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. Nobody found out what had happened to her until after the manong died, when finally a storm knocked over the rubber tree—that was years ago, it’s grown back now, duh—and the police found her bones. If you look at the roots of the tree at night you might see Anamaria’s face, or some parts of her naked body. If you stand in the Black Garden and stay absolutely silent you will hear her crying and calling for help. But you shouldn’t go near, because if you do she will have her revenge and she will kill you.

• • • •

It was fifth grade, a weird time when we were all changing. It seemed like every week someone was getting a bloodstain on her skirt, and sobbing in the bathroom from shame and hormones, while her barkada surrounded her vigilantly. At the start of the semester we had a mandatory talk called You and Your Body! We were given little booklets with “chic” illustrations, diagrams of the female reproductive system, and free sanitary napkins. We spent a lot of our time vandalizing the chic illustrations. Lea found an ingenious way to turn a uterus into a ram by shading in the fallopian tubes, and we took turns drawing uterus-rams in each other’s notebooks. I held a slight disgust for all of this girl stuff, though I couldn’t explain why. Maybe it was because I only had brothers, and some of their that-is-GROSS attitude rubbed off on me. My skin crawled whenever Mom or Ya Fely or the homeroom teacher made some reference like, “You are now a young lady. You are developing.” Our barkada had decided that we would tell each other “when we got ours,” and that would be it, no hysterics or anything. I was more afraid that someone was going to get a boyfriend. Bea, the class rep, took every chance she could to tell people about her darling Paolo from San Beda. I was fine with Bea having a boy, and Bea was my friend too, but she wasn’t part of our group. If any of us got a boy, I knew the dynamic would change so much we’d be screwed. It was around this time, after all, that people’s barkadas were getting shifted around, and that scared me more than I liked to admit. I loved my friends and wanted us to stay the same forever. There were four of us: me, Cella, Lea, and Hazel. Hazel and I were both in section C this year; Cella was in B, and Lea was in D. We had all ended up at the same assigned lunch table in first grade, and had continued eating lunch together since. We had our fights and silent periods and teary reconciliations, like everyone else, but otherwise we were one of the tightest groups around. These girls were the sisters I’d never had, and I thought we’d forgive each other anything. So when Hazel told me she had opened her third eye, I laughed in her face and thought nothing of it.

• • • •

Anamaria Marquez was a student at St. Brebeuf’s, just like all of us. One day she took a piss in the third-floor bathroom and the school bully locked her in, laughing, and called Anamaria a stupid slut. No one knows why she hated Anamaria so much. When the cleaning lady did her afternoon rounds she was surprised to find the door locked. Inside, on the second stall from the left, she found the corpse of Anamaria. Anamaria had drowned herself by sticking her head in the toilet. That’s why you should never use the third-floor bathroom. If you use the second toilet from the left, Anamaria Marquez will come out of the toilet right before you flush, and ask why you bullied her, and then kill you. If you use a different stall, she won’t kill you. She’ll just float on the ceiling and look down at you and ask you, Why?

• • • •

The annual school fair was coming up. Based on a random draw, the seventh graders were assigned the concert, and the sixth graders were going to work with the PTA for the bazaar, which would include goodies baked by the fourth graders. Our year level, the fifth grade, got the Haunted House. Bea announced this right before recess one Monday. The fair was pretty much the only time each year that boys were allowed on campus, which meant a lot of squealing. Section A was doing a freaky dollhouse inspired by Chucky; section B was recreating the well from the The Ring; my section, section C, was staging a haunted traditional Filipino home; and section D was enacting ritual sacrifice. There was a cash prize for the scariest section, so Bea insisted we do well. While people were yelling at each other to sign up for time slots and committees, Hazel pulled me aside and said she didn’t really want to do this, now that she had opened her third eye. I laughed and continued to cram my science homework. “What’s so funny?” I looked at her, annoyed. “Um. You just told me you opened your third eye.” “But I did.” Her eyebrows were furrowed, and her eyes were taking on that buggy, frantic look they did when she was priming for an argument. I considered this. Hazel was one of my best friends, but she was also an attention- seeker—she was the only one among us who had broken the rules and cried passionately when she “got hers,” describing her intense stomach pains as being “like giving birth.” I mean, it must have hurt a little, but she was fine by the next day. Lately I had been thinking that if anyone changed anything in our gang, it would be Hazel and her weird theatrics. It was probably the lack of a real drama club in our school. I stopped writing. “Why would you do that?” “Because,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to see.” I remembered our failed ghost-hunt during Stargazing Night in third grade, when we were both part of the Nature Club. We had squealed and scurried through the halls, waving our flashlights, and nothing had come out: no spirit balls, not even a little wheeze from the famed Anamaria Marquez. Then again, we didn’t make it to the third floor, because as we were creeping up the stairs a security guard spotted us and told us that area was closed. “And?” I asked, feeling the precious recess minutes drain away. “Have you seen anything?” She shook her head. “But I’ve—I’ve started hearing things! Whispering, weird noises, sometimes singing.” I couldn’t tell if this delighted her, or freaked her out. I was not a ghost person. If you had my Mom, who routinely doused the house in Holy Water, and never stepped into her parents’ home without begging her dad—rest in peace, Lolo!—not to come out and spook her, you probably wouldn’t be either. I preferred my dad’s stance: laughing and shaking his head because Mom was a probinsyana through and through. Besides, I always had my scapular to protect me from evil. It was a gift from my ninang at baptism: a brown cloth string that linked two images of Our Lady, which I wore around my neck. Mom insisted I never take it off, just in case I died suddenly, because it guaranteed entrance to heaven. “Sure. Any confessions from the kapres yet?” Hazel gripped my shoulder. “You really don’t believe me?” “I’ll believe ’em when I see ’em,” and I tried to say this comically, fakely, so that she would understand that I wasn’t trying to be mean. But I guess I used the wrong tone of voice, because she said, “Fine. Be that way,” and stalked off.

