locks had been internal, meant to protect us while reassuring us that in the event of an emergency, we could leave. Now the doors had been fitted with an overriding electronic system. Perhaps it’s a testament to how far things had gone that not a single person complained. We were just happy for the locks, especially now, in a building filled with dormant monsters. I woke to the first shot at midnight. I bolted up in bed, thinking I’d dreamed it. Then the second shot came. No screams. Just gunshots. I yanked on my jeans and ran to the door, in my confusion forgetting about the new locks. I twisted the knob and . . . The door opened. I yanked it shut fast and stood there, gripping the knob. Was I really awake? Was I really me? How could I be sure? People who “turned” were not usually killed on sight, not unless they were caught mid-rampage and had to be put down. Studies said that when vampires woke in the night, they later had no memory of it. People took comfort in that—at least if you turned, you’d be spared the horror of remembering you’d slaughtered your loved ones. I took no comfort because it also meant there was no way of knowing what it felt like to turn. Would you be conscious in that moment? Did it seem real at the time? I looked at the unlocked door. My gaze swung down to the yellow sun on the back of my wrist. Another shot, this one so close that I ducked, the echo ringing in my ears. The shot had come from the other side of the wall. Katie’s room. I threw open my door and raced to hers, and finding it open, I ran through and . . . Katie lay crumpled on the floor. In her outstretched hand was a gun. I ran to her and then stopped short, staring. She lay on her stomach, and the side of her chest . . . there was a hole there. No, not a hole—that implies something neat and harmless. It was bloody and raw, a crater into her chest, just below her heart. I dropped to my knees, a sob catching in my throat. She whimpered. There was a moment when I didn’t move, when all I could think was that she’d come back to life, like a vampire from the old stories and Hollywood movies. Except that wasn’t how real vampires worked. They weren’t dead. They weren’t invulnerable. I grabbed her shoulders and turned her over. Blood gushed from her mouth as I eased her onto her back. I tried not to think of that, tried not to let my brain assess that damage. It still did. I was pre-med. I’d spent enough hours volunteering in emergency wards to process the damage reflexively. She’d tried to shoot herself in the heart, not the head, because she didn’t know better, because she was the kind of person who couldn’t even watch action movies. So she’d aimed for her heart and missed, but not missed by enough. Not nearly enough. I shouted for help. As I did, I heard other shouts. Other shots, too, and screams from deep in the dormitory and I tried to lay Katie down, to run out for help, but she gripped my hand and said “No” and “Stay” and I looked at her, and as much as I wanted to believe she’d survive, that she’d be fine, I knew better. So I shouted, as loud as I could, for help, but I stayed where I was, and I held her hand, and I told her everything would be fine, just fine. “I couldn’t do it,” she whispered. “I couldn’t wait to turn. I couldn’t make you wait.” “I would have,” I said, squeezing her hand as tears trickled down my face. “I’d have stayed for as long as you needed me.” A faint smile. “Just a few more minutes. That’s all I’ll need. Then you can go.” I told her I didn’t want to go, just hold on, stay strong and hold on and everything would be fine. Of course it wasn’t and we both knew that, but it gave us something to say in those final minutes, for me to tell her how brave and wonderful she was, and for her to tell me what a good friend I’d been. “There,” she whispered, her voice barely audible as her eyelids fluttered. “You can go now. Be free. Both of us. Free and . . . ” And she went. One last exhalation, and she joined her family and her boyfriend and everyone she’d loved and known was dead, even if she’d told herself they weren’t. I sat there, still holding her hand. Then as I lifted my head, I realized I could still hear shouts and shots and screams. I laid Katie on the floor, picked up the gun, and headed into the hall.

• • • •

How many times had I sat in front of the TV, rolling my eyes at the brain-dead characters running toward obvious danger. Now I did exactly that and understood why. I heard those shots and those screams and I had to know. I got near a hall intersection when the guy who’d showed me the news of the first reported deaths two years ago came barreling around the corner. He skidded to a halt so fast his sneakers squeaked. He stared at me, and there was no sign of recognition because all he saw was the gun. He dropped to his knees and looked up at me, and even then, staring me full in the face, his eyes were so panic-filled that he didn’t recognize me. He just knelt there, his hands raised like a sinner at a revival. “Please, please, please,” he said. “I won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt anyone. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. I need to say good-bye. My mom, my sister, my nephew . . . please just let me say good-bye. That’s all I’ll do, and then I’ll do it, and if I can’t, I’ll go away. I’ll go far, far away.” I lowered the gun, and he fell forward, convulsing in a sob of relief, his whole body quaking, sweat streaming from his face, the hall filling with the stink of it. “Thank you,” he said. “Oh God, thank you. I know I should do it—” “Where did the guns come from?” He looked up, his eyes finally focusing. “I know you. You—” “My friend had this gun. I hear more. Where did they come from?” He blinked hard, as if shifting his brain out of animal panic mode. Then his gaze went to my yellow sun. “You aren’t . . . So you don’t know. Okay.” He nodded, then finally stood. “When the black stars had their private counseling session, they gave us guns. Access to them, that is. They told us where we could find them, if we decided we couldn’t go on. Except . . . ” He looked back the way he came. “Not everyone is using theirs to kill themselves first.” “They’re killing the other black stars?” He nodded. “They think we should all die. To be safe. They’re killing those who didn’t take the guns.” Footsteps sounded in the side hall. “I need to go,” he said quickly. “You should, too.” I lifted my hand to show my tattoo. “I’m not a threat.” He shook his head but didn’t argue, just took off. I waited until the footsteps approached the junction. “I’m armed,” I called. “But I’m not a threat. I’ve got the yellow sun —” “And I don’t really give a shit,” said a voice, and a guy my age wheeled around the corner, blood spattered on his shirt, his gun raised. “Kill them all and let God sort them out.” I dove as he fired. He shot twice, wildly, as if he’d never held a gun before tonight. When he tried for a third shot, the gun only clicked. I ran at him, but didn’t shoot. I couldn’t do that. I smashed the pistol into his temple and he went down. Then I heard running footsteps and more shouts, and I raced down the hall, taking every turn and running as fast as I could, until I saw the security station ahead. I fell against the door, banging my fists on it. When no one answered, I held my wrist up to the camera. “Yellow sun!” I shouted. “Let me in!” A guy opened the door. His gray hair had probably been cut military short a couple of years ago, but no one enforced those rules now and it stood on end like porcupine quills. “Get in,” he said. I fell through. When I got my balance, I saw a half-dozen military guards watching the monitors. Watching students killing each other. “You need to get out there,” I said. “You need to stop this.” The gray-haired guy shrugged. “We didn’t give them the guns.” “But you need to—” “We don’t need to do anything.” He lowered himself into a chair. “You want to, girlie? You go right ahead. Otherwise? Wait it out with us.” I hesitated. Then I turned away from the monitors and slumped to the floor.

• • • •

I was released the next day. That was their term for it: released. Cast out from my sanctuary. They escorted me back to my room to get my belongings and gave me a bag to pack them in. Then they walked me to the college gates, and for the first time in over a year, I set foot into the world beyond my campus. It was fine in the beginning. Better than I dared to hope for. The entire college town had been tested, the black stars already rounded up and taken away, and while families grieved and mourned their loved ones, there was a sense of relief, too. Was it not better that their loved ones be taken somewhere safe . . . so the remaining family members would be safe from them, if they turned? That’s what it came down to in the end. What left us safe. I boarded with an elderly couple who’d lost their live-in nurse and declared that my years of pre-med were good enough for them. It was four months later when we heard the first report of a yellow sun turning vampire. No one panicked. The story came from California, which might only be across the country, but was now as foreign to us as Venezuela had been. The reports kept coming though. Yellow suns waking in the night and murdering their families. Then rumors from those who worked in the nearest black star facility that they’d had only a few occurrences of the dormant vampires turning. Finally, the horrible admission that the testing had failed, that the stars seemed to indicate only a slightly higher likelihood of turning. That’s when the world exploded, like a powder keg that’d been kept tamped down by reassurances and faith. People had been willing to trust the government, because it seemed they were honestly trying their best. And you know what? I think they were. As much as my early life had taught me to trust no one, to question every motive, I look back and I think the authorities really did try. They simply failed, and then everyone turned on them. I lived with the elderly couple for almost a year before their daughter came and kicked me out. She said I was taking advantage of them, pretending to be a nurse without credentials. The fact that her town had been taken over by militants had nothing to do with her decision to move home. No, her parents—whom she’d not contacted in years—needed her, so she’d be their nurse now. The old couple argued. They cried. They begged me to stay. Their daughter put a gun in my face and told me to leave. A month later, after living with some former classmates in a bombed- out building, I went back to try and check up on the old couple. I heard the daughter had turned. She’d killed her parents. Killed their neighbors too because these days, no one was watching. Unless someone reported them, the vampires just kept killing, night after night. Some committed suicide. Some surrendered. Some ran off into the wilderness, hoping to survive where they’d be a danger to no one. The old couple’s daughter just kept living in their house while her parents’ bodies rotted and a growing swath of neighbors died. I thought about that a lot. The choices we made. What it said about us. What I’d do if I woke covered in blood. I decided if that happened I’d head for the wilderness. Try to survive and wait for a cure. Or just survive, because by that point, no one really expected a cure. No one even knew if the government was still trying. Or if there still was a government. I spent the next year on the streets, sometimes with others, but increasingly alone. I was lucky—none of my companions turned on me in the night. I hadn’t even seen a vampire. That wasn’t unusual. Unless you spotted one being dragged from a house to be murdered in the streets, you didn’t see them. And even those who were hauled into the street? Well, sometimes they weren’t vampires at all. No one asked for proof. If you wanted shelter, you could cut yourself, smear the blood on some poor soul, drag him out, let the mob take care of him and move into his house. Two of the groups I was with discussed doing exactly that. I left both before that thought turned into action.

• • • •

I’d been walking for six months. That was really all there was left to do: walk. Wander from place to place, seeking shelter where you could find it. The cities and towns weren’t safe, as people reverted to their most basic animal selves, concerned only with finding a place to spend the night and food to get them through the day. It was better in the countryside. No one could be trusted for long, but that was the curse of the vampirism. That kindly old woman who offered you a warm bed might rise in the night, kill you, and go right on being sweet and gentle when she woke up. Until she saw the blood. In the country, there were plenty of empty homes to sleep in and flora and fauna to eat. I met a guy who taught me to trap and dress game. I returned the favor with sex. It wasn’t a hardship. He didn’t demand it, and in another life, it might even have turned into something more. It lasted six weeks. We would meet at our designated place to spend the day together, walking and hunting, and talking and having sex. Then we’d separate to our secret spots for the night, for safety. One morning, he didn’t show up. I went back twice before I accepted he was gone. Maybe he turned, or he met someone who had. Or maybe someone had fancied his bow and his knife and his combat boots and murdered him for them. He was gone, and I grieved for him more than I’d done so for anyone since Katie. Then I picked up and moved on. It was all you could do. I found a house a few days after that. Not just any house—there were plenty of those. The trick was to find exactly the right one, hidden from the road, so you wouldn’t need to worry about vampires or fellow squatters. Even better if it was a nice house. “Nice” meant something different these days, as in not ransacked, not vandalized, not bloodied. The last was the hardest criteria to fill. There’d been so many deaths that after a point, no one bothered cleaning up the mess. You’d find drained bodies left in beds, lumps of desiccated flesh, and tattered cloth. But other times, you’d just find smears of old blood on the sheets and on the floor, where some squatter before you had been too tired to find other lodgings and simply dragged the rotting corpses to the basement and settled in. But that house? It was damned near perfect. Out in the middle of nowhere, hidden by trees, so clean it seemed the family had left voluntarily and no one had found it since. The pantry was stuffed with canned and dry goods, as if they’d stocked up when things started going bad. I lived there for three weeks. Read half the books in the house. Even taught myself to use the loom in the sitting room. Damned near paradise. But one day I must have been sloppy, let someone see me returning from hunting. I woke with a knife at my throat and a man on top of me. There was a moment, looking up at that filthy, bearded face, when I thought, just don’t fight. Let him have what he wanted and let him leave. Just lie still and take it and he’d go and I’d have my house back. That’s when I saw the others. Three of them, surrounding the bed, waiting their turn. And it was as if a pair of scales in my head tipped. I fought then. It didn’t do any good, and deep inside, I knew it wouldn’t. I don’t even think I was fighting to escape. I was just fighting to say, I object, and in the end, lying there, bloodied and beaten, I took comfort in that, when every part of me screamed in pain. I fought back. No matter what had ultimately happened, I’d fought back. It was a week before the leader—Ray—decided he’d broken me and I could be allowed out of that room. It took another week to build their confidence to the point where they left me alone long enough to escape that place, because of course they hadn’t broken me. As a child, I’d been inoculated against far more than mumps and measles. They did what they would do, and I acted my part: the cowed victim who comes to love the hand raised against her. An old role that I reprised easily. Which is not to say that those two weeks didn’t leave their mark, and not simply physical ones. But I survived, and not for one moment did I consider not surviving, consider taking Katie’s way out. I respected her choice, but it was not mine. It never would be.

• • • •

As I walked along a deserted country road a day after my escape, I remembered an old TV show about a zombie apocalypse. I’d been too young to watch it, but since those hours in front of the TV were the best times I had with my family, I took them, even if it meant watching something that gave me nightmares. That show had endless scenes just like this one, a lost soul trudging along an empty road. While I didn’t need to worry about the undead lurching from the ditches, at least in that world you knew who the monsters were. In ours, the existence of vampires was almost inconsequential. In the last year, I’d had a gun to my head twice, a knife to my throat three times, and been beaten and raped repeatedly. And I had yet to meet an actual vampire. When I heard the little girl singing, I thought I was imagining it. Any parent worth the title had taken their children and run long ago. There were fortified communities of families run by the last vestiges of the military, sanctuaries you couldn’t enter unless you had a kid. That’s another reason parents kept them hidden—so no one stole their children to gain entry. But this really was a girl. No more than eight or nine, she sang as she picked wild strawberries along the road. When the woman with her took off her wide-brimmed straw hat and waved it, calling, “Hello!” I cautiously approached. “You’re alone,” the woman said. She was about thirty. Not much older than me, I reflected. I shook my head. “I have friends. They’re—” “If you’re not alone, you should be,” she said, waving at my black eye and split lip. I said nothing. “Do you need a place to stay?” she asked. “Somewhere safe?” “No, I—” “I can offer you a room and a properly cooked meal.” The woman managed a tired smile. “I was an apprentice chef once upon a time, and I haven’t quite lost the touch.” “Why?” I asked. She frowned. “Why do I still cook?” “Why give me a bed and a meal?” She shrugged. “Because I can. I have beds and I have food, and as much as I’d love to share them with whoever comes along this road, most times I grab my daughter and hide in the ditch until they pass.” “And I’m different?” “Aren’t you?” The little girl ran over and held out a handful of strawberries. I took one and she grinned up at me. “We have Scrabble.” “Do you?” I said. “And Monopoly. But I like Scrabble better.” “So do I,” I said, and followed her to the strawberry patch to continue picking. • • • •

