TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 18, March 2014 FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, March 2014 FICTION Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez? Isabel Yap I am Coming to Live in Your Mouth Glen Hirshberg A Dweller in Amenty Genevieve Valentine Sunbleached Nathan Ballingrud NONFICTION The H Word: Being in the Presence of the Dead Joe McKinney Artist Gallery Dave Palumbo Artist Spotlight: Dave Palumbo Julia Sevin Interview: Jeff Strand Lisa Morton AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Isabel Yap Author Spotlight: Glen Hirshberg Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine Author Spotlight: Nathan Ballingrud MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions & Ebooks About the Editor © 2014 Nightmare Magazine Cover Art by Dave Palumbo www.nightmare-magazine.com FROM THE EDITOR Editorial, March 2014 John Joseph Adams Welcome to issue eighteen of Nightmare! As you know from our newsletter, editorials, and (incessant?) social media posting, our sister-magazine, Lightspeed, ran a very successful Kickstarter in January- February to fund the publication of the Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue, which will be publishing in June. $5000 was asked for, and $53,136 was pledged, which means it funded at 1062%. Wow! As a result of all that sweet success, the campaign announced—and met— some rather excellent stretch goals: Once it reached $25K, that unlocked Women Destroy Horror!, a special issue of Nightmare, to be guest-edited by by the legendary editor- queen of the dark and the macabre, Ellen Datlow! Since the campaign crushed that stretch goal, we’ll publish Women Destroy Horror!—a double-sized extravaganza— as our October issue this year. At $35K, a special issue of Fantasy Magazine was also unlocked, to be guest-edited by Cat Rambo. Thanks so much to everyone who supported the Kickstarter! • • • • Awards season is officially upon us, with the first of the major awards announcing their lists of finalists for last year’s work. Neither Lightspeed nor Nightmare got any love from the Bram Stoker Awards (alas), but we’re delighted to announce that the Nebula Awards, on the other hand, seem to be absolutely infatuated with our sister-mag Lightspeed, which has four Nebula finalists this year! (That brings Lightspeed’s lifetime Nebula nomination total to eleven since it launched in June 2010.) Lightspeed’s nominees for this year are: “Paranormal Romance” by Christopher Barzak, “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” by Ken Liu, “The Sounds of Old Earth” by Matthew Kressel, and “Alive, Alive Oh” by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. For a complete list of the finalists, visit SFWA.org. • • • • In other news, my new anthology—The End is Nigh— is on sale now. It’s the first volume of what I’m calling The Apocalypse Triptych—a series of three anthologies looking at three different modes of apocalyptic fiction: before the apocalypse, during the apocalypse, and after the apocalypse. I’m editing—and publishing—all three volumes of the Triptych in collaboration with bestselling author Hugh Howey. All of the books will all be available in both ebook and print formats, and The End is Nigh is available now. Visit johnjosephadams.com/the- apocalypse-triptych or your favorite book retailer for more information. • • • • And in a case of maybe saving the best for last and/or burying the lede: I’m delighted to announce that I have agreed to serve as the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, a new entry in the prestigious Best American series® published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Our inaugural guest editor will be bestselling author and all-around swell guy Joe Hill. The first volume will be published in October 2015, collecting the best of 2014. To learn more about the series, including information about how you can recommend stories for consideration, visit johnjosephadams.com/best-american. • • • • Before we get to our stories, just a reminder that over in the Nightmare ebookstore (nightmare- magazine.com/store), I wanted to point out that we currently have the following ebook bundles available: Nightmare (Issues 1-6) - $14.99 Nightmare (Issues 7-12) - $14.99 Nightmare (Year One: Issues 1-12) - $24.99 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. Of course, if you don’t want to buy a Bundle, you can also just purchase an individual ebook issue, or if you’d like to subscribe directly from us, you can do that too. All purchases from the Nightmare store are provided in both epub and mobi format. Visit nightmare- magazine.com/subscribe to learn more about all of our subscription options. • • • • With our announcements out of the way, here’s what we’ve got on tap this month: We have original fiction from Isabel Yap (“Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez”) and Genevieve Valentine (“A Dweller in Amenty”), along with reprints by Glen Hirshberg (“I am Coming to Live in Your Mouth”) and Nathan Ballingrud (“Sunbleached”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a feature interview with Bram Stoker nominated author Jeff Strand. That’s about all I have for you this month. Thanks for reading! John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. New projects coming out in 2014 and 2015 include include: Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Wastelands 2, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. He has been nominated for six Hugo Awards and five World Fantasy Awards, and he has been called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble. 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. FICTION Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez? Isabel Yap It all started when Ms. Salinas told us about her third eye. It was home ec., and we were sitting in front of the sewing machines with table runners that we were going to make our moms or yayas do for us anyway. I was pretty anxious about that project. I knew Mom was going to tell me to do it myself, because she believed in the integrity of homework. “Mica,” Mom would say. “Jesus expects you to be honest, and so do I.” I was wondering how to get Ya Fely to do it for me behind Mom’s back when Ms. Salinas started blabbing about the ghost on the bus. “You see, girls, most ghosts are very polite. At first I didn’t even notice he was a ghost, and then I realized the woman sitting next to him couldn’t see him, because she looked at me with this suplada face and said, ‘Miss, are you not going to sit down?’ Then the ghost shrugged, like, it’s okay with me. So I had to sit on its lap, while at the same time sitting on the bus seat, and that felt so . weird.” Ms. Salinas was young and super skinny, which made up for her ducklike face. On the scale of teachers she was neither bad nor good. She liked to wear white pants, and a rumor had recently spread about how she liked to wear lime-green thongs and was therefore slutty. We amused ourselves during home ec. trying to look through her white pants every time she turned, crouched, or bent. “Miss S!” Estella piped up. By then we had realized that if we kept her occupied, she might forget to give us our assignment. “When did you open your third eye?” “I was born with mine open,” she said. “My dad had it, and so did my Lolo. Oh, but my Kuya had to open his. He just forced it open one day by meditating. It’s really easy as long as you know where yours is.” A snicker from somewhere in the back made her look at the clock. “Girls, don’t stop sewing.” We obediently hopped to work. I stepped on my machine’s presser foot and stitched random lines through my table runner. Someone tugged on my elbow. “Help,” Hazel whispered. She gestured at her machine: the cloth was bunched up in the feed dog, the needle stabbing through it at random points. I reached over and jerked one end of the cloth until it came unstuck. It was now full of micro-holes. She made a face. I smirked. “You trying to give your cloth a third eye?” I asked. • • • • Anamaria Marquez was a student at St. Brebeuf’s, just like us. One day she stayed after school to finish a project. At that time the gardener was a creepy manong, and when he saw her staying in the classroom all by herself he raped her. Then, because he did not want anyone to know about his crime, he killed her and hid her body in the hollow of the biggest rubber tree in the Black Garden.