• • • •

Anamaria Marquez was a senior in high school when she committed suicide by hanging herself on the higad tree next to the parking lot. Her boyfriend had dumped her for one of the Popular Girls, and she was so distraught that she decided to teach him a lesson. She only meant to scare him and his new girl, or so her barkada said afterward. She was supposed to freak them out by pretending to hang herself, except it all went wrong; her foot slipped on the branch she was stepping on, or something. I’m not making this up. This really happened. It was all over the news and stuff. Of course the boyfriend freaked out, and broke up with the new girl and then had psychological issues all his life. And the tree, which was once a pretty tree, is now full of fat, hairy higads, crawling around or dangling in the breeze, and if they fall on you, you will get a really bad rash. So that’s the part everyone in Manila knows; now here’s the part only the girls of St. Brebeuf know: if you walk beneath the higad tree after the school has closed down, sometimes you will see her shadow on the concrete, the shadow of a hanging girl. Don’t look up. If you look up you might see her, and she might talk to you. No one knows what she says. No one who has heard her talk has survived.

• • • •

Hazel got all distant after that conversation. We were still talking, but there was all this weirdness underneath the surface. I felt that she was overreacting. Everyone else said it was hormones. She would pick at her food during lunch and not say much, even when Cella would do her hilarious commercial parodies. Everyone assumed Hazel was slimming down for the boys at the fair. I thought about apologizing a few times, but then I would think, Well, I didn’t do anything wrong! Besides, we were all so busy preparing for the fair (which happened right before the semester break) that every time the guilt crept up something would distract me. I was on the Props Committee, and spent my days badgering people to bring their Lola’s folding screens and old sheets and tablecloths —the grosser the better. The Haunted House was going to be in the Old Recreation Building, which we lovingly called the ORB. It was a small square structure right next to the Black Garden, barely used after the fancy new gym was erected. Our batch could make use of the whole ground floor. That last week was crazy. We had our usual schedule until Wednesday, and morning classes on Thursday. The fair started at five p.m. on Friday and ended with a concert on Saturday evening. We hated our school and our teachers were sadists and periodically Bea burst into tears, because our Haunted House was obviously going to suck. When it got too stressful people would launch spitball fights, wadding up newspaper and shooting it from the straws someone had added to our materials pile. The school finally let us start decorating the ORB on Monday. I sat with the rest of the Props people and spraypainted crumpled balls of newspaper to look like bloody things. We draped the windows with mottled sheets and marked off our section of the floor with some plastic cafeteria tables that we covered with yellowing tablecloths. A troop of girls retrieved the random wireframe bed that lay in the corner of the home ec. room. The idea was that we would have a creepy, bloody Lola lying on the bed, looking for her lost grandchildren, shouting “Anak! Anak!” at passersby. We had also envisioned a grandfather clock. That was probably not going to happen. To make up for it, Bea decided that the tiniest girls in class needed to dress up in nightgowns and crawl out from underneath the plastic tables. Hazel was still one of the smallest girls in class, although she had been the first in our group to start wearing a bra. I happened to pass by just as Reena from the Costumes committee was asking her whether she had a plain white nightgown. “I have some old shirts,” she said. “That would work! We’ll just paint them. Hey Hazel,” Reena said. “You look, like, kinda anorexic. What’s wrong?” “Nothing,” she said. “Growth spurt, maybe?” Reena pressed. Reena wanted to be a doctor when she grew up. “I’ve been waking up in my sleep a lot. It’s too noisy,” Hazel said. She shrugged, and turned, probably to stop Reena’s pestering. I didn’t have a chance to keep walking. I smiled at her. She quirked her lips, but I couldn’t tell if she was smiling back. She looked tired. There was something unfamiliar about her face, but it was probably the way the old sheets were blocking the sunlight from the windows. We had to pile them on thick so that it would actually be dark and scary inside our Haunted House. To make conversation, I said, “Did you fill in your time slots?” “Yes,” she said. “Friday evening.” Then she floated away, as if something else had caught her attention. Reena shook her head and muttered, “Cramps.”

• • • •

Anamaria Marquez was the principal’s daughter, and felt she needed to be perfect. You know that girl. There’s one in every class. But no matter how perfect she was, the principal was always too busy for her. One day she didn’t show up for homeroom. They found her body in the well of the Black Garden, all swollen, her mouth full of seaweed. Some people said her legs had dissolved and became seaweed, too. That is why the well in the Black Garden is full of seaweed, and the water is brown, and every frog that drinks from it dies. Some girls might tell you to throw a coin in the well of the Black Garden and make a wish. Don’t. You will be cursed. Anamaria Marquez will crawl out and eat you, and bad things will happen to your family. But if you say “Mama Mary” three times before she reaches you, she will dissolve into seaweed again. I don’t think you should try. She crawls really, really fast.