If I thought the last house was heaven, that only proves how low my standards had fallen. With this one, even before the vampires, I’d have been both charmed and impressed. And maybe a little envious of the girl who got to grow up in this cozy sanctuary, like something from an old- timey English novel; the ones where children lived charmed lives in the English countryside, spending their days with bosom friends and loyal dogs and kindly grownups, getting into trouble that really wasn’t trouble at all. The house itself was as hidden by trees as the one I’d left. The woman had seeded the lane with weeds and rubble, so it looked as if nothing lay at the other end. There was a greenhouse filled with vegetables, fruit trees in the yard, a chicken coop, even goats for milk. The pantry was overflowing with home-canned goods. “Keeps me busy,” the woman said as she took out a jar of peaches for afternoon tea. For dinner, we had a meal beyond any I’d dare dreamed of in years. Then we played board games until the little girl was too tired to continue. After that, her mother and I read for an hour or so. Finally, we headed off to bed, and I was shown how to lock myself in. There were two deadbolts, one fastened on either side of the door. As to be expected these days. I said good-night. Then I went inside, turned my lock, and climbed into bed. I lay there, in that unbelievably comfortable bed, with sheets that smelled of lemons and fresh air. I lay, and I waited. Hours later, when I heard footsteps in the hall, I closed my eyes. The woman rapped softly on my door and whispered, “Are you awake?” I didn’t answer. She carefully unbolted the lock on her side. Then came a rattle, as she used something to pop mine. The door opened. Eyes shut, I waited until I heard breathing beside my bed. When I pinpointed the sound, I leaped. I caught the woman by the throat, both of us flying to the floor. I saw a blur of motion and heard a muffled snarl and turned to see the little girl with a canvas sack over her head. Her mother swung at me. I ducked the blow and slammed her against the wall. The girl was snarling and fighting against the sack. As I pinned her mother, the girl got free of the bag. The child’s eyes didn’t glow red. Her fingers weren’t twisted into talons. Her canines weren’t an inch long and sharpened. She looked exactly like the girl I’d just played Scrabble with for two hours. But the look in her eyes told me I’d guessed right. Yes, I’d hoped it was still possible for a stranger to be kind to me, to take me in and feed me and give me shelter because we were all in this hell together. I’d taken the chance, because I still dared to hope. But I’d known better. If I was surprised at all, it was because I presumed the mother was the vampire. But this made sense. “She’s my daughter,” the woman said. “All I have left.” I nodded. I understood. I really did. In her place, maybe I’d have done the same, as much as I’d like to think I wouldn’t. I looked at the little girl. Then I threw her mother at her. The woman screamed and tried to scramble away. The girl pounced. It was not over quickly. I’d heard stories of how the vampires kill. The rumor was they paralyzed their victims with a bite. But the girl kept biting and her mother kept struggling, at first only saying the girl’s name and fighting to control her. Then came the panic, the kicking and screaming and punching, any thought of harming her child consumed by her own survival instinct. The girl bit her mother, over and over, blood spurting and spraying, until finally the woman’s struggles faded, and the girl began to gorge on the blood while her mother lay there, still alive, still jerking, eyes wide, life slowly draining from them. I walked out of the guest room and locked the door behind me.

• • • •

The next morning, I hit the road, back the way I’d come. I walked all morning with the little girl skipping beside me, then racing off to pick wildflowers and strawberries. She’d woken in her own room, her nightgown and face clean. I’d woken her at dawn, seemingly panicked because I couldn’t find her mother. Something must have happened, and we had to go find her. The girl followed without question. Now she walked without question. I’d told her that her mother had vanished, and she still skipped and sang and gathered flowers. Proving maybe a little part of her was still that monster after all. At nightfall we reached my old sanctuary, the horror I’d escaped two days ago. I led her right up to the porch and rang the bell. One of the guys answered. Seeing me, he stumbled back, as if a vengeful spirit stood on the porch. “I want to see Ray,” I said. He looked at the little girl. “Wha . . . ?” “I want to see—” “Hey, girlie.” Ray appeared from the depths of the dark hall. “I want to come back,” I said. He threw back his head and laughed. “Realized it’s not so bad, compared to what’s out there, huh?” “I brought a gift,” I said. “My apology for leaving.” That’s when he saw the girl. He blinked. “You can use her to get into a refugee camp,” I said. “We’ll say we’re her parents, and the guys are your brothers.” “Huh.” He thought for a moment, but it didn’t take long before he smiled. “Not bad, girlie. Not bad at all.” “I just want one thing,” I said. He chuckled. “Of course you do. Gotta be a catch.” “I’m with you,” I said. “Just you. None of the others.” The smile broadened to a grin. “You like me the best, huh? Sure, okay. I accept your condition and your apology . . . and your gift. Come on in.”

• • • • After midnight, I slipped from under Ray’s arm and crept out. I tiptoed down the hall, unlocking doors as I went. It was an old house, the interior locks easily picked. The last one I opened was the little girl’s. Then I continued along the hall, down the stairs, and out the front door to begin the long walk back to the other house, my new home. I got as far as the road before I heard the first scream. I smiled and kept walking.

©2015 by K.L.A. Fricke Inc. Originally published in Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror, edited by Christopher Golden. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kelley Armstrong is the author of the Cainsville modern gothic series and the Rockton crime thrillers. Past works include the Otherworld urban fantasy series, the Darkest Powers & Darkness Rising teen paranormal trilogies, the Age of Legends fantasy YA series and the Nadia Stafford crime trilogy. Armstrong lives in Ontario, Canada with her family. 58 Rules to Ensure Your Husband Loves You Forever Rafeeat Aliyu | 3617 words

(23) No man jokes with food. Does your husband like a kind of food? Try to change your cooking. Rumour has it that in the early mornings, the expressways of Abuja are littered with dead bodies. Iman’s Toyota cut through the dusty fog of the early morning, the dark outside her windscreen occasionally broken by the few working streetlights. Never passing the forty km speed limit, Iman drove down Nnamdi Azikiwe Expressway till it became Shehu Yar’Adua Way. Nervous, Iman pulled the dead skin from her chapped lips with her teeth. As the sun made its steady ascent, her lips were bleeding. She could still feel the pressure of Kevin’s teeth on her shoulder. The horrifying memory made Iman shudder, and her right foot hit the accelerator harder than she planned. Struggling to rein in her emotions, Iman slowed and veered right, parking at the side of the expressway. She groaned and slammed her head against the steering wheel. If she couldn’t find a dead body, there was no way she would return home. Through the tears in her eyes as she lifted her head, Iman made out a dark form sprawled to the left of the road in front of where she had parked. The tempo of her heartbeat increased. Iman moved forward until she was close enough to confirm that the dark form was indeed a dead body; a man by the looks of it. Iman could see a blue shirt that was hoisted up, exposing the belt, tight around a trim waist and brown slacks. She had prepared her car, lining the back seats with sheets of newspaper, to protect them from gore. She had laid out a blanket on the floor of the car: she would use it to cover the body. As she stepped out of the driver’s seat, Iman looked nervously around her. There was no other car around—no one in sight—but Iman was sure that several pairs of eyes were on her. Just in case, she had her story straight. “I am a good Samaritan,” Iman would say. “I’m just taking him to the hospital . . .” If anyone catches you, you’re dead, a cold voice warned Iman. As soon as it was on her back seat, Iman felt relieved. Shifting gear to Drive, Iman sped off. As she drove, she couldn’t keep her eyes off the rear-view mirror. “We’re not going to ask any questions,” she whispered to herself like the crazy woman she had now become. “Whether he was hit by a drunk driver, whether . . .” It took a while for her to hear the murmuring. This time, she moved the mirror and saw that the dead body in her back seat was moving. “Wayo Allah na!” she screamed and hit the brake forcefully. The body rolled over and bumped against the back of her front seat. In the driver’s seat, Iman quivered. She didn’t dare look behind her. She needed this to end. “Please help . . .” His voice was faint, but it was there. Outside the car, the sky was no longer dark. Iman reached for her shoulder and traced the imprint of Kevin’s teeth. She closed her eyes and could almost hear the gnawing. Both Mummy’s advice and Auntie Clara’s admonitions rang in her ears. Iman’s breathing stabilised. “It’s alright,” she said out loud. She even glanced over her wounded shoulder to the backseat. “I’m taking you to the hospital.” The roads were busier by the time Iman reached the gate of the bungalow Auntie Clara had gifted them on their wedding day. Iman got out of the car to push open the black iron gate and drove in. She parked at the back and dragged the body to the kitchen. She had barely closed the door when she heard Kevin moving behind her. “Kevin,” Iman huffed, her hands smarting. “Come and help me . . . he’s for you.” Kevin appeared at the kitchen door. His teeth sank into flesh the moment an exhausted Iman dropped the body to the kitchen floor. A harsh scream rang through the house as Kevin bit and tore. Iman struggled to her feet. She had to stop the screaming or the neighbours would hear. She grabbed a knife from the drawer and, without thinking twice, jabbed it into the man’s throat. Spurting blood hit her in the face; she would never know whether it was due to her or Kevin’s attack. This was what her husband had become. Iman’s head swam as wave after wave of nausea hit her. Yet she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the scene before her. She held the nausea in, unsure whether she was as disgusted with Kevin as she was with herself. He didn’t even let her cook it first.

(2) Don’t expose your husband’s weaknesses to your family and friends. It will bounce back at you. “Auntie Clara, Kevin is cheating on me.” “And you’re sounding so calm?” The truth was that Iman had already gone through half of the “13 Stages of Finding Out If Your Husband Is Having an Affair” as suggested in her favourite lifestyle magazine. Past crying and self-loathing, Iman was now very angry. “I already cried when I told Mummy,” Iman replied. “And what did she . . .” The poor data reception in the house cut Auntie Clara’s sentence. Iman held her Samsung phone against her ear and walked to the living room window where reception would be better. “I didn’t hear you, ma.” “I said, what did she tell you.” Auntie Clara’s voice was impatient. She already knew how Mummy was. Iman sighed, “. . . that it’s in a man’s nature and that I should bear . . .” Auntie Clara didn’t let Iman finish talking. “Both Kate and that boy are unfortunate beings! And you, you’re the biggest idiot of all. I know you’re not calling me because you want to end that useless marriage.” Auntie Clara was right. Iman absorbed her words because they were true. Best friends with her mother since their days in university, Auntie Clara had always been a second mum to Iman. Where Kate was yielding and conforming, Auntie Clara spared no words. It was often a puzzle that both women were friends. “I don’t want to be a divorced woman,” Iman tried to explain. She hated that word “divorce” and all things attached to it. Having been married for barely two years, that would never be her portion. Auntie Clara kissed her teeth, drawing out a long hiss. Iman persevered, “I just want him to be faithful. I want him to love me, only me, forever.” There was a pause on the other side. Iman had expected questions; maybe even a stern word or two, but this silence dragged on till it started to frustrate her. Surely, Auntie Clara understood what she was talking about. She must know what lay veiled in Iman’s words. It was something they knew but never spoke of: never cross Auntie Clara, or you would suffer illnesses that modern science couldn’t explain. Iman still remembered that one time a family came to beg Auntie Clara for mercy because she had supposedly got her witch doctor to put a curse on their relative. When Auntie Clara finally replied, her voice was low: “Are you sure about what you’re asking?” She had read through the lines and didn’t need any explanation. “Yes, ma.” Iman breathed a sigh of relief.

• • • •

It was not exactly sleep paralysis, but sometimes Iman would be acutely aware that she was dreaming even while she slept. When she was in this state, she would be unable to move. Very rarely, Iman would feel something touch her or breathe down her neck. Tuesday morning, she felt a dull yet sharp pain on her waist. When she finally managed to open her eyes, she found Kevin trying to eat her. Iman bolted out of bed and out of the room, slamming the door shut behind her. Her heart was trying to beat its way out of her chest. Standing in the dark hallway, Iman leaned against the door she had just shut behind her. Kevin was not running after her. Tentatively, and with her head pounding, Iman opened the door. Kevin lay on his stomach on the bed, the sheets peeled away to reveal the back, broad shoulders and tapered waist that Iman knew intimately. Was I dreaming? Iman tiptoed back into the room towards the bedside table where her phone had spent the night charging. Did he look any different today? Why would he turn on me? This had happened before; twice now since that day. Iman grabbed her phone and left the room. She hit speed dial before she closed the door shut. Auntie Clara picked on the first ring. “Didn’t I tell you I’ll be in Dubai?” Her voice was loud enough to let Iman know she was displeased. “Call me on Wozzup!” She had hung up before Iman even had the chance to say hello. She had forgotten Auntie Clara was travelling. Iman made her way out of the house and did as instructed. “Hello ma.” This time Auntie Clara gave her the chance to speak. “How are you?” Iman asked not because she cared, but because it was Auntie Clara. “I am fine, my dear.” Auntie Clara replied. “How are you? How is Kevin?” “I’m okay.” Outside the bungalow, Iman paced. “. . . but I’m not sure about Kevin. He tried to eat me this morning again. It’s like he’s a zombie.” And just like that, bad-tempered Auntie Clara returned: “Will you shut up, mahaukaciya!” she huffed all the way from Dubai. “I have warned you never to use that word: your husband is not some caricature from an American film.” “But . . .” Iman tried to talk, but Auntie Clara wasn’t letting up. “Have you been following the rules?” Auntie Clara demanded. “Remember when we went to visit Prof, he outlined what you needed to do. You wanted your husband attached to you. There you have it.” Auntie Clara ranted on. “I personally don’t know why you insisted on marrying the useless man. Do you remember how the bastard couldn’t kneel down to greet me when you introduced me? But he knelt for Kate, as if you didn’t spend your formative years with me. Am I less of a mother because I didn’t give birth to you? Now you’ve secured him, you had better train him well . . .” Iman blocked Auntie Clara’s words, holding her phone away from her ear. She tried to remember the rules the so-called Prof had advised she follow, all to ensure that Kevin was wrapped around her as tightly as one would secure the knots of a wrapper to their waist. Something must have gone wrong somewhere, but Iman didn’t know what. When she retraced her steps to the bedroom, Kevin was awake. He was sitting on the bed; his hands were propped on his knees and he was holding his head. Kevin looked up when she walked in. He was distraught as he pulled Iman close and lifted the tank top she wore, revealing Iman’s slightly rounded tummy and the imprint of his teeth on her waist. Iman bit sharply on her bottom lip as Kevin’s alarmed eyes caught hers. He remembers. “Baby, what is happening to me?” Kevin asked. She wasn’t going to answer. Instead Iman pulled him into a hug. This was her responsibility.

(14) Don’t forget to check that your husband looks smart. Why wouldn’t Auntie Clara just agree, that Kevin was no longer a human being? That the dark skin she loved so much looked green. When hair won’t stay on a head, Going bald may prevent the stares. Even at that, people didn’t seem to notice, that being married to a monster was hopeless. They would surely blame the wife, So Iman bought makeup: some foundation and some powder. Let people not talk about her life, And say that she wasn’t taking care of her husband.

(19) Never be too busy for him. Kevin used to call around eleven a.m. to remind Iman to bring lunch for him. Like clockwork every weekday, Iman’s phone would play Runtown’s latest song, “Mad Over You.” “Hey baby, lunch in an hour?” She could hear his smile through the device when she accepted the call. “Fried rice and peppered chicken coming up,” she would reply. This was a habit that remained even when he stopped calling. Iman knew exactly when she needed to start heading towards the two-room office Kevin had rented for his startup in one of the many shopping centres that littered Abuja. That Thursday, Iman walked into his office in Wuye and was greeted by his skinny secretary. Florence pulled her aside before Iman reached the door to her husband’s office. “Excuse me, aunty.” Immediately, Iman’s head spun. Not only did she detest being called “aunty,” but she was sure that Florence was about to quit. Iman placed the food container on the front desk, eyeing it to ensure that none of its contents had spilled. Florence pulled her outside before she spoke. “Aunty Iman, how are you? How is everything?” She leaned against the dusty balcony railing while Iman started sweating in the unbearable heat. “Oh, everything is fine,” Iman replied hastily. Realising Florence was just as nervous as her, Iman decided not to beat around the bush, “What’s going on?” “Madam, I’m worried because . . .” Florence looked over her shoulder towards the open front door of the office that showed Kevin’s closed door. Shit! She’s found out. Iman bit her bottom lip hard. It was a testament to how times had changed that dark thoughts immediately crossed her mind. Would I have to kill Florence too? “. . .Oga keeps looking at me as if there is something wrong with me.” Florence’s words rippled through Iman’s thoughts. “What do you mean?” Florence rushed to explain, as though to divert the obvious route the conversation was heading. “No, I mean, yes . . . you know, I actually feel scared sometimes. Like . . . like he wants to eat me . . .” At that, Iman actually smiled. It was silly of her to think that history was repeating itself. “What? Oh. Why on earth would he want to eat a human being? Don’t worry about it.” She laughed as if that hadn’t become routine over the past month. Florence joined her laugh. “I know that doesn’t make any sense. He just seems a bit different than usual but . . .” “Don’t worry,” Iman repeated. “I assure you, he’s fine.” She tossed those last words over her shoulder as she walked through the doors into Kevin’s office. “Hey.” Kevin started rising once she entered. In reply, Iman threw the food container at him. It hit his chest and landed on the floor with a thud. There was a splash of red on the pink shirt that covered Kevin’s chest where there hadn’t been any before. “I have warned you to keep yourself in control.” Iman’s whisper was harsh. “Do you want people to know?” For the life of her, she didn’t understand how people didn’t already know. Kevin was gaunter than before, despite the fact he could eat a human body in three days. “You shouldn’t any attract attention,” she warned him. “Just focus on work, and when you’re done, come home to me.” The silence in the room stretched until Kevin replied, “Okay, it’s not a problem.” The next day, Iman had Kevin give Florence a severance letter which Iman had spent the night typing.

(10) Sex is very important to men. No man can withstand sex starvation for too long. She couldn’t sleep in the same room with him anymore. The last time, Kevin had bit her hard enough to draw blood. Now her doctor was convinced Iman was a victim of domestic violence. The truth was much worse. Earlier that day, Auntie Clara and Mummy came to visit. Kevin acted normally, even engaging Mummy in conversation when Iman pulled Auntie Clara into the kitchen. “You seem to have things under control,” Auntie Clara stated. Iman showed her the latest bite mark on her thigh. “Jesus!” Auntie Clara exclaimed. “I told you something was wrong,” Iman said through gritted teeth. Auntie Clara shifted her shoulders and shook her head. “It’s because you haven’t been following the rules,” she insisted. “When last did you have sex?” “I can’t have sex with a zombie,” Iman protested. “He is not a zombie!” Auntie Clara raised a finger in warning. “That night, didn’t Prof cut him with a knife? Kevin looked so still.” Iman wrapped her arms around her middle. “We left him there for three days.” “Listen to me, Iman.” Auntie Clara reached for her shoulders. “You should follow the rules. If not, things will end badly. Have sex with him. I have something for you. Wait here.” Iman leaned against the kitchen counter. It was supposed to be easy: give her a husband she could control. That was the only way to stop him cheating. Iman didn’t ask for him to become a flesh-eating monster who only sometimes listened to what she said. He was like a disobedient dog. When Auntie Clara returned to the kitchen, she was holding a tiny bottle about the length of her thumb. Within was a substance that looked black and oily. “You should see Kevin talking normally with Kate,” Auntie Clara said. “Obviously, you’re doing something right.” Iman hadn’t yet told her about the changes to Kevin’s diet. On this kitchen floor, they had both killed an innocent man. “See this oil.” Auntie Clara held it up. “Just dip your finger in it and insert it into your vagina. It’s like magic, it’ll make you wet and aroused.” Auntie Clara pushed the bottle into Iman’s hands. “I’m sure the zombie nonsense will stop once you have sex with him.” • • • •

Years ago, Iman had had a falling out with a former colleague because, in a casual conversation, Iman had mentioned sex. This was a faux pas, because her colleague’s boyfriend was in the room. “Please o,” the colleague exclaimed while glaring at Iman: “I’m a virgin.” How was Iman to know that her colleague’s boyfriend was being fed lies? Iman didn’t ever consider that she would become that woman until she met Kevin. Kevin liked good, modest, cultured girls. Iman had changed so much for him; twisted her personality out of shape. Now that Kevin was supposed to be under her control, why couldn’t he change for the better? Iman placed a bit of the oil into her vagina. She was to wait for thirty minutes, so she sat down on the bed. She had somehow fallen asleep, but was soon awakened from dreams in which soft lips traced had her nipples and firm hands had rubbed her clitoris. Hazy with lust, she left the master bedroom and headed towards the guest room where Kevin was locked in. Opening the door revealed a sleeping Kevin, just as she had ordered him to. Iman approached the bed. Just as she’d noticed since the juju spell, Kevin was erect. Rigor mortis. The term came unbidden to Iman’s mind. But according to Auntie Clara, he wasn’t dead, so what she was about to do wasn’t abnormal. Iman reached down between her thighs to draw out her wetness, and then she straddled Kevin. As she rode him, Iman tried not to focus on how good this felt. It was simply what was necessary to keep Kevin under her control. Yet Kevin felt different, and his hardness just wouldn’t let up. For the first time, Iman felt an orgasm that came from deep within her. Even when she climbed off of him, Kevin was still hard. Although she still tingled from the aftermath of her pleasure, caution stopped Iman from sleeping beside Kevin. Her step was lighter as she locked the door to the guest room again and headed back to the master bedroom. Iman headed to the bathroom first to clean herself up. She shouted and fell to the floor when the first wad of toilet paper carefully dragged between her thighs showed black stains.

(28) Fruit of the womb is a blessing from Heaven, love your children. Wondering how it happened was rhetorical. He was not a zombie after all. According to Auntie Clara, Kevin should be healthy too. Iman no longer woke up to him trying to eat her and—with Iman looking over his shoulder—he performed his duties well at work and with outside company, although his nefarious dietary habits remained. A smile graced Iman’s face, but it lacked any mirth. A visit to her doctor had assured her that everything was well: the baby was moving normally and was healthy. A grim image flashed through Iman’s mind: her baby crawling among the bones she had buried in their backyard.

©2019 by Rafeeat Aliyu.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Rafeeat Aliyu is a horror and speculative fiction writer based in Nigeria. Her short stories have been published in Expound Magazine, Omenana, Queer Africa 2 and the AfroSF Anthology of African Science Fiction. Rafeeat is a Clarion West Graduate (2018). You can learn more about her on her website rafeeataliyu.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Glottal Stop Nick Mamatas | 3386 words

Dating cis was rough, no doubt. For any woman, but especially for Beatriz Almonte, a living meme who had several years ago made a mistake and gained the attention of a secret bulletin board full of trolls for whom harassing her was a vocation not dissimilar from the priesthood. She had no more free background checks left on Spinstr, but was bored and horny enough to do without just this once and press *sm00ch* on some guy’s face. Another mistake. Jerome seemed fine—in shape, no beard, there was a photo of him at an anti-war demo on his Slambook, no sign of a frogface or crusader sword emojis on Mirmir, and no videogame talk on any of his social media. Jerome’s hashtags were all in order. Beatriz agreed to meet for a late lunch eaten al fresco so she could get away with wearing sunglasses, in public but at a corner table so that she’d have a legal expectation of privacy under California Penal Code § 632, and in a neighborhood in the city adjacent to her own. She hired a neighbor to drive her to the Korean tapas place so as to keep from exposing her address or route to the Travyl ride-share system. And she came otherwise prepared, with everything from condoms to weapons. The first few minutes went well, though Jerome was two inches shorter than advertised. Beatriz had to admit that she was fifteen pounds heavier than advertised, but she wore make-up, even tricky eyeliner wing tips, for him. Her necklace, with the particular charm, that was for herself. Sneakers instead of nicer shoes too. If he balked at the makeup, he was a troll. If he took it as too strong a signal for sexual availability, he was a pickup artist in training. But he passed that test, with a silent appreciative smile. Pleasantries, a semi-clever remark about the menu, kindness toward the waitress. Then came the water, the drinks, the appetizers. The second hand of the clock tied to a rhetorical bomb clicked over. Jerome said, “So, do you really not eat ‘white food’? Because your rice is white, isn’t it?” She noticed that his smartphone was on the table, screen down. Beatriz’s mistake: she had called Taco Bell “white food” on what was supposed to be a fun little attempt at virality. She suggested that only basement-dwelling nerds would consider Taco Bell “going out for Mexican,” and if a taco from there cost the same amount as a candy bar, what kind of ingredients could possibly be in it? Wet dog food, she’d guessed on Twitter. Beatriz was castigated as a snob and an illegal immigrant, an uptight rich bitch and a greedy whore, and of course, she was also the Real Racist. Once targeted, her entire social media profile was combed over for various other crimes—drunken selfies, a bad breakup that was surely her fault, having a father from the Dominican Republic and a maternal grandmother who was Chinese, a job she quit by simply not showing up anymore in tenth grade. (“How many fish starved to death because you decided you were too good for PetVille, Queen Bea? You’re fucking next.”) That she got a mere BA in Chemistry and not a BS—”You can fuck your way to a BA” was the common Internet wisdom. One time she held a fund-raiser on Slambook for Planned Parenthood and collected forty dollars. Baby-Killer Beatriz needed to be murdered, but only after being raped by the dogs she had so callously failed. That was three years ago. Now, across the table from her, Jerome’s smile was a familiar one. The fishhook grin. “I’m kidding,” he said. “I’m joking.” They were always joking. “I just did a search on you, you know. Didn’t you investigate me? I even gave you my last name. Want to see my I.D.?” “This is not going to be a productive date, Jerome,” said Beatriz. It wasn’t quite time to grab her purse and go, though. Was he going to video her ass when she got up, were there others nearby, or was he really just making the worst joke imaginable. “Did I make your pussy dry, Bea? Being a straight man who thinks he has a sense of humor and all?” he asked. A reference to another ancient tweet she had once made. Now it was time to go. “It was never wet for you.” A debate would be no more productive than the date, but the response shut Jerome up for a second and gave Beatriz a chance to glance around. There were others. The guys didn’t even try to hide. It wasn’t a matter of bad hats and worse beards, but the staring and sniggering from the other seats and on the corner of the block, the open-mouthed peering into their phones, phones aimed at Beatriz. Whoever got footage of her crying, or upset, or shouting, won. It was a clear escalation—stills of her car in her mother’s driveway, of their own reflections in the wire mesh glass of the entrance door to her apartment building were no longer enough. They needed her breaking down, in public, daring to go out and dress up a bit. Cockhungry slut TRIGGERED on first and last date the SpinVid would be titled, she knew it. The waitress caught a glimpse of Beatriz’s expression through the great glass windows that separated the al fresco seating from the restaurant proper, and sneered. Beatriz was on her own. “Clutching your pearls?” Jerome asked. He snatched up his phone and aimed it at her. She wasn’t. Beatriz popped open the fake pearl, wiped the mineral oil from the swiftly oxidizing clump of sodium it contained, and flicked the metal with her thumb into Jerome’s water glass. It took a second. She threw herself backward, out of her chair and over the low fence behind her, the force of the explosion sailing over her head. Amidst the shrieking and smoke, she ran, sweater in one garbage can, overshirt in another, onto a bus headed in a random direction, the fare paid in cash. From her phone though, there was no escape. She let it buzz with notifications till dark, when the bus had completed its circuit of the city in which she lived, and her battery ran down. Emergency cash in her sneakers got her a cab ride home. Assault with a deadly weapon. Attempted murder. Attempted murder in the first degree. Capital murder, except that Jerome was unharmed, save his eyebrows. The first three SpinVid videos of men clumsily shaving their eyebrows in idiot solidarity had already racked up six- figure views. Why did she do it? Three long years had taught Beatriz that as far as society was concerned, she was outlaw. In the medieval sense—beyond the protection of the law. Men were allowed to crack her passwords and drain her bank accounts, stick her face on the lone female body in gang bang porn, find the care home in which her grandmother lived and leave messages for her with the front desk about “the cunt of your cunt of your cunt,” and the police could only shrug. There we no rules, it turned out. Plenty of force and authority, though, for women like her. Chemicals reacted explosively in the real world, and it was Beatriz who had made a point of bringing sodium to her date in the first place. Had Jerome not accepted a glass of still water, she would have subtly nudged her own glass toward him during the date’s opening patter. Now the police would surely be coming for her. For a moment, Beatriz felt sweet relief. No cell phones in prison. Most women were imprisoned, thanks to having made the fatal error of cooperating with men, so she’d be safe. She wouldn’t miss men either, and she spoke passable Spanish. Maybe there would be some trans women there she could get close to. Already she was casting herself in a television show. By the time she got out of “the joint”—she was thinking in TV clichés from her own childhood now!—all the social media platforms would be obsolete and abandoned, a graveyard of controversies as accessible as floppy disks. But her jade succulents, her African violets, her tradescantia. Beatriz’s apartment was full of life, of plant-scented air. An Edenic bubble. No list of instructions she could write would be specific yet flexible enough to keep the plants alive while she was away, even if she could trust her sister not to trash them all. But her job at the Verizon store, which wasn’t so bad. Her boss was a former college wrestler, and marched one of her stalkers out onto the sidewalk and slammed him so hard, the kid’s coccyx disintegrated. Nobody arrested him—not the stalker, not her boss. Men can do what they want. But those bullet-rain days when she couldn’t walk down the street with her phone in her hand, Beatriz actually felt free. She loved the seasons: chill and flurries on dark afternoons, endless summer twilights, red carpets of leaves. She cried. The police were coming. There were no sirens in the air, no red and white lights flooding the streets beyond her drawn blinds, but the police were coming. Anyone Beatriz could reach out to would be on the other end of a string stretched taut between an infinite number of tin soup cans. She didn’t have a lawyer, nor really any idea how to contact one who specialized in criminal or Internet law. She’d always depended on search engines and the hive mind of her social media reach. Men were waiting for her to call for help, to even send an e-mail. They’d found her despite her precautions; she had to assume that everything she might do or even look for could appear on the front page of the New York Times the next morning. It would certainly be her, on the news aggregators, face twisted and eyes wild, with cops, male cops, twisting her arms behind her back. Beatriz froze, seeing herself through a glass darkly. She couldn’t bring herself to wake up her desktop. The police were coming. She tossed her phone over her shoulder, not caring about what it broke when it skittered across her kitchen island and brought something with it to the floor. Beatriz was in the big desktop screen, like she lived online. Once upon a time, the Internet was an escape from the too-small apartment in the dicey part of town in which she lived with her noisy family. Beatriz could be a superhero, a sex doll, an expert on everything from telenovelas to Presidential politics, a helpful friend with a few extra bucks, a basket case eager to suck up the unconditional good wishes only strangers from afar could offer. There would be people on her side. “That Bea, she’s a real firecracker.” A few guys might even hesitate next time they preyed upon a woman for the lulz. The police were coming. She could upload some basic information about where to procure sodium metal, but that would make trouble for her notional lawyer, and for any future parole hearing. Conspiracy. Feminazi terror squads. M-13 and Antifa working together to #killallmen. The police were coming. She wished she had a police scanner app on her phone, but she didn’t dare use her phone. There wasn’t going to be any online access in prison—she didn’t think so, anyway. The police were coming. There was probably one desktop in a heavily guarded library, and it was a privilege easily rescinded. To her Internet friends who didn’t know her true name, it would be as though she had died. Beatriz’s e-mails would pile up unread. (Well, that happened often already . . .) Finally, she could sit before a sleeping computer no more. In the bathroom, to wash her face. The police were coming. At least she could look presentable for the next round of humiliating memes. one sjw down at the top of the news photo of the police dragging her away, thirty million to go under it. Her makeup was running. Those wings were a pain in the ass to do. She’d tried three times, blinking away tears and cursing in two languages, before getting it right. Now they were ruined too. She reached for the empty soap dish where she usually kept her phone when in the bathroom, but of course it wasn’t there. A selfie to be sent out just as the fateful knock sounded at the door. There was something about the black tears streaking her cheeks that said it all, and Beatriz wanted to capture it. That’s how it always seems to end for women—men made you cry, and ruined even the things you did for them. A smudge of black eyeliner welled up under her eye. It looked like a lot of things. A bit like a tear, of course. But upside down. An anti-tear. But upside down. A tear sneaking back into the duct. No more crying, not ever. Like a tattoo of the same—what so many people come out of prison, or that life, with. Someone dead. Someone raped. Someone killed by one’s own hand. It was other things too, that mark on Beatriz’s cheek. An upturned fist. The black yin fish of the taijitu, that dynamic grand ultimate her grandmother drew for her once, but never fully explained. The feminine side, without the white dot of the masculine yang to stain it. “I don’t understand,” young Beatriz had said, “why are girls black and boys white?” Her grandmother had no answer; she only said, “Maybe you’ll understand one day.” No white, no men. Sounded good to Beatriz. Today was the day she did understand. And it looked almost like an apostrophe. An elision, a symbol of absence. The police were coming. She was going to be absent soon enough—her chairs unfilled, her clothes hanging limp and unworn for years. Fill-in-the-blank.