• • • •

Thursday was tense and awful and most of us stayed in school until past ten, decorating the ORB and taking naps on each other’s laps. Cella wandered over from 5B’s display to see how our section was faring. Her face was caked with white makeup, except for the blue rings under her eyes. I burst out laughing when she approached. When B said they were doing The Ring, they weren’t kidding. “They made you Sadako?” “It’s the hair, the hair!” she moaned, gathering the massive amount in a fist. “Did I have any choice?” “Why the blue eyebags?” “They couldn’t find any black face paint,” she said mournfully. “I think it will work if my hair is all over the place?” She combed it over her face and waved her arms around. “Yeah, that works,” I said. Cella was the tallest of us four. Looming over me with only one eye visible and all that face paint, she actually did look like a dead girl who had crawled out of a well. I hoped our Lolas would be able to hold their own. “Where’s Hazel?” she asked. I found myself preoccupied with the stockings-and- old-shirts-guts I was holding. “Uhhh, not sure.” “Hey, Mica,” she said, pulling her hair back. “Are you two okay? It’s been kinda weird at lunch these days. Did something happen?” I shrugged. “I’m fine with her. I don’t know if she’s fine with me. We had . . . a debate, a few weeks ago.” I didn’t mention the third eye. It floated into my brain, but something stopped it from leaving my mouth. Cella patted my head. “Well, Hazel’s been kinda moody since she started her period. You can tell me and Lea if you want us to, you know, intervene or whatever.” “Eh, we’ll be fine,” I said. “Hey look, there’s Hazel,” Cella said. “Let’s go talk to her.” I wanted to refuse, but Cella grabbed my arm and started tugging me. Hazel was sitting alone in a corner, with her head bent, as if she was reading something in her lap. We had only taken a few steps when someone from section B called out, “Come back, Sadako! You need to practice your groan!” “Shoot,” Cella muttered. “Okay, you go on your own. Just say you want things to go back to normal!” She ducked back through the makeshift curtain that separated her class’s display from ours. I steeled myself and decided that I could always ask her if she needed any props, in case things got weird. As I neared, I realized Hazel was talking to herself. “I know, that one is kind of ridiculous. I think some high schoolers made that up so that they could go there to make out.” She must have heard me approaching, because her shoulders tensed. She stood and whirled around. “Hi, Mica,” she said, oddly breathless. Her face was caked with dead-girl makeup, like Cella. Our section’s makeup artists were obviously better than B’s, because her face actually looked convincingly withered. There was a ribbon in her hair, and someone had artfully arranged her bangs to obscure half her face. They had also inked a trail of blood from her lip to her chin, and smeared it expertly. If she weren’t still wearing her uniform, I would have clapped my hands in glee. If everyone looked as freaky as Hazel, that cash prize would be ours. “Are you practicing your script?” I asked. “It sounded kind of long.” Hazel’s eyes flickered sideways. The fluorescent lights in the ORB were old, and some of them were burnt out, so certain spots were cast in shadow. The place where Hazel was standing was bright enough. I suddenly did not want to look at the shadowy space next to her. “Um, just thinking aloud,” she said. As if she could not help herself, she added in a low mutter, “Yeah, I know, okay? Stop it already.” “Excuse me?” I said. My palms felt clammy. I clutched my old-clothes-guts and tried to look Hazel in the eye, but she kept looking at the space next to her. It annoyed me, that she was trying so hard to freak me out by acting this way. But this had been going on for too long. It looked like I had to be the mature one. “Hey, Hazel,” I said. I sucked in a breath. “I’m sorry I laughed about your . . . third eye thing. I was tired that day, okay? I’m sorry.” Her eyes snapped back to me. They were suddenly cool, calculating. “But you still don’t believe me.” I sighed, trying not to be angry. Why was she so intent on putting the blame on me? Hazel could never admit to being wrong, and that side of her was coming out more and more often. I didn’t like it and it bugged me in a way that it didn’t bug Cella or Lea. “Look, we can each believe what we want to believe, okay? I don’t believe in ghosts. That’s all.” “I told you so,” she answered, but she didn’t seem to be addressing me. Something icy ran down my back. Then she focused on me again, suddenly looking fatigued. She actually swayed. I thought she might collapse. I reached out to steady her, but she stepped away from me, like I was dirty. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” she said. Her eyes were wide, as if she was trying to convince me of something. “It’s okay, Mica,” she said, giving me a tiny grin. “Don’t worry about it. We’re fine.”

• • • •

Anamaria Marquez was a student at St. Brebeuf’s, just like us. She had the usual black hair and brownish eyes and pearl earrings. Her portrait is hanging on the second floor corridor—the one with the Music Room and the President’s Office and the Dance Hall—next to the paintings of St. Brebeuf and Blessed Antonia Mesina and the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. None of the teachers or admin know why her painting is there. The truth is that they trapped her spirit in that painting, so she’ll only haunt you if you walk down that corridor. You’ll notice that her eyes are always following you. You’ll notice her uniform, which is the same as our uniform, and you’ll notice that her smile is a little sad. Anamaria Marquez is the reason why the third and fourth floors have those extra railings. Anamaria Marquez jumped from the third floor after a dare. Actually, I don’t believe that story. I believe the one that says she was pushed. Because Anamaria Marquez was such a sweet, sweet girl, and maybe her sweetness was too much for someone. Have you heard about the mysterious puddles of water in that corridor? It’s from the painting. If you visit it at three a.m. you will see that her face is broken, and tears are streaming out of her eyes.