But also a symbol of possession. She hadn’t seen the mark when looking at her reflection in the sleeping monitor of her desktop, but now she saw it clearly, for the first time. Beatriz owned herself. She owned her face. She owned her story. She owned her life. She owned her mind. She owned her soul. It was also something else; not quite a question mark, but some kind of mark; she didn’t remember what. Now the siren-sound reached her ears. Now the red and white lights spilled in through the blinds as she walked through her dim living room. The police were coming. It was hard to think. She wouldn’t have much time, but she didn’t need hardly any time at all to take one last selfie. The men were lurking. She’d been marked by them, turned into a living meme. Now a meme lived on her. She didn’t bother with filters or hashtags, but went to her desktop, woke it up, pulled the tape from her webcam lens, and snapped a picture. She had a program that would upload the picture simultaneously to every still-extant platform on which she ever had a presence—from Palz.com through Diaryville and all the way up to S* and poor abandoned Y’ello? Beatriz’s hands were on the keyboard, ready to write a brief message to go along with the image. The police were coming. Something that would sear the image into the minds of millions. She wouldn’t have time to articulate the polysemy, and that would ruin the image anyway. Listing meanings meant defining limits. Something for women, for people like herself, the abused and oppressed, to wave around as obnoxiously as any meme. But she also couldn’t just depend on an appeal to her friends and allies to spread the meme without some collective understanding of what it could mean. In a flash, I regret nothing! entered her head. Not her head, no. Wrong, just the muscles in her fingers. I regret nothing! was already a joke, and a reference to itself. Someone else’s imagination had been encoded in Beatriz’s nervous system. The anti-tear needed its own meaning, one that would decolonize minds, a rallying cry and a warning to others. She wanted men to see it and feel their throats tighten, their hearts twitch, the way they made her feel two dozen times a day. The mark would never ever be for them, and always ever against them. And besides, Beatriz did have regrets. Why did she even decide to date cis again? That was another idea that belonged to someone else, to practically everyone else. She could have just stayed home, or let her mother set her up with some guy from the old country who was twice her age. What she didn’t regret, though, was that little sodium metal bomb. She’d been wanting to do something like that since high school, when her chem teacher dropped a bit of sodium in a beaker full of water to wake the class up. Beatriz stayed woke. The police were here. There was a first knock on the door, one harsh enough to make it clear that it would be the only knock. Beatriz adjusted her monitor so that the front door to her small apartment was visible in the background, then typed something, and then gripped her mouse, ready to record. The police were here. There was another knock, but it was made by no man’s fist. The door shuddered in its frame. Beatriz did have another sodium pearl, and a water can for her plants by the entrance. If her aim were true, she could toss it over her shoulder, gain a measure of immortality after it blew up in a cop’s face. But then the Internet would miss the mark on her cheek. The police were here. Time slowed down. Beatriz leaned in close, clicked record. Her face filled the screen, obscuring the ruckus behind her. The police were all men, of course. Of course, but perhaps that gave Beatriz an extra few seconds. The video stream was attracting an audience—she recognized the handles of some of her perennial abusers, but they were being swamped out by the names of allies, of strangers. She was going viral. Beatriz had only a moment to say something as catchy as Time’s Up!, as exciting as Just Do It!, as stirring as You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chains!, or even as inexplicable as Who Is John Galt?—something that would lend voice to the gleaming black anti-tear on her cheek, and all that it meant to her. Commenters were talking about it, asking what it meant. She needed to explain, to make the meme explode, like 2Na+2H2O→2NaOH+H2. The police were on her. They pushed her face against her monitor as they bent her arms back, which only helped with her close-up. What could she say? This could happen to you! True, but nobody would believe it. They pulled her off her chair. She was pleased that her remnant eyeliner had smudged the small lens built into her monitor—the black swirl was huge now, filling half the screen. You’re next! Maybe, but too much like an empty threat. Right before she hit the carpet, tits and chin first. Finally. “I. “Am. “—!” A sound like no sound. The webcam cut out as she fell off the screen. The police officer pinning her spine to the ground with his knee gasped, and only for a moment eased his grip.

©2018 by Nick Mamatas. Originally published in The People’s Republic of Everything. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including I Am Providence and Sabbath. His short fiction has appeared on Tor.com, Weird Tales, Best American Mystery Stories, and many other venues—much of it was recently collected in The People’s Republic of Everything. Nick is also an anthologist; his titles include the Bram Stoker Award winner Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow) and the hybrid flash fiction/cocktail recipe book Mixed Up (with Molly Tanzer). BOOK EXCERPTS EXCERPT: Collision: Stories (Meerkat Press) J.S. Breukelaar | 5700 words

“J.S. is leaving her footprints on a path blazed by luminaries such as M.R. James, Robert Aickman, Tanith Lee, Kelly Link, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Jeff VanderMeer, Gustave Flaubert, Edgar Allan Poe, Daphne DuMaurier, Leonora Carrington and Charlotte Brontë, to name but a few.” -Angela Slatter, Award-winning author of Sourdough and Other Stories, Vigil, and Corpselight A collection of twelve of J.S. Breukelaar’s darkest, finest stories with four new works, including the uncanny new novella “Ripples on a Blank Shore.” Introduction by award-winning author Angela Slatter. Relish the gothic strangeness of “Union Falls,” the alien horror of “Rogues Bay 3013,” the heartbreaking dystopia of “Glow,” the weird mythos of “Ava Rune,” and others. This collection from the author of American Monster and the internationally acclaimed and Aurealis Award finalist, Aletheia: A Supernatural Thriller, announces a new and powerful voice in fantastical fiction. Coming February 19, 2019 from Meerkat Press.

Excerpt from “Like Ripples on a Blank Shore”

The Host went down in an eruption of crimson and bone, bringing commuter traffic to a standstill. Car windows unwound as drivers scanned for the shooter. Reports would later confirm that a pedestrian lost her footing on the splashed goo of the Host’s brain matter and broke her hip in two places. The passing woman turned out to be the shooter’s aunt. There was no doubt about it. Hosts were bad news. That was the beginning. No one in Deerport, or anywhere, knew what drew the Hosts in such sudden numbers to some towns and not others. Experts attempted to pinpoint a cause, or reason, or remedy—but no one could agree on even what they were, let alone why. Arriving in twos and bad-news threes at the Greyhound Station, into Deerport they came over those dark, wet weeks. Alighting uncertainly from the bus or the backseats of Uber rides, they tracked slush down the aisles of the Safeway and slowed traffic and filled the darkness of the purple- curtained multiplex theaters with their relentless, restless rustle. And there were more on the way, according to Professor Maya Grayson at Sullivan College, an expert in medieval folklore and on all things Hostish. When asked by a reporter, “Why so many Hosts pouring into Deerport?” Grayson quickly answered by referring to last year’s Tower 9 Incident in New York City, where an apartment building in the Upper West Side attracted Hosts (a shortened version of the singular hostis, from the Latin word for enemy, stranger, or guest) by the hundreds. Residents reported seeing them slumped on the fire escape and in the basement laundry room, leaving a shimmer of dark ooze along the walls where they edged like spiders. Riding up and down the outside of the building on the joists, laughing—if that clotted sigh could be called a laugh—as the wind peeled off their loose flesh. “I can understand glass towers in Manhattan, but why Deerport?” the radio caller had asked Professor Grayson. But no one, not even Grayson, could say why they came to a certain place, or for whom—if they targeted certain individuals or towns. Nobody knew. At six p.m. on a Monday evening, the Upper Deerport Terminus was thronged with Hosts and nons. Celia, at five feet eight, scanned over the sea of heads for Terminal 10, where her bus was already almost full and ready to depart. She’d never make it through the crowds in time. She would be lucky to make the next one. A male Host with a seamed face jostled her elbow. From one swollen eyelid, slid a single tear, tensely oblong. Celia watched the tear trickle down the filthy crease that bisected his cheek, over his jaw and back into a bloodless slit at his neck, and decided she would get an Uber. But getting out was easier said than done —the Terminus was packed. Gooseflesh rode the back of her neck—there was something wanting about their presence, as if they knew her even if she didn’t know them. That was the problem with these so-called infestations—random and inexplicable as experts insisted that they were. It was as if the Hosts knew where they were going and what they were looking for. Or who. Impossible, according to the experts, unless volition could be attributed to Nature itself. Panic squeezed Celia’s temples as her vision tunneled, looking for the door. She tried to pivot on her heel. She jostled shoulders and briefcases— impossible to tell which line was moving off the buses and which was moving on. It all seemed the same line to her. The terminal grew steamy and rank with human body odor and a smell like clogged leaves pulled from roof guttering. She had been planning to go for a run when she got home this evening, but all she could think about now was pouring a big glass of wine and going to bed. It was too wet to run anyway. She managed to get herself turned halfway around and edge sideways through the crowd and out, finally, through the big glass terminal doors and onto the street. Gasping in the sudden cold, she fumbled with shaking hands for her phone and pulled up Max’s number. Can you pick me up? She texted. The buses are crazy. Max: Because of the Hosts. Media’s all over it. Max usually took his bike to work. But today he had the use of a little silver Ford compact that belonged to his sister Clare—who had once been his brother, Clay. Max couldn’t pick Celia up, he reminded her, because he was driving to Sullivan to pick up Professor Grayson—who was also his grandmother—for a family reunion here in Deerport to celebrate Clare’s transition. Celia knew that Maya Grayson could drive herself, but this was probably the old lady’s way of getting some alone time with her favorite grandson. Her only grandson. Celia and Max had only been dating five months, not long enough for her to have met all his family. Recently he had taken her to one of his grandmother’s lectures at the college, titled: “To Be but Not to Be: Aristotle and the Hostis Dilemma.” Max introduced them at the reception. Professor Grayson had fixed her eyes, magnified behind batwing glasses, on Celia and pronounced: “You’re the one from that ghastly California wedding last year? How many dead?” Max had tried to change the subject with some awkward question about the Host infestation, but Grayson appeared not to notice. “I recognize you from the papers. You were engaged to that tycoon, the robotics man . . .” But Max had already begun to drag Celia away.

• • • •

Celia had always thought of herself as someone who needed to be taken care of. She watched the ellipses slide across the gray bubble on the screen. The reunion on Friday was taking all of Max’s time—she’d hardly seen him over the weekend because he was busy getting work done so he could clear his schedule. Is Clare there yet? Celia texted. Max texted back that he wasn’t collecting her up until tomorrow and what about if they all meet then for lunch? Darkness was falling fast and she could smell a fresh snowfall. It annoyed her that Max couldn’t pick her up. She felt unnerved by the swarms (if that was the right word) of Hosts, who looked almost like regular humans but—even after sixteen years of research—defied most people’s idea of what that was. They were not (theoretically) dangerous in themselves, but their eyes had a strange way of reddening after dark, like trashcan fires. Those dirty eyes followed her out of the bus terminal, and ragged formations of Hosts were already outside, lifting their noses to sniff the cold, sticky night. A male came toward Celia annunciating wildly and in an advanced state of decomposition, that clear ichor gushing from his bottom lip and from eye sockets filled with what looked like molten lava. She quickly called an Uber. It was a first-degree felony to murder a Host, and so-called accidental killings—usually vehicular—could get complicated fast, depending on the circumstances. Other than that, no one knew how they died, if at all, or if they were born in any natural sense of the word. In the rare autopsies performed on them, the frontal lobe—responsible for volition and decision-making—presented free of gyri and sulci, and looked more like a bowl of creamy oatmeal than a rosy red human brain. When the Uber pulled up, there was a Host already in the back seat. Celia felt ashamed for hesitating, the driver watching her disapprovingly —or apologetically—in the side mirror, she wasn’t sure. The people of Upper Deerport prided themselves on their inclusivity, and refusing to get into a shared ride with anyone, Host or non, was out of the question. She tried not to stare at the fluid flowing from the Host’s sensible shoes onto the rubber mat. The car left the city lights and was soon cruising through night-swirling snow, the driver separated from them by a wall of air freshener and talk radio. A farmer from Lower Deerport called in, complaining that the Hosts teeming into the city would soon outnumber the . . . but whatever the caller was about to say got lost in static as the driver discretely changed stations. He and Celia exchanged tight smiles in the rearview. The Host then said something that Celia didn’t understand, and repeated it in a tone of barely suppressed hysteria that was both human and not at the same time. Both sentient and insensible, as Professor Grayson said at her lecture, reminding the audience that according to Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction, something can’t be both human (or anything) and not, at least not at the same time. So what were they? Maybe it was the wrong question, and that bothered Celia. The Host’s glottal filled the car, frustratingly just at the edge of comprehension. What was she saying? Take me home? Kill me? Celia tried to block it out at the same time as she strained to understand—there was something accusatory about the reverberant moans and staccato chortles. Something knowing. Religious leaders had suggested that the Hosts spoke in tongues. Experts in the occult disagreed and said it was a language older than man, its sibilant clicks maybe older than time. Science writers hypothesized an extraterrestrial origin; SETI relaying recordings of their mangled words— if that’s what they were—into the cosmos. The Host’s febrile rant rose to a crescendo and then fell to a sodden murmur. Celia moved her feet a little further from the spreading seep on the floor. The Uber steered through the suburban streets, and Celia tried to think back to the first reported appearance of a Host sixteen years ago. Since that time, there had been an unnumbered profusion of changing theories—stranded souls (self-beaching, like whales, in bodies that could be traced to no one), or spontaneously regenerated cold cases, Jane and John Does sprung from who knew where (or what), or aliens trying to pass as humans (and doing a terrible job of it). Using special software, linguists played their speech backwards and at different speeds, codified and pixelated. Money poured into think tanks and research centers like the one run by Max’s grandmother at Sullivan College. Yet progress was slow and confounded by the rapid physical “disassembly” of the Hosts in “captivity.” So all Celia could do (wanting and not wanting to open the passenger door and push the Host out onto the street) was to quietly agree with her copassenger that yes, it was wetter and warmer than you’d think it should be in February, and darker too. The Host hissed in defeat and shrank into her thin woolen coat. She fixed eyes like broken rubies on the steady flow of mucus from the tops of her shoes as if it were her last possession.