• • • •

The next day was Friday. Fair Day. There was a lot of last minute blood splattering to be done. I ran into Lea on my way to the bathroom to wash my hands for the hundredth time, and she breathlessly handed me a sandwich. “Here. Extra. She told me you were gonna forget lunch,” she said. “Who?” “Hazel,” she panted. “Gotta run!” Lea was vice president of her class and looked extremely harassed. So Hazel and I really were okay. Great. I hadn’t slept so well the night before. At one point in my dream, Cella, in her Sadako attire, had crawled out of a papier mâché well and begged me to open my eyes. I had woken up in the middle of the night with a bad taste in my mouth, and nearly jumped when Mom blearily stuck her head in my room and asked me what was wrong. “You have Holy Water on your bedside table, Mica, remember,” she said. Then she reminded me not to forget my prayers, and I had to convince her I hadn’t. I was already so sleep-deprived that week I could barely think. So it was a relief that Hazel wasn’t still mad at me. The gates opened to outsiders at 3:30 p.m., though they couldn’t enter any attractions until 5:00. There was a massive scrambling behind the scenes when it hit 4:00, but somehow, by 4:55, we were all in place and ready to go. As usual, the Haunted House was one of the biggest attractions. Girls from other year levels and their boylets started streaming through, as did the occasional cluster of teachers. With all the props in place, and the overhead lights turned off completely, we actually seemed to be doing pretty well. Our first Lola, played by Bea, got especially loud screeches from the groups shuffling through. “Anak! Anak!” she howled, rolling her eyes as far back as they would go. “Nasaan ang aking mga Anak?!” “Lola! Lola!” went the two “Little Girls” on duty. Abbie and Erica were roughly the same height, and someone had outfitted them in matching white smocks. They crawled out from under the table and lolled their heads, reaching out with grasping fingers. “Lolaaaa!” I was responsible for guiding people out of our display and into Section D’s. I was wearing an old dress— someone from Costumes had cut out the waist part and sewn fake intestines onto it. I bobbed my head and went “Salamat, salamat,” before directing visitors around the folding screens, which blocked section D’s altar from view. They had a pretty good chance of winning, because of the holy statues they had amassed. I don’t know how they did it. If I so much as asked for one of the baby Jesus figurines from our home altar, Mom would throw a fit. There was a short break at 7:00 so that we could rest and switchover for the next shift. The fair closed at 9:30. I checked the list and saw that the next Little Girls were Hazel and Yanni. Bea was looking over my shoulder. The next Lola, Sammy, was yawning behind her. “Have you seen Hazel?” Bea asked. “We only have twenty minutes. Shouldn’t she be with Costumes by now?” “I’ll go find her,” I said. I wanted to thank her for the sandwich, anyway. I entered the ORB Bathroom, which Costumes had invaded. It was a mess, with piles of clothes and girls in different stages of undress. I waded through, asking people if they had seen Hazel. One or two girls thought they had seen her wandering around outside the building. It looked like she was looking for someone, they said. “If she comes in here, tell her she needs to get into position,” I said. I darted out of the ORB to find the fair in full swing. It was already dark. The deep purple sky was starless. Bugs swarmed over the big stadium lights they had erected around campus. The scent of kettle corn hung in the air. A gaggle of seventh-graders laughed exaggeratedly as a group of boys with overly-gelled hair passed them. To my left was a row of parlor game booths, courtesy of the high school students. To my right was the Black Garden, barricaded by the old metal gate. I gave it a cursory glance, already set on grabbing some kettle corn, but that thought vanished as I spotted Hazel: already in costume, standing beneath the biggest rubber tree.

• • • •

Anamaria Marquez was a student at St. Brebeuf’s, just like you and me. When she was in fifth grade, she died from a mysterious illness. She really loved to study, poor Anamaria; she dreamed of becoming a great scholar one day, perhaps becoming the principal of our school. It never happened, but her love for the classroom was so strong that she never left. Sometimes you will see a bright light winking against the classroom window, and if you stick your head out the window, you will see a girl huddled beneath it. Her skin will be rotting. She will look up at you and ask if you’ve done your homework. If you’re a good student, she will spare you. If you’re a bad student, she will ask you why, why, and she will latch onto your shoulders and you must carry her until you die. No one will see her except for you, and the only way to get rid of her is to visit the Monastery of the Poor Clares and offer them a dozen eggs every day for twelve days. And don’t even think about lying. If you lie she will leap into your mouth and possess you, and make you claw off your own face.

• • • •

I pushed through the gate and walked in. I found that my hand had flown to the scapular around my neck. I realized how ridiculous I was acting, and jerked my hand away, but I stopped walking forward. I called out to Hazel from where I stood. “Hazel? Your shift’s about to start! Are you done with your makeup?” Hazel turned, slowly, to face me. I saw that she was standing right in front of the rubber tree’s hollow. I couldn’t tell if she already had makeup, or not. She was pale, but not in the cakey way, and the rings under her eyes seemed real. Her mouth moved. I could not hear what she was saying. “Hazel, come on,” I said. I heard a loud roaring in my ears, and realized it was my heart. My voice came out pleading. “Hazel?” “Mica,” she wheezed, with great effort. “Mica, I’m sorry.” “What? Hazel?” I couldn’t help it; I moved forward, staggering toward her, my fake guts swinging as I tried to avoid the roots of the rubber trees. “Hazel, what’s wrong?” “I’m sorry,” she whispered, starting to cry. “What?” My skin was prickling. “Let’s get out of here, Hazel.” I didn’t look at the tree and its drooping branches; I didn’t look at the roots. I didn’t look at the well to the left of the tree; everyone knew it was drained, anyway. “Let’s go. Come on.” I paused right before a tangle of roots that snaked between us and reached out my hand to her. She shook her head. “Not until you say you believe,” she whispered. Then I saw—the impression of fingers on her neck, as if someone was gripping her throat. “I opened it because I was curious,” Hazel wept, struggling to get the words out. “And I still can’t see. But then she found me, and she keeps talking to me. She wants you to say,” her breath hitched. The finger-shaped dents on her neck deepened. “Say,” she choked. Something dark bubbled up from the pit of my belly. Something dark stirred the trees. The rustling sounded like the chatter of young girls, our friends, our own voices. We were alone in an abandoned school, and it was pitch black—midnight? Three a.m.? I could not turn my head to look back at the gate or the lights of the fair. “I believe,” I whispered, gripping my scapular, gazing at Hazel, whose eyes were bulging. “I believe,” I said, louder and louder, “I believe! I believe! I was wrong!” Hazel’s eyes rolled back. Her feet slowly lifted off the ground. “It’s my fault!” I screamed. “Now give Hazel back to me!” Hazel wheezed and gasped, as if she could finally breathe again, and she dropped down, stumbled forward —I let go of my scapular and reached out my hand to her, shaking uncontrollably. Cold fingers grasped the wrist of my free hand, and cold lips brushed my cheek, and a cold voice whispered sadly in my ear, “I know.”

• • • •

Anamaria Marquez was a student at St. Brebeuf’s, just like you and me. She is standing in the middle of our circle right now. You can’t see her, but I can. She is happy we are talking about her, even if some of our stories are stupid; even if some of them have got it all wrong. At least we know her name. At least sometimes we think of her.

© 2014 by Isabel Yap.

Isabel Yap was born in Manila and raised in Quezon City. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared most recently in The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2005-2010, Frostwriting, Santa Clara Review, and Lauriat: An Anthology of Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction. She won the 2013 Academy of American Poets Prize from Santa Clara University, where she graduated with a degree in Marketing. She is also a graduate of the 2013 Clarion Writers’ Workshop in San Diego. Isa is fond of sweets, fairytales, ugly dogs, Asian culture, and jabbering with friends. She currently lives in Menlo Park, California, where she works for a start-up that develops mobile apps. When she is not attempting to write, she can probably be found reading manga, drinking tea, or listening to videogame music on YouTube (sometimes all at once). To learn more, read our Author Spotlight on Isabel Yap. I Am Coming to Live in Your Mouth Glen Hirshberg

“This must be the very pinnacle of good fortune, he thought. To have every moment of his death observed by those beautiful eyes—it was like being borne to death on a gentle, fragrant breeze.” —Yukio Mishima

It happened the first time during the four a.m. feeding, and Kagome believed she was dreaming. This was not unusual; she almost never slept anymore, and most of her life felt like dreaming, now. She’d already flushed out Joe’s catheter, sponged gently at the pus that dripped incessantly from the tumor that had devoured his upper lip, and replaced the nutrient bag on the IV stand. Now she was sitting quietly, holding his skeletal, freezing fingers in her own. Briney, Joe’s Burmese, lay curled in the permanent indentation he’d made for himself across Joe’s thighs. Once or twice, the cat half-raised one nictitating lid, flicked its stub of a tail back and forth as though sweeping the room with radar, and went back to sleep. Out on the deck, the shadows of the oaks swayed in the winter wind spooling silently down the San Gabriels, and the Nuttal’s woodpecker that never left, even in the snow, knocked once against whichever pine or telephone pole it had lodged in this night. I am coming, she heard, half-heard, rolling the bones of Joe’s fingers with her thumb. It was like the interferon year all over again. In a way, despite the realities of the current situation, watching him then had been worse. He’d slept even more, for one thing, sometimes as many as thirty hours in a row, and never less than twenty. But his sleep had been more disturbed, riddled with tremors that wracked him for minutes on end, haunted by dream-demons Joe clearly remembered afterward but rarely described to her. Tall things, he’d murmur. Whisperers. Sometimes, that year, the moments when he wasn’t shuddering or dreaming were more frightening still. His face had been less drastically scarred, then, but also tended to go sickeningly slack, drain of everything that identified that hawk-nose, these flippy ear-lobes, this slightly up-turned mouth, as Joe’s. Looking into it had been like staring at the drawn shades of a house that had been termite-bombed. And yet. Back then, there’d also been that one, absurd element of hope. That the interferon regimen might just work. Kill every deadly cell inside Joe but still leave Joe. Whereas now, hours or days from the end—not weeks, she’d been assured, not even one week—Joe rarely so much as twitched. Sometimes, as she tended to him, his eyelids fluttered, but contentedly. At least, Kagome insisted to herself that was the case. And sometimes, right at this moment, he’d actually awaken and look at her, and she’d see that formidable engine in there fire one more time, all that ferocious fight, all those useless things he somehow knew locking into place behind his retinas. Once, he’d told her he loved her, that she was the only reason he was still battling. Mostly, though, he glanced at the feedbag and said, “Kidney pie. Rock on.” Or, if they had a chemo or oncologist appointment later that day, “Shotgun.” I am coming to live . . . She was moving his hand against the inside of one of her wrists, now. Feeling the paper-thin membrane against her smoothness, right where the sleeve of her robe ended. Dazed, she moved his hand to her cheek. Held it there. Stroked once, so gently, down. Back up. Down again. Then she slid Joe’s hand to her neck. Down farther, into the V of her robe to brush one nipple. The other. How long had it been now? Two years? Three? They’d had such sweet touching in the eighteen months before what they’d always known was coming—or, coming back— arrived for good. Such patient touching, as though they’d had all the time in the world. Now his skin—what there was of it—just felt scratchy and hard, like a dried-out loofa. I am coming to live in your mouth. She jerked upright and dropped Joe’s hand to the hospital bed that had taken the place of their couch and swung around. Screaming, she thought. I should be screaming. She couldn’t see his face. He was standing in the corner, just where the shadow of the tallest oak spilled through the glass sliding door. His stained tan overcoat hung too low, all but brushing the tops of his galoshes, which looked shiny and wet, though there hadn’t been so much as a mist out there yet this fall. He had his head bent low, the brim of his trilby completely shading his face. “Get out of my—” she started, and his voice overrode her though it was barely a whisper, hollow as respirator breath in an oxygen mask. I am coming to live in your mouth. Because you never have anything to say. Then she was screaming, crying, too, “Out! Get out! OUT!” The figure in the corner didn’t even lift its head, but it was still speaking, or else those words had rung a resonant spot inside her, because she could hear them over her shouting. Coming to live. Never have anything . . . “What in sweet God’s name?” Mrs. Thiel snapped from the stairway, and Kagome whirled, her own voice choking to silence but that other’s still echoing. At least the mask was down, Kagome thought, watching Joe’s mother’s razor-thin eyebrows squeeze together like crayfish pincers. For a long moment, she just held Mrs. Thiel’s gaze, then remembered and leapt to her feet, swinging around. By the sliding glass door, she saw the shadow of the oak shaking slightly, as though ravens had just sprung from its branches. Bare floor. The boxes of sterile needles and spare tubing tucked neatly against the breakfront. Nothing else. I am coming to live in your mouth. When she turned once more, she found Joe’s mother smiling. The eyebrows hung in their carefully separated spaces like precisely hung photographs. The mask, in place once more. “Jasmine?” Mrs. Thiel said brightly. “Help us greet the new day grinning?” Moving to the stove, ignoring Kagome’s elegant tetsubin tea things arrayed on the shelf by the sink, she filled the utilitarian silver kettle she’d brought with her when she’d finally dropped the pretense and moved in a few weeks before. The kettle made an ugly, banging sound as Mrs. Thiel settled it over the burner. “Think the newspaper’s here? I’ll get you your crossword. Or is it more a sudoku kind of hour?” Instead of answering, Kagome gazed down again at what was left of her husband. Her screaming hadn’t roused him. Would today be the last day? Would the next time he opened his eyes be the final one? Good God, had she already had the final one? When had it been? She couldn’t even remember. She watched Joe’s chest, which just lay flat. Lay flat. Lay flat. Lay flat. And finally, fitfully, inflated, as though some small child were shoving at it from inside. Joe’s mouth didn’t exactly open anymore, but part of his lower lip quivered as air slipped past it. He gurgled once, and pus ran down his teeth onto his tongue. Then his chest clamped down again. Kagome glanced toward the corner. With a brief, discreet brush of her husband’s palm with her fingertips, she turned to face Mrs. Thiel. She had no smile in her, and managed one. At least, it felt like she did. “Sudoku, I think,” she said. Without even slipping on her fuzzy robe, she crossed to the front door and stepped out into the icy mountain air to wait for the paper she knew wouldn’t come for at least another hour.