• • • •

Celia’s neighbor, Mr. Ferris, lived on the ground floor of their small apartment building outside the city. Celia closed the car door behind her and checked the mailbox. Ferris sat smoking in the dark on his little front porch and tremulously watched the car disappear, the Host’s open mouth mashed against the rain-streaked window. She nodded to Mr. Ferris and stumbled over a couple of young Hosts all but invisible in the darkness at the foot of her stairs. Instinctively she reached an arm out to steady herself, making contact with the damp pliancy of one of their heads. Her gorge rose. She couldn’t tell if it was male or female. The hair was wet, slimy with ichor. They both looked up at her with red eyes brimming with rain. Mr. Ferris said, “They’ve been there all day. Like they were waiting for you.” Again, that wary, accusatory tone that laced its way into almost any discussion in Deerport involving the . . . invasion. Like what side you were on was too close to call. As if choice might have less to do with it— with being human—than anyone in Deerport thought. And that had to be someone’s fault, right? “Why would they be waiting for me?” Celia laughed loudly. “That part of their brain’s soup.” But Mr. Ferris just wobbled his head, neither yes nor no. “I’ve called the Emergency Service to get them the hell out of here.”

• • • •

After her LA wedding got called off over a year ago, Celia had moved east and picked a town where there was no one to disappoint and nothing was her fault. She’d mostly kept it that way, even after she and Max began to date. He knew about her past, of course, partly through the rumors and hearsay, but he wasn’t interested in talking about it. Best not to dwell, he said. About a month ago, he found the dried wedding bouquet in her closet, and she’d asked him if he was disappointed. “In what?” he’d asked. “That you were almost married once or that you kept the flowers?” “Either.” He’d danced a stiff little jig and said he was okay with it if she was. “I’m Irish,” he said. “Disappointment is in our mother’s milk.” His upturned mouth said he was joking but his downturned eyes said he was waiting for the punchline.

• • • •

Celia called goodnight to Mr. Ferris. She itched to take a shower, although there had been exactly zero recorded human deaths from contagion by a Host. She was on the third step when she heard him cock his rifle. Ferris was of the generation who lived most of their lives before the first so-called Stranding in ’01, which left the unnumbered souls beached in flesh conjured (some said) from dreams. At first, in their bulky parkas and twisted scarves, they were all but indistinguishable from a heartsick humanity, until you got up close and there was that telltale ripple of gooseflesh at the back of your neck, the half-pleasant smell of dried flowers and deadfall, an urge to both pee and cry. Sixteen years later, Ferris still talked about Hosts as if they weren’t there, as if just because he couldn’t understand what they were saying, they must not be able to understand him either. Celia knew, as he must, that there was no point in waiting for the Emergency Service vans. They’d drop the Hosts at the city limits, but the Hosts would come back. They vanished when they were good and ready. No one knew why, or where to. Following a pod—or a “pack” as they were sometimes called— of Hosts to their next destination was known to be a waste of time at best, bad news at worst. So-called “Host Hunters” typically reported anything from a blown carburetor or misremembered turnoff causing unforeseen delays. Flash flooding, a breakup call from a lover, some glitch in the celestial software. By the time the hunters got to where they thought the Hosts might be, they were somewhere else. It was just bad luck. “There’s one up at your kitchen table too,” Mr. Ferris called up after her. “I saw it from the backyard.” “Killing a Host is manslaughter, Mr. Ferris.” Celia kept going up the steps without turning around, lest she lose heart. Her mouth felt dry and her eyes hurt, like when she was little and her uncle, coming in to say goodnight, would open the closet door, walk inside it and come out, intact. Still himself. Just to prove to her that it was empty of monsters. For now. “Manslaughter,” she heard Ferris say behind her. “Ain’t that a joke.” No one locked their doors in Upper Deerport. Just her luck to have a Host in her house. Celia’s hands slipped on the icy door latch. She dropped her umbrella on the front step and stood in the threshold for a moment to let her eyes adjust and to will her hands to stop shaking. The kitchen table stood against the rear window that looked down over the building’s shared barbecue area. The dark glass reflected the blank kitchen countertops and Celia standing by the fridge—tall, her hair attractively shorn, and still in her winter coat. The Host that was there earlier—if that was what Mr. Ferris saw—was gone, with no sign in the kitchen, or anywhere else, of anyone at all. She sagged against the fridge. The big glass of wine that she’d been looking forward to no longer seemed like the kind of thing she wanted to do alone, and the bed where she finally stretched out fully dressed, barely creaked under her weight. She woke before dawn, weeping, something that hadn’t happened for months. She’d dreamed again about her uncle. In the dream she (it was both her and not her) was driving north on Interstate 5 when she hit a Host. The Host bounced off the hood, but when it landed on the snow, it wasn’t the Host. It was her uncle lying there instead. On waking, her nose was blocked and when she turned onto her back, tears trickled into her ears. She sat up and blew her nose, and then she smelled roses and rust. Celia waited for her heart to slow, unable to get warm. She sipped some water from the bottle on the bed table and sank back under the covers, still clutching the Kleenex box to her chest. She pulled the quilt up and tried to fall back to sleep, to find erasure in another dream. In this one, she was standing in the shared barbecue area and when she looked up at her window she could see the Host in her kitchen. He stared ahead, not at her, but over her, across Deerport at the freeways beyond that led to other towns, other cities. In the dream the Host was male, although Mr. Ferris had not said that he was. To reach him, Celia had to climb down— not up—twisting flights of broken stairs. When she finally got to her kitchen, the Host stood waiting before an oblong box on the kitchen table. Celia in her dream went over to open the box, and in it, her wedding bouquet was swimming in blood. She woke up curled on her bedroom floor, drenched in sweat and freezing. Her arm was asleep from where she’d been lying on it. It hung from her body like a dead fish. She got up and pulled on a robe with the other hand, went into the kitchen to look for the Host, but now all around her was a terrible emptiness, full of nothing but itself, an enormity of sighs. She turned the furnace on and waited for her coffee by the window. Hosts congregated beside the barbecue stove in the courtyard below. Rain fell, and in the sky was a glimmer of rainbow. Rivulets ran down the tarp covering the stove. The Hosts huddled around a plastic table beneath a huge steel umbrella, shivering indifferently in cheap thermals and parkas. One of them had a torn ear that dangled beneath a balaclava by a shred of skin. The leg of another had burst open like a squished caterpillar. Celia switched on the TV. The local cable station was running the story under the banner, “Upstate Town Divided by Influx of Hostis” (the Latinate term was often confused for the plural form). There were two panelists. One was a high school science teacher calling for tolerance, saying it was like coastal Florida towns infested by geckos, or a breed of rare bird, or beaches in New Zealand where the whales repeatedly stranded. He called for unity in the effort to herd the Hosts and get them moving again; but the other panelist, a congresswoman, was calling for a different kind of roundup. “It’s not a question of if they’re contagious,” she said. “But what with.” “What about the homeless? The disabled?” the science teacher said. “Burn victims or refugees from a chemical attack? Would you want to round them up too? Who are we to judge who’s doing a good job of being human and who’s not?” He crossed his legs and laced a bony hand across his knee. “Or even how being human is different than not.” “I don’t leak,” the congresswoman said. “At least not in public.” The science teacher turned to the camera. “My point exactly.” Celia went back into the bedroom to get dressed for work. She turned on the light but it made little difference. She opened the closet to pick out her clothes. The corner of a cardboard box peeked out at her from the top shelf beside her backpacks and purses, and she reached up and brought it down. It was white and rectangular like a small coffin. She cradled it in one arm and raised the lid. Inside the box was a wedding bouquet—white roses and tulips, not swimming in blood like in her dream, but tied with a pink ribbon. The petals of the roses had dried to yellowed parchment, and the leaves of the tulips twisted into black fingers grasping at the ribbon as if it were a noose. The smell of it was the same as in her dream. Celia put the box back up on the shelf and selected a pair of black denim vintage bib-and-brace overalls to wear with a green turtleneck sweater. She picked out sparkly socks and black patent brogues. It was Tuesday, she remembered. The day Clare—Max’s glamorous new sister —was due to arrive. Mr. Ferris was already waiting at the bottom of the steps. His whole head trembled—and she wondered if it was the first manifestations of Parkinson’s Disease. “Make sure you lock your door.” “Okay,” she said, even though she knew he’d come up as soon as she was gone and see that she hadn’t.

• • • •

At her stop, she had to wait for the later bus because the first two were packed. Celia watched a woman in a long puffy jacket barking instructions into a megaphone to volunteers rounding up Hosts into minivans. But Celia knew they’d be back, just like the whales in the New Zealand towns restranded—unwilling or unable to be saved. “Why can’t we understand?” Max had said when they first started dating and the New Zealand whale beaching was running on the big screen at the pub where they met for lunch. On the screen were hundreds of dying pilot whales stretched to the horizon. “Why can’t we save them?” His mouth stayed upturned and his downturned eyes brimmed with tears.

• • • •

Celia finally got onto a bus and tried calling Max, but got no answer. She felt tired from her dream. She stood hanging onto the overhead rail, hemmed in by Hosts and nons. With one hand she scrolled through the news columns. A technology magazine was running a new take on the clone theory—the Hosts were possibly escapees from a cloning experiment based in San Diego. A local cable station had Professor Sullivan on Skype from what Celia recognized as Max’s parents’ living room. “—the Uncanny Valley,” she was in the middle of saying. “Soul survivors seeking refuge in dreams made flesh.” The bus turned into the road that led to the public square overlooked by her office building. Her phone rang, and in the gray-noise ambience of the bus crowded with Hosts, the sound of Max’s “hey” was flat and hard as beaten metal. “Did you come by my place yesterday?” she asked. “Before you went to collect your grandmother?” “Yesterday? Nah, I was working from home. Why?” His breath was a little ragged and she could tell that he was riding his bike to work. “There was someone in my apartment, according to Mr. Ferris.” “A Host?” “I don’t know.” Celia’s office was in one of the many canal-era warehouses repurposed in this part of town for creative start-ups, media firms and film companies. Through the bus window she noticed that a small crowd had assembled around some protesters carrying signs that read, God hates Fakes. “I saw your grandmother on TV,” Celia said. “From your place. That must have been exciting.” Max had a nice laugh, deep and breathy. “It’s all publicity for her new book. The Uncanny Valley—Where No One Can Hear You Dream. What do you think?” “Grandma could have a point,” Celia lowered her voice, which seemed to boom over the muted rumble of the bus. “Take Replicants. Doppelgängers for instance.” “Or rattlesnakes,” Max said. “Or guns. Or us.” She could hear the air whistle around the mic from his earphones. What could he hear at her end? The tense silence of non-Hosts anxious to be anywhere else? But her ears strained to hear what the Hosts were trying to say, and she fought the desire to know what it was. “You still there?” Max said. “I’m here.” “Must have gone through a dead zone,” Max said. He swore under his breath at something or someone in his way and she waited, before continuing: “What about the farmer who opened fire on the Hosts who’d gathered in his field? I just read on the news that a bullet ricocheted off the post and killed his prize steer. That’s what I call uncanny.” Max grunted, his breath struggling in the cold. “A freak accident.” “That’s what they called my wedding,” she said before she could stop herself. “I’m sorry,” Max said. “That was bad. Bad happens. Bad luck, bad shooting, bad weather.” She struggled to draw a breath of frigid air laced with stale tobacco, cologne, the wormy musk of the Hosts. The bus had slowed to a crawl. She’d be faster walking. No one is keeping me here, she reminded herself. No one is keeping me on this bus. “It was the dress.” It was out before she realized it. Celia didn’t like to talk to Max about her wedding. She could be anyone she wanted to be with him, or was that a lie too? She covered her mouth with her hands, but she could feel them listening. It was as if the entire bus was a cosmic sound shell, a giant ear turned, like a wolf’s, toward the sound of her pain. “Says who?” “Dillon said it belonged to a Host.” “That is the biggest load of balls and you know it, Celia,” Max panted into his mic as he pedaled, his brogue deepening with uncharacteristic irritation. “You ever been to a Host wedding?” He wasn’t trying to make her laugh, or to sound stupid. She liked the way he never tried to call her anything but her name. Not Cici, or Cee, or worst of all, Ceels, like Dillon did. Just Celia, because as Max once pointed out, her name meant heaven. “I’m Irish,” he joked. “We’d no more give heaven a nickname than we would give one to Himself.” And he’d pointed his finger to the blue summer sky, his downturned eyes smiling at her over his upturned mouth. The Hosts on the bus had begun, one by one, to look at her. They weren’t staring, not exactly. Some of them even had their eyes rolled up in their heads, globs of that ichor quivering on their lashes. There was a stillness to them, a gaping receptivity, that she never felt with her own kind. It was as if a part of them was receptive to a part of her, she sensed, which was significant to them in some critical way. “There are lots of things about them that we don’t know,” she said into her phone, trying to free her backpack from where someone was pressing on it. “That we don’t see.” “You’re sounding like your ex now,” Max said. “Or like Grandma. Get off the bus.” “I can’t,” she lied, despising herself. “They won’t let me.” “Shit!” he said, and she heard the angry skid of his bike, and his bell, which he almost never rang. “They’re everywhere today.” I told you so, she wanted to say. His panting slowed. He’d given up, gotten off the bike. “Don’t you ever just want to know what it feels like,” she whispered into the phone behind her mittened hand, “being one of them?” “Careful what you wish—” he said, the rest lost beneath the squeal of brakes, and then, “Only way we’re going to know what it’s like to be a Host is if we become one ourselves, Celia. And that’s not how it works.” A seat emptied behind where Celia stood and a Host sat down in the space next to the window, turned his face emphatically to the glass. He was dressed in an oversized peacoat, and a bloodless gash in his hand went all the way down to the yellowed bone. Celia breathed in that sweet, offal-like reek. Max was right of course. You didn’t become a Host, like you became a ghost, or a Zombie in a horror film. There had been no reporting of loved ones disappearing, turning up the next day with no brain and ill intent. You stayed human and Hosts stayed Hosts. “Speaking of how things work, this family reunion of yours . . .” “What about we go away for a weekend? Just you and me. Maybe somewhere warm? I mean it.” They had not gone away together yet. Was that what she wanted? She heard him swear and when she asked him what it was, he said that it was nothing—he’d just pinched his finger trying to fasten the bike chain in the cold. “Is it bleeding?” she said to no one. “You’re far from your office.” “A walk’ll do me good. You’ll think about what I said? Damn finger’s bleeding like crazy. You’ll think about getting away?” She imagined her voice swimming like a lost soul through the wires to his ears. She imagined Max’s blood from his finger seeping onto the slush, and she saw the red spreading, and herself drowning in it. The bus opened its doors, and she had to yell above the noise of the protesters in the square. “When do you pick up your sister?” “Who?” He hung up, leaving her with a pounding heart and an overwhelming urge to sit down in the empty space next to the Host by the window. And never get off. Story Notes: It never rains in Southern California. Everyone knows this. When I was living in LA, I went to the wedding of a good friend who turned up out of the blue. The wedding was at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Wayfarers’ Chapel in Palos Verdes. There was a freak storm and almost no one showed up. We got caught in the storm—cars off the road, it was crazy—we made it to the chapel, but we missed the ceremony. The reception was subdued—no one dead, but a few of the guests in the hospital. My friend’s wedding day. She wore a ridiculous dress and looked beautiful in it. She looked happy. I had a brand-new baby daughter, less than two weeks old, and I was happy too. My friend and I had lived together for a while, knew a lot about each other’s ups, and about each other downs, and I thought about why things turn out the way they do, and the answer is more questions. This story isn’t about that wedding, but it’s partly about how things like it, experiences like that— they never completely go away, but ripple in and out of your life in ways you can’t predict. Or drop off like stitches in a knitted scarf, only to be picked up again, maybe, without you even noticing. My friend and I haven’t seen each other since that day. The title of the story is a line from Radiohead’s song “Reckoner” from their In Rainbows album. The song nails for me the sense that being— human, or other—is a matter of being pulled apart and put back together again. Decomposing and recomposing. An infinity of ripples.

© 2018 by J.S. Breukelaar. Excerpted from Collision: Stories. Published by permission of the author and Meerkat Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR J.S. Breukelaar is the author of the Aurealis-nominated novel Aletheia, and American Monster, a Wonderland Award finalist. She has published stories, poems and essays in publications such as Gamut, Black Static, Unnerving, Lightspeed, Lamplight, and elsewhere. She is a columnist and regular instructor at LitReactor.com. California-born and New York raised, she currently lives in Sydney, Australia with her family. You can find her at thelivingsuitcase.com.

The H Word: How The Witch and Get Out Helped Usher in the New Wave of Elevated Horror Richard Thomas | 1964 words

(Warning: Spoilers for The Witch and Get Out.) If you haven’t seen The Witch (2015) and Get Out (2017), you must have been living under a rock. The former was a breakout title for A24 Films, becoming the fifth highest grossing movie they’ve put out to date (with over $25 million dollars in earnings). And the latter was nominated for several Golden Globe and Academy Awards, winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Two very different films, they both took chances at the box office—with their stories, images, themes, settings, and overall experiences. By garnering financial and critical success, they opened the door for a slew of experimental, edgy, divisive horror films.

The Witch

While A24 had put out other controversial, innovative, and unsettling films before The Witch (such as Ex Machina, Enemy, and Under the Skin), this was one of their first horror movies, and audiences definitely responded to it. It takes a lot for a line in a movie to become “meme- worthy,” but Black Philip invoked some powerful emotions when he asked young Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” The answer, of course, was yes. The backdrop of religiosity that hung over this film created an atmosphere ripe for tension. What might lurk in the woods, once they left the settlement? Who was to blame when the baby disappeared, the eldest son died in a feverish state as he quoted the bible, the twins went crazy, as the mother crumpled under loss and speculation, the father gored by the goat? Thomasin, of course. But audiences had to be able to relate, to understand, to make sense of this period piece. It was essential to tap into some elements that were familiar—the concept of the “witch in the woods,” and her youth retained though the flesh and blood of children. I mean, we’ve all heard of Hansel and Gretel, right? But where this film took us to new heights was in the cinematography, the imagery and emotion, the balance between horrific and hopeful, as well as the way the movie ends. The scene where Black Philip speaks, a conduit for Satan, is a tense, unnerving, and oddly inspiring moment. Blamed for all that has gone wrong, Thomasin has lost everything—and none of it was her fault. If she’s going to pay the time, she might as well commit the crime. The sadness in the simple offerings is deep: “Wouldst thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress?” Is that all it takes? When you’re starving at the edge of a town where you are no longer welcome, and everyone around you has perished or betrayed you—the darkness has a certain appeal. “Wouldst thou like to see the world?” Of course she would. Disrobing, Thomasin signs her soul away, and wanders into the woods to join the other naked, genuflecting witches, eventually rising into the sky, closer to the swelling moon, laughing, as she floats up into the air. The loss of innocence here, the power of the warnings and signs throughout, the musical score running over it all is intense. A smart movie, this wasn’t the slasher that some fans wanted or expected. No, it was much more. In old school horror, The Witch would have focused more on the . . . you guessed it, witch. Or on Satan. They would have been more present, had more screen time, and there would have been much more gore. (There is some gore in The Witch, but not much, mostly in the shadows.) Hereditary, the only horror film at A24 that has done better than The Witch, currently standing as the second-highest grossing film in studio history, also takes this approach. At the end of Hereditary, we get the revelations about the demonic king, Paimon—and his role in the death and fate of the main characters. If this were classic horror, we would have known more sooner, seen the entity, and lingered on the gore more often. (Something I think failed the new Suspiria at the end.) As it is, showing restraint (for the most part) helped Hereditary to maintain tension, and keep the terror psychological, avoiding the old school jump scares to focus on emotion. Not to mention the financial success of The Witch certainly gave A24 the confidence to take on additional innovative horror in Hereditary.

Get Out

A film with a much different feel than the restrained, stoic, and visceral The Witch, Get Out is a movie built on the success of Key and Peele and Black Mirror, tapping into the political and sociological intellect of Jordan Peele, all while maintaining a sense of humor. But don’t let that distract from the weight of this film. Throughout the movie there is a push and pull of the lightness, laughter, and desire between the two main characters, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams). We trust that they know what they are doing, that Rose won’t get Chris in trouble, and that the family will welcome him in with open arms. But bit by bit we get a sense that something is horribly wrong. From the staff, to the weird vibe the parents give off, to the gathering at the house—there is that voice in our heads as well, uttering that old horror mantra, “get out!” As more and more is revealed, and things get stranger and more intense, the truth behind the event comes out—the auctioning of Chris, the transferring of mind and soul into young black bodies, the secret society, and even Rose’s role in it all. When Rose’s mother, Missy, hypnotizes Chris, and tells him to “Sink into the floor,” it’s a hallucinogenic moment, reminiscent of the Twilight Zone, banishing him to the “sunken place.” It was a perfect movie for our current zeitgeist, tapping into racism, paranoia, and the ugly truth that lurks in the hearts of the rich, entitled, and primarily white patriarchy. Having the courage to put out a film like this is what helped to set the stage for other movies commenting on issues such as mental health, relationships, sexism, religion, and more. Get Out taps into familiar horror films that blend the sense of other, as well as paranoia, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Not to mention a hint of The Stepford Wives. But Peele takes this beyond a story of body swapping and possession. When we finally do get to the end of the movie, as Chris escapes, a police car pulls up, and it’s every racist, futile climax—he’ll be arrested, and tried for the murders, his wild conspiracy story falling on deaf ears. I mean, of course the cop would be in on it, right? But instead of the police, it’s his friend, Rod, who works for the “T-S-motherfucking-A.” We get the nod and wink to the camera. We know how this was supposed to end. And that’s part of the way that Peele and cast subvert the expectations here. (Side note: there was in fact an alternative ending, the “first” ending where this darker fate played out, Chris in jail, unjustly. But it was deemed too dark, with Peele feeling that post-Obama we needed a hero, a more positive spin on it all.) Blumhouse, like A24, knew a winner when they saw it, no matter who they made uncomfortable. I mean, that’s the point, right? We all squirmed in our seats for different reasons. Take a look at The Killing of a Sacred Deer, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos. Now, while this film is definitely more serious than Get Out, it also taps into the conventions of the genre while innovating. The fates of the family members in more traditional horror movies would have been dealt out in standard slasher fare—simplistic violence and vengeance. The way the horror extends and fulfills in Sacred Deer is a very creative way to show the relationship between the boy, Martin, and Steven, as well as Steven’s family. I think of the trust that was extended in Get Out between Chris and Rose, and how that faith was betrayed. We all put trust in our doctors (especially surgeons), to honor their oaths, and to follow a code of conduct. In The Killing of the Sacred Deer, Steven’s entitlement, the irresponsibility of going to a surgery drunk, and the consequences that play out—it ripples and expands to blanket Martin, as he loses his father on the operating table. The unsettling way in which Martin dispenses his justice is hard to watch. Much as the bidding on people as property in Get Out is hard to watch—the old, rich white patrons striving to inhabit the young, black, virile flesh. While Peele and Lanthimos are stylistically different, one utilizing satire and bigotry, the other leaning into the surreal and abstract, both created original, emotional and lasting films that subverted the expectations of the genre, taking us to new, disturbing places.

In Conclusion

When we look at the cinematography and content of The Witch and Get Out, the chances they took on the big screen, I think it’s easy to see how they might have helped influence other films that came after. If they didn’t have financial and critical success, I don’t know if we could we have had the following movies: It Comes at Night, A Ghost Story, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, A Neon Demon, A Dark Song, Mother!, The Ritual, A Quiet Place, Annihilation, Hereditary, and Suspiria (2018) . I don’t know what’s next, but what I’m thrilled to see are smart movies, complex films, stories that aren’t one link in a dying franchise chain, or regurgitations of similar work. While not every film I’ve listed today is going to be a classic—some blowing the ending, some staying too much into the past, some leaving too much off the screen—at least they are creating original, compelling, emotional work. To me, when work is polarizing, when audiences are divided—some hateful and upset, others inspired and enlightened—the filmmakers are onto something. If you water it down, and push it too much to the middle, try to market the film for mass consumption, you will never do anything great. You have to swing for the fences, even if you strike out now and then. It’s the only way to hit the ball out of the park—to do something truly special. It’s not enough to write an original screenplay, or adapt an unknown novel. In horror, you have to show enough of the familiar in order for us to relate, understand, and recognize what’s going on—we have to be grounded in something concrete. And then, take us to new places— teasing out the balance between terror (tension) and horror (the revelation); tapping into both the epic in scale and the intimately dysfunctional; creating a perspective, experience, and setting that isn’t cliché and obvious. It’s not easy. But the best filmmakers are forging their own paths through the haunted houses, abandoned asylums, and rotting forests—shining a light into the farthest corners of the horror universe to give us wonder, fright, and enlightenment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Richard Thomas is the award-winning author of seven books—Disintegration and Breaker (Penguin Random House Alibi), Transubstantiate, Staring into the Abyss, Herniated Roots, Tribulations, and The Soul Standard (Dzanc Books). His over 140 stories in print include Cemetery Dance (twice), Behold!: Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders (Bram Stoker Winner), PANK, storySouth, Gargoyle, Weird Fiction Review, Midwestern Gothic, Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, Qualia Nous, Chiral Mad (numbers 2-4), and Shivers VI. He was also the editor of four anthologies: The New Black and Exigencies (Dark House Press), The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers (Black Lawrence Press) and Burnt Tongues (Medallion Press) with Chuck Palahniuk. He has been nominated for the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Thriller awards. In his spare time he writes for Lit Reactor and is Editor-in-Chief at Gamut Magazine. For more information visit www.whatdoesnotkillme.com or contact Paula Munier at Talcott Notch. Roundtable Interview with Women in Horror Lisa Morton | 5959 words

To celebrate Women in Horror Month 2019, I asked four excellent female writers and horror experts to join me for a roundtable discussion. Given how the genre seems to be expanding rapidly to include more women at all levels of experience and publishing, I tried to gather a group of women with a range of talents and experience. Linda Addison is an accomplished short story writer and editor, but she is probably known primarily as a poet. She is a recipient of the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and is the only author with fiction in three landmark anthologies that celebrate African-American speculative writers: the award-winning anthology Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction, Dark Dreams I and II, and Dark Thirst. Joanna Parypinski made her first professional sale in 2011, and her short fiction has since appeared in the magazines Nightmare, Black Static, and Vastarien, and anthologies including Haunted Nights, The Beauty of Death 2: Death by Water, and The War on Christmas. Forthcoming in 2019 is her novel Dark Carnival, and a middle grade tale in New Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. She also teaches English at Glendale Community College. Becky Spratford is the public library world’s most visible horror expert. She is the author of the American Library Association’s Reader’s Advisory Guide to Horror (published in a second edition in 2012), and maintains the acclaimed blog RA for All: Horror at raforallhorror.blogspot.com, as well as the original RA for All blog at raforall.blogspot.com. She was a Guest of Honor at StokerCon 2017, and she travels throughout the year talking to librarians about broadening their horror collections. Kaaron Warren is an Australian author whose work extends through four novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, and The Grief Hole) and six short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. Her novella “Sky” from that collection won the Shirley Jackson Award and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. It went on to win all three of the Australian genre awards, while The Grief Hole did the same thing in 2017. She has also taught writing workshops and mentored newer writers.

• • • •

Let’s start by talking about influences, and I don’t want to confine this to just authors and their works—let’s also discuss female characters who may have inspired us.

Linda: The first real person that influenced me to write is my mother. She was a fantastic storyteller, and would entertain the nine of us with fables she made up. This made it feel very natural to create stories for me. Also, two strong female characters from the Star Trek television series were huge influences: Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) as the first Black female officer in a SF series and Christine Chapel (Majel Barrett), whose character said more with a look than words. When I was in high school I loved Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty because of the music in their writing. After college I discovered genre writers Anne McCaffrey, Octavia Butler, Nancy Kress and Connie Willis. In horror, some of my female influences were Anne Rice, L.A. Banks, Elizabeth Massie, Marge Simon and Charlee Jacob. Looking back, I see that I read more male SF and horror writers than female because the field didn’t have as many in print as they do now, and even less Black female writers. Kaaron: Influence came early in life for me. Later, I think people affected me in various ways, but these are the ones who helped form me as a person and, as part of that, as a writer. The women in my life: My mother, grandmother, aunties. All of them funny, loving, strong and kinda wild, in their own ways. The neighbors, and friends’ mothers. Being around so many different women and watching how differently they coped with managed life was a great influence on me. It made me realize we each have our own way, and that there are many ways to put dinner on the table. One of my favorite things was listening to women talk. The deep dive they did into the stories of their own lives, and the way they’d tell these stories; I have deep nostalgia for those moments of eavesdropping. In movies and TV, it was the women who broke the mold that I admired and was influenced by. Sandy Dennis in Up the Down Staircase, which I must have watched on TV ten years or so after it came out. I still think of it, sometimes, when I need to make a tough choice in fiction or life that goes opposite to what others are doing. And Jane Fonda in Barefoot in the Park gave me a desire to be a free spirit (and to live in New York, but I haven’t managed that one). Writers: S.E. Hinton, Agatha Christie, Daphne du Maurier, Rosemary Timperly, Enid Blyton. I had little access to genre fiction, beyond my father’s collection of SF. You could say I was influenced in a way by the lack of women being published in the Nebula anthologies and the books he had on the shelves, and the lack of women genre writers in my local library.

I think we can all agree that the genre has spread to include more diversity over the last few years. How has that affected it artistically? Are we seeing a broadening of themes and tropes?

Linda: I’ve been writing and submitting since 1975, and remember there being very few female names in genre (horror and science fiction, in particular), to the point where I considered changing my author name to L.D. Addison so editors wouldn’t treat my submission differently because I was female. Later I talked to Nancy Kress after a workshop, and she said if I write well enough, it won’t matter if my name identifies me as female. I took that to heart, and here I am. The genre is becoming more diverse, but it’s a slow process. The publication of work by women has added to the field artistically simply because of the quality, but we’re far from balanced. There are certainly more women than in the 1970s but we still see anthologies, conventions, etc. that are being called out in social media for not including women, minorities, other groups. I’m personally involved in initiatives with HWA and an anthology by Twisted Publishing (a Haverhill House Publishing imprint) to include more diversity. In order for things to change, the people making decisions on who to include have to take the time and effort to evaluate how they are making these choices. They have to do research to look outside their usual resource list. It takes mindfulness in the planning stages, not excuses later that they can’t find creative people that reflect the world we live in. There’s still a lot of work to be done. Joanna: It’s so wonderful to see horror welcoming diversity! Seeing editors reach out to women and minority writers is exciting, and while Linda is right that it seems to be a slow process, I think we’re going in the right direction. I think diversity does broaden not only themes and tropes, but also styles, characterization, and setting, which gives a reader so many more options to connect with the material. I’m looking forward to seeing how diverse writers continue to bring in new perspectives and creativity. Becky: With the addition of more women’s voices, we are seeing a broadening of the genre, obviously, but especially in the subgenre of body horror. I am particularly intrigued by how women are examining these issues in their work. But more than just adding more women, I think the genre is being even better served by the inclusion of more authors of color. Since horror is based on creating the emotions of fear, disgust, anxiety, and dread (among others), seeing it in the hands of authors who are forced to deal with being treated as less worthy in their day to day lives brings a whole new level of terror to the stories they create. Authors like Stephen Graham Jones, Gabino Iglesias, Carmen Maria Machado, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia are creating some of the best horror out there by consciously feeding off of their position as outsiders from the “mainstream culture.” The results are original, exciting, and truly terrifying tales of terror that critics and fans enjoy. Can you imagine the hole in the genre if these authors, their colleagues, and the future writers whom they all will inspire, didn’t have a chance to publish? I can, and that hole is a pretty scary thought in and of itself.