• • • •

But the cold didn’t help. Nor did the shower when she came inside. Nor Mrs. Thiel’s superb slow eggs and salsa. The final proof for just how unsettling her four a.m. encounter had been came as Mrs. Thiel was clearing the breakfast dishes, leaning over her shoulder while Kagome tapped the last unfilled boxes of the Thursday Times crossword with her pencil eraser. “Mulliner,” Mrs. Thiel said suddenly, and Kagome stared at the puzzle. The answer was correct, of course. Sixty-five down: Old hat, at the Angler’s. Jobs misspelled to make Wodehouse characters, the theme of the day. When, exactly, had Mrs. Thiel started nailing crossword clues like that? Never before, in the time Kagome had known her. “Get the crazy glue,” Mrs. Thiel said, and Kagome grabbed her hand and almost made her drop the dishes. She could feel Mrs. Thiel’s scowl on her shoulders—God forbid either of them should actually show any emotion other than radiant, resolute hopefulness—but Mrs. Thiel held on, too. For one second, no longer. Get the crazy glue. It was what Joe said when he turned away from a ball he’d bowled immediately after bowling it, before the ball was halfway down the lane. When he knew he’d rolled a strike, and that the pins would be flying. In the three, maybe four times Kagome had gone bowling with Joe, she’d never seen him guess wrong. “‘Cause there’s no guessing involved,” he’d say. And touch her cheek gently with one finger as he returned to his seat. I am coming to live in your mouth . . . The doorbell rang at eleven while Kagome was still combing out her long, black hair and beginning to weave it into the complicated sakkou fashion she’d learned from her mother, and that had always hypnotized Joe. Fascinated him. “Like a wild knot,” he’d said once, slipping his long fingers in and out of the whirl of loops and crosses she’d made. Then, when she’d lain still long enough, he told her what that was, as she knew he would. A knot built out of infinite sequences, with a seemingly infinite number of edges. “In the actual universe—the physical one—” Joe told her, “there’s no such thing.” Abruptly, she came out of her reverie. Hospice. She’d blocked that out. Forgotten they were coming. Then she heard the door opening, a single strum of out-of-tune ukulele, and her first real smile of the day spread over her pale, exhausted face. Pinning the last twist of her hair into place, she stepped into the hall and caught a fleeting glimpse, galoshes sliding silently around the corner, into the guest room they never used, who would come? Sprinting for the room, she threw open the door —closed? It was closed?—and found the erg machine Joe had ordered to keep his muscles in shape while his skin rotted off and his lungs shriveled and his organs imploded, one by one. Beyond the bare windows, she saw the tops of trees, all but bare now, swaying. More ukulele strum from downstairs, and Ryan’s ridiculous, keening laugh, and his croak of a voice. “Going down, chum. Going down hard.” And then that roaring, ripping cough—the cancer growling as it fed— that told her Joe was awake. Kagome hurried downstairs, ignoring the urge to swing around, just once, to make sure. She’d made sure. And already knew, anyway. “How long has he been awake?” she asked Mrs. Thiel, who was wiping down the kitchen counters, having already washed every dish and tucked away the supplies from last night’s feeding. Only occasionally did the woman allow herself a glance toward the couch, where her son, propped up, was trying to get his fingers around the Playstation controller and his thumbs into place. Finally, Mrs. Thiel looked at Kagome. And grinned. Kagome smiled back. They stood together and watched. Ryan, in his usual holey black Warped Tour skateshirt and Vans, was alternately flipping at his mop of brown hair and fiddling with the television controllers. Eventually, the screen burst into color, and pumping techno music thudded through the room. Returning to his seat, Ryan spied Kagome, waved the ukulele he was still holding by its neck in his free hand, and settled in the chair closest to Joe. On the screen, twin rocket-propelled race cars approached a starting line as the riff in the music repeated itself, then froze as the START NEW GAME? message appeared. It was hard to remember, watching them, that Ryan had started out as Kagome’s friend. He’d been her intern at Mountain Living. In some ways, he fit the copy editor stereotype even more closely than she did: glasses, nervous twitch to his fingers, permanent pale-yellow cast to his skin. Computer tan. Except he also wore Vans and played the ukulele, told invented shaggy dog jokes that made Kagome laugh—no mean feat, in this particular era of her life—and kick-boxed. Four months ago, out of nowhere, hunched over his computer in the midst of a particularly gnarly edit, he’d mentioned his Boggle prowess. She’d said nothing, but brought Joe’s travel set the next day and set it wordlessly before Ryan at lunch. It had taken her two rounds to realize he hadn’t been kidding, and seven for him to win the match. Which made him exactly the second person she’d ever met to take one from her. She hadn’t so much invited him to dinner as thrown down the gauntlet. He’d shown up singing “Tiny Bubbles,” Joe had skunked him at Boggle but lost every Playstation