Has anyone ever attempted to sway you away from the genre? I know, for example, women horror writers who were offered nice publishing deals . . . if they wrote paranormal romance.

Linda: No one in the publishing field has suggested I write something else, but early in my career when I was collecting rejections, I decided perhaps I would be better at writing non-fiction. Since I worked in the computer industry, I pitched ideas to Essence Magazine in the early 1980s, which ended up with my being published there twice. It was very exciting to see the magazine on the newsstand/bookstore and know people were buying it, but ultimately it wasn’t the weird poems and stories that were whispering in me all the time. The last thing I did was a proposal for a nonfiction book on programming, which got a lot of attention from a major publisher and almost happened. I consider it a good thing that it didn’t, because I later realized I didn’t want a career writing nonfiction, that I would rather have a day job and write what I wanted. Kaaron: I’ve written mystery stories for a Science Education Club, but that didn’t sway me away from horror! I’ve never been offered a nice publishing deal for paranormal romance, nor for writing in someone else’s universe. Both things I think I’d consider, because all writing is exercise, I reckon! Any words I put on paper are practice for the real stuff, the stories that eat away at me and push me to write.

How has the genre changed for women since you’ve been part of it?

Becky: While I think women feel more empowered to show their dark sides, more importantly, publishers are more willing to put out horror by women, and I don’t just mean the creepy, atmospheric, stuff. I know women were writing dark, probing, raw, terrifying, and extreme horror before, but I didn’t see it coming out until the twenty-first century began, and then only from people like the now defunct Leisure Books. Now we have publishers putting out the same intense horror by men and women. Authors like The Sisters of Slaughter (Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason) are killing it (pun intended) with the pulp horror for independent presses, while others like Ania Ahlborn, Mira Grant, and Gina Wohlsdorf are putting out what previously would have been considered “unladylike” horror for the bigger presses and selling a lot of copies to people of all genders. Another change I have seen is female leadership at the top of many of the smaller horror presses, from owners to acquisition editors, I am seeing women at or near the top of just about all of the horror presses. This is helping as broad a range of horror by women to be published as there currently is for male authored books in the genre, in other words, all types. Linda: The genre has changed for women from when I began submitting forty years ago. There’s more women being published in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. When I first started, there were few women publishing, at least under their own names, and even fewer Black women. Now there are women releasing work in all areas of genre, and women on the business side (publishers, editors, etc.). The Black community is creating its own outlets for books, etc. That is increasing the amount of Black women’s publications. There’s still a huge amount of work to be done before things are balanced, but at least the work has begun. Roundtable interviews like this help to spread the word. Conventions that put in the work to include guests of honor highlighting women and others’ contributions to the genre is very important. For example, Ann Marie Rudolph and William S. Lawhorn, co-chairs of the 2018 World Fantasy Convention, included GOH women from all over the world and myself as Toastmaster. Other conventions, like Multiverse (multiversecon.org), the multi-genre literary con in 2019, are recruiting women for their programming committees. Leadership changes, like you [Lisa Morton] as president of HWA, and what you’ve done to make sure there’s equal representation in decision making, etc., is invaluable. Change comes from the publishing gate keepers, that is, the people who are reading work and making publishing decisions. For example, editors Christopher Golden and James Moore of The Twisted Book of Shadows anthology recruited a diverse editorial team as first readers because they wanted a more inclusive professional- level final book. Any publisher/press that is putting out work from the usual suspects is being called out in social media. My hope is that these folks see they can’t do business as usual, but have to be mindful that they live in a world of many different types of creators and readers and they have to work a little harder to reach out for submissions. Being inclusive isn’t just the right thing to do, it is a financially good decision to make.

Has the #MeToo movement impacted the horror genre?

Becky: I think it has. In the culture of the genre there has been a huge shift toward the public support of women and their equality as authors and their safety. There have always been sexist people involved in our genre, those who don’t think women can write horror. But there have also been those who used the close and trusting Con culture to make passes at and even sexually assault women. There were always men in the genre who stood up for women in horror, but often that “standing up” was behind the scenes—privately letting harassed women know they were on their side. Since the start of the #MeToo movement, I have not only seen more women willing to step up and call out offenders and demand respect for their works instead of accepting being bullied, but also, I have seen male authors publicly take a stand next to these women and declare their support openly as well as condemn the offenders. This is a huge shift. We are just beginning to see the #MeToo inspired books come out. Two of my favorite authors who are openly confronting issues of sex and gender in their horror stories are Damien Angelica Walters and Carmen Maria Machado. Linda: The #MeToo movement has affected every part of life in this country, the creative world and every genre. Women on this planet have endured abuse, misuse, and disrespect for too many generations. I hope the growing movement will inform the younger generations more than anything else that every human deserves to be respected. It remains to be seen how deep the change will go, but I’m hopeful.

Should female writers be consciously working to change the “woman as victim” cliché?

Becky: This is a question I struggle with frequently. A colleague of mine went to Bouchercon this year, and after she returned we were discussing this issue as it pertains to crime fiction and horror. So much of it is predicated on violence being done to women, and while in horror, we have plenty of women, who fight for themselves (and win), there is still way too much violence against women at the heart of the genre. Of course, as women in the genre, we should try to change this cliché; however, so should every writer in the genre. The hard part here, though, is that horror requires a victim at some point in the story (if not multiple times). Someone has to be a victim of the “monster” for the story to work, regardless of their gender identity. How we navigate this sticking point is tricky. I think all authors should be conscious of who the victims in their stories are, and work toward equality for all victims. Let’s not forget the non-binary characters too. Everyone needs their chance to be attacked by the monsters. I am joking, but only a bit. Since the genre requires a human victim, and said victim’s specific gender identity doesn’t really come into play for this requirement, we should all be trying to make sure all genders are represented. However, women in horror can help by leading the charge to call out those (of all genders) who continue to make women the primary victims in their tales. Kaaron: Like Becky, I struggle with this one. For me, simply removing women from victimhood doesn’t achieve any kind of equality or positive end goal. The fact is that violence against women does happen, at horrifying levels. It happens against non-binary people, too, and against transgender people, against people of color, and against men. Part of what writing horror is to me is exploring why. Why are some people driven to commit acts of violence, be they a random punch on the street or systematic abuse of spouse and children? What drives this violence? Writing is about working through it, seeking some kind of answer. Not a solution; I don’t believe that’s even possible. But by holding up a mirror to it, by looking it in the face, maybe we can affect some change. Fiction is a way to reach those who are not already “converted,” to maybe reach some of those perpetrators of violence and give them something to think about.

For Becky: are the librarians you speak to ever surprised when you talk about women horror writers?

Not really. Women have been writing super violent thrillers and suspense books for years. Patrons love them. Women writers who hug the edges of horror like Gillian Flynn, Lauren Beukes, Lisa Jackson, and Sarah Pinborough are huge library favorites. I think they are more reluctant to talk about horror in general (beyond the bestsellers) by any authors, rather than those by women in particular. Librarians as a whole are not huge horror fans; it scares them too much. Since they are afraid to read it, they then get worried that the books may be too violent for their collections. But then I remind them, “Have you read a recent James Patterson novel or any of the Stieg Larsson Lisbeth Salander novels? Those books are extremely violent, more so than most horror.”

I’m betting almost all of us here have encountered that odious old saw about, “Women can’t write horror.” Is that attitude still around, and if so, what do you say to counter it? Kaaron: I’m sure that attitude is still around. I mostly get a more personal “How can you write horror?” because people can’t understand how I can have an apparently normal life yet write about the dark heart of humanity. I was recently at an event where my book table was next to the table of a local politician, and she asked me the question. I told her that she and I were probably motivated by similar things: The world around us. That we wanted to make changes if we could, that we found so much of the world unfair and terrifying, and that we wanted to make a difference. I said that I was trying to sneak my way in to those who would otherwise be harder to reach. In storytelling, you can get to people who otherwise would not want to listen. As far as countering “women can’t write horror,” it’s a bit like the “women aren’t funny” argument. What they’re saying is, “I don’t like women’s horror stories, and I don’t find women funny.” I’m not sure what you can do to counter that. Lists of women horror writers won’t help someone who has already decided they don’t like what women write. Joanna: Before I even read Kaaron’s answer, I thought of the whole “women aren’t funny” argument—but maybe it’s because I’ve been watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. While I haven’t personally encountered this prejudice, I believe it is still around; for some people, I suppose it is difficult to let go of outdated traditional ideas about who gets to do what. If I encounter such an attitude, I think I would just have to ask them, why? Why, specifically, do they believe women aren’t good at horror? Maybe it’s the professor in me, but I always think if I ask enough questions, I can help the other person get to the root of their preconceptions, and, with any luck, help to dismantle those which prove to be unfounded.

Would you ever write a rape scene, and if so, how? I wouldn’t do it simply because I think it’s been so overused.

Kaaron: My first published short story was about a rape. It wasn’t about a male character then being motivated to seek revenge or anything like that, though. In the end, it was about a so-called loving and gentle man who made the rape about him, rather than the woman it happened to. It was about the gentle horror that lies within, the daily slings and arrows that we live with. It has absolutely been overused as a motivating plot point, but it is a fact of life, albeit an utterly horrifying one. This stuff happens, and for me, not writing about it, if that’s where the story is heading, is denying an awful truth. Joanna: Probably not. It’s possible I might obliquely refer to it, but I can’t see myself actually writing one. If I addressed rape in a story, I would want it to be for a purpose beyond character motivation, which seems like a cheap reason to bring in such a traumatic experience. I recently read Carmen Maria Machado’s collection, Her Body and Other Parties, which concludes with a powerful story in which the word “rape” is never even mentioned and no rape scenes occur, although it becomes clear that the entire story deals with the fallout of a sexual assault. I thought that was an excellent example of how to address this type of horrifying experience in a very real and effective way.

With so many outstanding new women writers coming into the field, why aren’t we seeing more female horror writers in the bestseller lists?

Kaaron: Are we seeing much horror on the bestseller lists? Maybe more lately. Bestseller lists are so dependent on manipulation, from what I can tell. You need to be with a big publisher in order to get the distribution and reach required to make the lists. It’s a matter of timing as well; sales within a few days of release, that kind of thing. So perhaps the question is, why aren’t we seeing more female horror writers with the big publishers? I think part of it is that we are writing interesting stories that don’t fit a mold and, to be honest, I wouldn’t want to change that. Bestseller lists are not always groundbreaking stuff (there are always exceptions, of course) but what I want to write and what I want to read is the stuff that does break rules and boundaries. I want to be surprised and blown away. Women horror writers are giving me this at the moment; amazing short stories across the board, from one side of the globe to the other. Becky: I agree with Kaaron completely. Pure horror does not make the bestseller list often. Even with the mega bestsellers like Stephen King, we hear all the time at the library from patrons, “I don’t like horror.” Then we ask, “Who’s your favorite author?” And we get “Stephen King” as an emphatic answer. However, that doesn’t mean that people aren’t reading horror in large numbers. Most horror is not with major publishers that work to get authors on the bestseller list, but from working in the library, I can tell you people are reading plenty of horror. And, at the library, they will read whatever they can get their hands on. But being on the bestseller list is not where we find the most interesting things being written these days. Kaaron’s second point, though is the most important when we talk about women writers. Women are currently among the most boundary pushing authors, period . . . no matter the genre. I think Ann Leckie’s SF Imperial Radch series, anything by Roxanne Gay, and Gillian Flynn are examples of mainstream female authors right now who are pushing the boundaries in their work; finding readers, men and women, who want to probe the dark corners of fiction. Gillian Flynn in particular and her bestselling success with Gone Girl was a game changer. She created a story which took over the popular media landscape and it featured an awful, horrible, evil woman as its protagonist. When it first came out I loved it, but I was worried that the average American reader was not ready for Amazing Amy. I am so happy I was wrong. There is also an established guard of female horror writers who have been around for a long time and have won many genre awards, but are starting to get noticed in more popular media, like Caitlín R. Kiernan and Tananarive Due, for example. A new generation of women horror writers like Lucy Snyder, Gwendolyn Kiste, Damien Angelica Walters, and Stephanie Wytovich are starting to really hit their stride with stories, poems, and novels that are both disturbing and beautiful, grotesque and lyrical. And then there are authors like the Sisters of Slaughter, who can write a super entertaining and gory pulp horror story that rivals any man, ever, and people love them (myself included). It’s not the authors. We have always had excellent women horror writers. But now, readers, of all gender identities, are more willing to see women as authors, full stop. They can be just as dark and just as gross as any man. And, in a weird twist of sexist fate, readers seem to be more willing to let women horror authors be everything—gross or beautiful or both at the same time—more so than men can get away with.

When you sit down to write a new story, do you ever think about the gender of the characters, or is it always dictated naturally by the story? I have, for example, occasionally envisioned a story at first with a male protagonist, but then realized it became more personal if I flipped the gender.

Joanna: I think about gender the way I think about any other aspect of a character—something that makes them who they are. And while I definitely contemplate gender, once a character has entered my mind, I usually don’t end up changing their gender. I’m not sure why that is. I’ve changed character names, looks, and even personalities, but rarely do I change their gender. In that sense, maybe it is dictated naturally by the story or the character her/himself? Even when I’ve toyed with the idea of changing the gender of a character, I find it changes the color of the story. Gender was something I was extremely conscious of in my short story, “The Thing in the Trees” from Nightscript IV, which is about a transgender man who takes a new position as a forest ranger. It just wouldn’t have been the same story if it was a transgender woman, or a cis man or woman. Playing with gender and identity in that story was really interesting for me, as a cis woman, getting into the mind of someone who has had the experience of being a woman and who is now, finally, recognized as a man. There are all these variables that make us who we are, and gender is obviously a major part of that—of the experiences of the character that have shaped them into who they are. I do think it’s fun, though, to consider flipped gender retellings of the classics—mostly flipped in the form of male-to-female. Frankenstein’s monster as a woman? Lovecraftian secret societies as experienced by women? The latter was something I worked with in writing a story that’s coming out in the next issue of Black Static, about a college student who joins a strange sorority. Linda: I have switched the gender of the characters in a story depending on the gender of the main character in the last story I finished, because I want to keep things interesting for myself. The basic needs/desires/pain that any character deals with doesn’t depend on the gender of the character for me, the differences come in expression/motivation of emotions. In my new book I’m playing with different things outside the basic male/female concepts. I find it much more interesting when written or visual work surprises me with a different take on an old idea where the savior is a woman, the saved a male or when transgender, etc., characters are involved. F4 by Larissa Glasser was so wonderful, not just because there were transgender characters, but it added energy to the fantastic action and storyline—I was very sad when I finished reading it.

How do you feel about women-only anthologies? Are they effective in introducing readers to new voices, or are they a form of literary segregation?

Joanna: While I dislike the notion of literary segregation, I think that we are still at a point, particularly in the horror genre, where there are far more talented women writers than are well-known or viewed as canonical. A part of me thinks we shouldn’t need women-only anthologies, but the world we live in is imperfect, so at this point, women-only anthologies serve an important purpose in terms of equity and recognition. As an example, I’m teaching a Gothic/Horror literature class, and in putting together my reading list of short fiction spanning from Gothic to modern horror, I discovered that almost all of the authors I chose were men. It was certainly humbling, as a woman horror writer, to have to actively seek out work by women. So I was glad to be able to pull Nightmare’s Women Destroy Horror! and Dark Region Press’s Dreams from the Witch House from my bookshelf and be able to focus on female voices in horror. These types of anthologies have certainly introduced me to writers I wasn’t familiar with. So until or unless barriers of inequality finally dissipate, I’m glad to have women- only anthologies to read, and I think the same could be said of POC anthologies. Becky: I really hope we can one day get to a point where we don’t need women-only or POC-only anthologies, but like Joanna, I understand their necessity. When I talk to librarians about making lists and displays for patrons, I talk about trying to make your lists reflect the national makeup. Make sure you have fifty-fifty male to female representation and at least thirty-three percent (minimum) POC. I also caution them to not only have heteronormative stories. I check myself in all the work I do, too. A few years ago, I started to be more conscious of having inclusive representation in my work and I was shocked at how overwhelmingly white and male my lists were. Even my POC authors were mostly male. We can all do better, but until being inclusive is the norm, what we do reflexively, we all have to work to level the playing field. That being said, I recently reviewed an all- female horror anthology that was collected and edited by a man. While it was a good collection, I feel like the introductions to the historic, most of them all but forgotten, women and their brief biographies were not as strong as they could have been if a woman had written them. The nuance in the dichotomy between being a woman, a wife, a mother, and a writer was missing from those important framing pieces. Has the advice you’d offer to new female horror writers changed over the last ten years? And I’d like to start with Joanna, to hear what you’d say to other new female writers.

Joanna: As a new writer, I’m not sure I have any sort of authority to offer advice! But I do teach writing, in the form of Freshman Composition, and what I try to impart to my students is always to find their own voice. Their writing simply isn’t going to look like the elevated academic texts we read, and that’s okay. Imitation can be an excellent method of honing your skills; I practiced imitation for many years as I was learning to write. But ultimately, you have to find your own voice. I think this is especially important for women writers because we have grown up with a largely male canon, and so learned what “good” writing was from male writers. And if you step into any MFA program, you’ll find countless students trying to emulate Wallace, McCarthy, Hemingway, etc. They’re great writers, to be sure, but their rather masculine form of writing is not the only form of good writing. So for other new women horror writers, my advice would be that you don’t have to emulate King, Straub, Campbell, or McCammon; your own voice is likely to be infinitely more compelling than any imitation, so read widely, read diversely, imitate, and then don’t. Kaaron: I agree with Joanna that finding your own voice is vital. I’ve probably been giving this advice for longer than ten years, though! I think recently I’ve been reminded of the importance of mentors, so my advice would be to try to find one early on, possibly through one of the paid mentorships available in a number of places.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and award-winning prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening”. She is the author of four novels and more than 130 short stories, a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, and a world-class Halloween expert who has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Real Simple Magazine, and The History Channel (for The Real Story of Halloween). She co-edited (with Ellen Datlow) the anthology Haunted Nights, which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly; other recent releases include Ghosts: A Haunted History and the collection The Samhanach and Other Halloween Treats. Lisa lives in the San Fernando Valley and online at lisamorton.com.

Author Spotlight: Micah Dean Hicks A. Merc Rustad | 1148 words

“Quiet the Dead” is a vivid, evocative horror story full of literal ghosts and the more personal hauntings that live with Kay and her siblings. I loved the visceral atmosphere, the way the prose draws you in and paints a bleak and bloody portrait of a small, dying town. Stunning! Can you tell us a bit about the inspiration for this story?

I created Swine Hill in the course of writing a novel, but there were a lot of characters and stories that I had to leave out of the final version. “Quiet the Dead” gave me a chance to explore another haunted family. I’m from rural Arkansas, and small, dying towns are a feature of the landscape. I think I’ve been troubled by places like Swine Hill ever since I was a kid. In some towns, there’s a palpable mood that things are bad and getting worse all the time. Obviously that’s not true across the state, and some places are doing fine. But many communities are in deep decline. The past feels heavy there. It’s hard not to see my home state as a little haunted. The ghosts, something that would come to define the whole setting, were actually the last part of Swine Hill to fall into place. Early readers kept asking me, “If Swine Hill is so awful, why don’t people just leave?” And that’s a hard question to answer, because there are places where the local economy is shattered, where even something as ordinary as an appliance breaking is a catastrophe, and people can’t easily walk away from those situations. Getting out takes money, luck, connections. It takes having somewhere better to go and faith that such a place even exists. The ghosts became my answer. While letting me play with language and create a really interesting setting, the ghosts also worked as a metaphor for all the things that people couldn’t get away from, sometimes burdens and sometimes allies, but always making life harder. This story has such an incredible voice and sense of place; it feels as if we’re in Pig City and Swine Hill. Can you tell us a bit about your writing process? Do you have any writing rituals?

I’m a very thinky writer, what George R.R. Martin would call an architect. I like to work from a blueprint. Before I start actually writing the story, I do a lot of brainstorming and outlining. I want to figure out who my characters are, what their pain is, how they relate to one another. I make a list of scenes and test out various versions of the story. I even make a list of colors, textures, objects, and images. I knew from the beginning that this would be a busted knuckles, dead tadpoles, mop water, and broken glass kind of story. Even though I do all that planning in the beginning, I still throw a lot away. My revision strategy lately involves tossing out entire drafts, making a new outline, and rewriting the story from scratch, not keeping a single sentence from the previous version. I had to write this story twice before I felt happy with it, not including several rounds of edits and smaller revisions.

Do you have a favorite ghost story?

I love pretty much any story with a ghost in it, but a longtime favorite is Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. There are so many moments in that novel that shake me. The creature that runs through the house, like a dog but not a dog. The unseen something that slaps the walls with its heavy hands. But the image that sticks with me more than any other, so strange and new and uncomfortable, is Eleanor’s childhood memory of sitting at home with her mother when it begins to rain stones: “. . . showers of stones had fallen on their house, without any warning or any indication of purpose or reason, dropping from the ceilings, rolling loudly down the walls, breaking windows and pattering maddeningly on the roof.” The rain goes on for three days. Eleanor’s mother assures them that it’s because of their spiteful neighbors, people who’d always had it out for them. The moment doesn’t make logical sense. It doesn’t fit human patterns of cause and effect, and her mother’s insistence on such an absurd cause only makes the event that much more alien and uncomfortable.

Ghosts choke and cloud the entire town, the pig plant that dominates it, and the characters whose lives are tied to Pig City. There’s a fascinating range of hauntings—from Kay’s angry ghost to Oscar’s time-looping spirit to the ghost of silence that holds Mira hostage. What are your thoughts or beliefs in ghosts in our world? Is everyone a little haunted?

I wouldn’t say I’m someone who believes in the supernatural (though it’s easy to say that at home, on my couch, with the lights on). But I love the idea of everyone being a little haunted. Definitely as I was writing this story and the novel that also takes place in this setting, I started looking at the people around me and asking, what would their ghost be? What drive or need is anchored in their bones, making them act or be silent to feed it? Think of the last time you were ashamed of yourself. Did it feel like your own body was a stranger, some other thing that wore you and spoke in your voice and let down someone you loved? Or maybe you just embarrassed yourself by saying or doing something thoughtless, your own hands or voice betraying you. It might have been unintentional, but you did it. There’s nothing to blame but what’s in you. I think that feeling is pretty close to a haunting.

What can we look forward to reading from you in the future?

I’m incredibly excited that my first novel, Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, comes out February 5th. It also takes place in Swine Hill, following a different haunted family. Jane is possessed by a specter that can hear other people’s thoughts. Her brother Henry has a spirit that forces him to build strange and dangerous machines. Their mother, consumed by a lonely and jealous ghost, burns anyone she touches. You can think of “Quiet the Dead” as a kind of trailer for the novel. The book explores Swine Hill more deeply; uncovering secrets within the factory, taking readers down the haunted corridors of the high school, and prying back the ugliness and desperation of both the living and the dead.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER A. Merc Rustad is a queer non-binary writer who lives in Minnesota and is a Nebula Awards finalist. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Fireside, Apex, Uncanny, Nightmare, and several Year’s Best anthologies. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or their website: amercrustad.com. Their debut short story collection, So You Want To Be A Robot, was published by Lethe Press (May 2017). Author Spotlight: Rafeeat Aliyu Tonia Thompson | 625 words

A lot of critics say zombie stories have been overdone. How would you respond to that?

While there are a lot of zombie stories out there, I think there are still many new things that can be brought into the genre. Most of what’s currently available seems to draw from the same premise. However, as a fan of the genre, I’ve always been curious of how cultures around the world imagine the undead. There are a lot of possibilities out there.

What made you decide to format your story as sections associated with the rules?

Shortly before I started writing this story, there was a viral message being forwarded via WhatsApp. I believe the message originated here in Nigeria, but I’ve heard that it has made rounds in other countries, too. It was a set of rules advising women on how to be good and “godly” wives. This list was really long, and several points in it were backed by Bible verses. These rules perfectly highlighted some of the pressure women face in Nigeria, so I decided to borrow some of them to tell this story. That said, the number in the title is arbitrary.

In your story, the zombie character is a combination of an “Americanized” zombie and the traditional zonbi of Haitian lore. What inspired you to include both elements? What elements did you ultimately reject?

My first introduction to zombies were the Americanized ones in movies like Romero’s Living Dead series. I really wanted to write a zombie story, but at the same time didn’t want to write a cliché, so I spent a lot of time reading about the origin of zombies. The Haitian zonbi elements are largely inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s book Tell My Horse. I was also looking at stories from Nigerian traditions where people are brought back from the dead by powerful magic. I just didn’t want this story to be typical.

In addition to folk magic, this story examines gender and marriage roles, as well as the stigma of divorce. What experiences from your childhood have had the most impact on your work?

From the time I was a teenager, I would have aunties and older women praying for my marriage. It was also expected that I do the same. At weddings they would say, “We’ll be at yours too.” implying that my own wedding will surely take place. This pressure increases with each year as I grow older and remain unmarried. This story was me channeling my frustrations at the way Nigerian society promotes heteronormative marriages and the expectations placed on women. The zombie theme blends in because sometimes it feels like the pressure to marry is a disease. You see women who are in unhappy marriages asking, “When will we receive our invitation?” It’s like everyone has caught a marriage bug that persists even when people are married to monsters.

Where can we find more of your work? What do we have to look forward to?

You can find more of my work on Omenana, Expound Magazine, AfroSF Science Fiction by Africa Writers, and Queer Africa 2. If you’re curious about the lives of lesbian, bisexual and trans women in Nigeria, She Called Me Woman is a collection of true stories edited by Chitra Nagarajan, Azeenarh Mohammed, and me. My fantasy novelette about interdimensional travel and girls wrestling will be in the next issue of FIYAH magazine. You can keep up with my work on my website, rafeeataliyu.com.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Tonia Thompson is the creator and executive producer of Nightlight, a horror podcast featuring creepy tales from Black writers. Tonia has been writing horror since the second grade, much to the dismay of the teachers. She is currently working on her first audio drama series, described as a podcast version of American Horror Story meets Superstition. Tonia tells horror stories regularly on Twitter, and in her spare time, she loves to hike, but normally chooses to sleep in instead. She lives in Texas with her husband and son, but dreams of living in Colorado, especially in the summer.

Coming Attractions The Editors | 114 words

Coming up in March, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Cadwell Turnbull (“All the Hidden Places”) and Adam-Troy Castro (“Example”), along with reprints by Kaaron Warren (“Bridge of Sighs”) and Seanan McGuire (“Carry On”). 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 Mari Ness, Nibedita Sen, and Isabel Cañas. 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:

Magazine Website www.nightmare-magazine.com

Destroy Projects Website www.destroysf.com

Newsletter www.nightmare-magazine.com/newsletter

RSS Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/rss-2

Podcast Feed www.nightmare-magazine.com/itunes-rss

Twitter www.twitter.com/nightmaremag

Facebook www.facebook.com/NightmareMagazine

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! To learn more, including about third-party subscription options, visit nightmare- magazine.com/subscribe. 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 Drip, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard The Editors

If you’re reading this, then there’s a good chance you’re a regular reader of Nightmare and/or Lightspeed. 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 Drip (d.rip/john-joseph-adams) and a Patreon (patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams).

TL;DR Version If you enjoy Nightmare and Lightspeed and my anthologies, our Patreon and Drip pages are 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 and Drip? There are no big companies supporting or funding the magazines, so the magazines 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 Drip and 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 Lightspeed and Nightmare are separate entities, we decided to create a single “publisher” Drip and Patreon account because it seemed like it would be more efficient to manage just one page on each platform. Plus, since I sometimes independently publish works using indie- publishing tools, we thought it would be good to have a single place where folks could come to show their support for such projects. Basically, we wanted to create a crowdfunding page where, if you enjoy my work as an editor, and you want to contribute a little something to help make it easier for us to produce more cool projects, then our Drip or Patreon is the place to do that.

What Do I Get Out of Being a Backer or 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 or Drip, 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 or Drip. Those URLs again are d.rip/john- joseph-adams and patreon.com/JohnJosephAdams. Thanks in advance for your time. We look forward to hopefully being able to make the magazines—and my other publishing endeavors—even better with the support of people like you.

About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor Wendy N. Wagner

Associate Publisher/Director of Special Projects Christie Yant

Assistant Publisher Robert Barton Bland

Reprint Editor John Langan

Podcast Producer Stefan Rudnicki

Podcast Editor Jim Freund

Podcast Host Jack Kincaid

Art Director Christie Yant Assistant Editors Erika Holt Lisa Nohealani Morton

Reviewers Adam-Troy Castro Terence Taylor

Copy Editor Melissa V. Hofelich

Proofreader Devin Marcus

Webmaster Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios Also Edited by John Joseph Adams The Editors

If you enjoy reading Nightmare (and/or Lightspeed), you might also enjoy these works edited by John Joseph Adams:

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey)

THE APOC​ALYPSE TRIP​TYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey)

Armored

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu)

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 (with N.K. Jemisin) [Oct. 2018]

Brave New Worlds

By Blood We Live Cosmic Powers

Dead Man’s Hand

Epic: Legends Of Fantasy

Federations

The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes

HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects

Lightspeed: Year One

The Living Dead

The Living Dead 2

Loosed Upon the World

The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination

Operation Arcana

Other Worlds Than These

Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen)

A People’s Future of the United States (with Victor LaValle) [Feb. 2019]

Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Seeds of Change Under the Moons of Mars

Wastelands

Wastelands 2

The Way Of The Wizard

What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey

Shift by Hugh Howey

Dust by Hugh Howey

Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn

Sand by Hugh Howey

Retrograde by Peter Cawdron

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey

Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer

The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn

The Spaceship Next Door by Gene Doucette In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks

The Chaos Function by Jack Skillingstead

Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

Gather the Fortunes by Bryan L. Camp

The Unfinished Land by Greg Bear

Visit johnjosephadams.com to learn more about all of the above.