game they’d tried and also computer Jeopardy, and that had pretty much been the last time Kagome had spent with Ryan except at work. When Ryan was at their house, which was almost every night now, he was with Joe. Once the sickness consigned Joe permanently to the couch, Ryan came more frequently, not less. She didn’t think she’d ever been happier about another human being’s existence except her husband’s. “You’ll be wanting me to say I’m lucky,” Ryan told Joe now. She watched his eyes flick to the tumor on Joe’s mouth. On Joe’s lap, Briney aimed an annoyed glare at Ryan, then hopped down and disappeared upstairs. “Nnuz nuuuuhne,” said Joe. He couldn’t really turn his head, but Kagome saw his gaze stray in her direction. “He says, ‘Because you will be,’” Kagome told Ryan. Even Mrs. Thiel could no longer understand her son. Ryan grinned. “Then you’re admitting defeat before we begin. It’s what I’ve always wanted from you.” He triggered the game, and on screen one of the racers launched from the start and hurtled out of sight around a curve, while the other spun immediately into a side wall and blew up. “Nnuk,” Joe said. Ryan grinned wider, and kept going. Kagome saw the panic first, and moved immediately, silently. Mrs. Thiel was right behind her, and Ryan didn’t even notice until they were already beside Joe, gently disentangling his catheter tube from underneath him and beginning the several-minute process of preparing to help him up. “What . . . oh . . .” Ryan said, wrinkling his nose at the smell and standing. “It’s okay, dude.” He held out his hands. “He knows it’s okay, could you get a water bucket and the sponges?” Mrs. Thiel snapped. “Under the sink,” Kagome murmured. “Thank you, Ryan.” Somehow, once they got Joe to his feet, he managed to stay there while Kagome and Mrs. Thiel bundled up the mess in the sheets and Kagome scrubbed at the slimy, brown streaks sinking into the pillows. Those streaks seemed so devoid of mass they barely even qualified as shit. When she’d finished, she leaned back on her haunches and brushed her nose with her forearm and looked up at her husband. So thin as to be almost two- dimensional, pale as paper, like an origami approximation of himself. To her delighted surprise, he was fully alert, staring back. And smiling? “Nnnay nur nuky,” he said. “I’m lucky,” she whispered, and kissed the bones of his hand. “How about Tijuana Taco?” Mrs. Thiel chirped as she returned from whatever she’d done with the sheets. Framed them, probably, Kagome thought, then chastised herself for thinking it. “Kagome, green chile for you, right?” “Just soup,” she murmured. A few chattery seconds later, Mrs. Thiel mercifully left the house on her errand. Standing for so long had completely exhausted Joe, and he was swaying and shivering more violently than the trees outside as Ryan and Kagome lowered him back onto the home-care hospital bed he’d chosen to die on and settled his heap of comforters and blankets and coats around him. They weren’t enough, and Joe went on shivering even as sleep swallowed him. Stripping off her rubber gloves, Kagome stood and gazed down at her husband. Behind her, Ryan muted the TV, though from the clicking of the controllers, she knew he was finishing Joe’s race for him. Starting right where Joe’s car had exploded. After a while, he took up his ukulele again, stroked that quietly. The chords he played changed so slowly, she wasn’t sure they were even connected or part of a song until he started half-humming a vocal line, in his strangely sweet croak that was far too old for him. “Because you never . . . because you never . . . have anything . . .” She didn’t mean to hit him, of course she didn’t, but the words he had sung didn’t register right away, and when they did, she panicked, spun so fast that the fist still holding the shit-rag smacked across his cheek and her knee drove the ukulele out of his hands and across the room. Stunned, streaked with brown and red across his cheeks, Ryan stared up at her, while her free hand flew to her own mouth. “What did you just . . .” Her brain was screaming back to this morning, and she was crying again, too, seeing the stick-thin, galoshes-guy in the corner. “Ryan?” Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t so. She hadn’t seen the trilby man’s face. But he’d been considerably taller. And even though his shape had been disguised by his trench coat, it hadn’t been Ryan’s shape. No. It had been . . . what? She couldn’t remember. Furthermore, Ryan had been downstairs, just coming inside, at the moment Kagome had seen the trilby man ducking into the guest room. Because he had been there. She was as sure of that now as she’d been that he was imaginary a few hours ago. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, blinking to try to stem her tears. She bent to wipe at the streaks on Ryan’s cheek, and he let her. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “It’s okay,” he said, though she’d clearly frightened him. “You’ve been through so—” “That song.” Dropping the rag, she slumped into the wooden chair Mrs. Thiel always sat in, leaving the armchair for Kagome. Precisely the sort of gesture Kagome despised in her mother-in-law, even though it probably had no other motive behind it than kindness. “What made you sing that?” Now Ryan was staring. “Sing what?” “What you just sang.” “I wasn’t singing. I was barely even—” On the couch, Joe unleashed a cough that lifted his spine off the pillows and convulsed him with shudders but didn’t waken him. Kagome dug under the blankets, found the IV tube, and followed it down to Joe’s hand. Then she held on. After a while, she turned her gaze once more on Ryan. Her eyes had dried, her features settling into their comfortable, familiar impassivity. Mrs. Theil’s wasn’t the only mask, she realized. “Kagome,” Ryan murmured. “I’m sorry. I was just . . . strumming. Wasn’t I?” “Yes,” Kagome lied, and her heart banged. “I think probably you were.” After that, they sat and breathed and watched for Joe’s breaths. At some point, Kagome’s free hand found Ryan’s, and for a fleeting few minutes, she felt a peculiar, suspended stasis. Not peace, nowhere near peace. But there were people in this room who loved her. And someone else, too, who was coming to live, and Kagome gripped Ryan’s hand and closed her eyes and held still and held on. “She driving you crazy?” Ryan said. “Joe’s mom, I mean? What’s she so happy about, anyway?” For a long time, Kagome didn’t answer. Didn’t want to. Despite the waves of panic and loneliness and nausea and fear, she wanted to stay right where she was, propped in place, like a birdhouse with birds hopping around and into it, even though there was virtually nothing left inside. “She’s never been happy,” Kagome answered. “She just . . . she thinks it’s what Joe wants. You know, he’s never liked even acknowledging that he’s sick. She also thinks it’s why he’s still here. If you don’t look at it, it can’t see you. That kind of thing. I think. Maybe she’s right. You know he’s been told he had less than a year to live since he was seven years old.” “Does she like you?” The question startled Kagome out of her half-trance. For the first time in who knew how long, her eyes left Joe’s face. She looked not at Ryan but the mountainside folding into nightshadow as the November day drained away. Then that voice was in her ears again, and her bones, too, and the soft tissue of her arms and chest, whispering, scratching. I am coming to live in your mouth. Coming to live in your mouth. Coming . . . “She thinks I’m a vacuum,” Kagome said, and didn’t cry, or squeeze Ryan’s hand. She squeezed Joe’s, though. Hard. “She thinks he married me to have a calming presence near. Because he finally got scared.” “Does she know you can beat him at Boggle? Does she actually think that calms him?” “Scrabble. Not Boggle. Not ever.” Her eyes flicked to Ryan’s face. Behind his glasses, his surprisingly large green eyes seemed to swivel in their sockets like a bird’s. To her immense relief, he was smiling a little. Somehow, in his Warped t-shirt, with his long legs bunched up against the hospital bed and his hair falling over his face, he looked completely adrift on the currents in this room, bobbing like a bottle with a message in it. Whether the message was for or from her, she had no idea. Hospice arrived a little after five, an hour or so after Mrs. Thiel came back. Rising from the wooden chair where she’d stayed all day—to her mother-in-law’s visible annoyance, and not once had Mrs. Thiel taken the empty La-z-boy—Kagome watched the two nurses and one social worker fan through the room, silent and efficient as the elves in that story about the shoemaker, who come in on a moonbeam. Truly, they were marvels. Even the doorbell when they rang it seemed muffled. Even Mrs. Thiel went quieter when they were here, though her ferocious half-grin never wavered. The two nurses sponged Joe down, changed his bedding; one combed what was left of his hair while the other washed out the tumor over his mouth with a syringe. The social worker brought Kagome tea in one of her porcelain cherry-blossom cups, and may have spoken to her, too. Kagome might even have spoken back. She couldn’t be sure, knew only that the muttering in her ears and her blood had gone quiet. She could hear it, still, but barely. As though it were out on the deck in the falling dark, and just once she glanced that way, through the sliding doors, and saw only shadow. I know you, she thought, and didn’t even try to make sense of that. “You know what hospice does?” Mrs. Thiel had halfway shrieked, when Kagome had insisted on bringing them in. “Hospice kills you. You understand that, right? You think they’re coming to help? They’re coming to kill Joe. They’re the angels of goddamn death.” And of course, she was right. The smothering doses of morphine and methadone that ate away at the brain, the thousand other little drugs they gave that the body couldn’t really take, all meant to keep Joe comfortable, mask the pain. The words they used, to settle them all. Get them ready. Or, not ready, there was no such thing, and they would never have used so crude a term. Tranquil, maybe. Sort of. Angels of death they truly were. But why did Americans always focus on the death part? What else did they imagine angels were for? So pervasive was the spell the hospice workers cast that Kagome only noticed the positions they’d taken and realized what they were about to do a few seconds before Joe woke up. Way back in her throat, a groan formed, and though it came out choked, barely even audible, the sound grated against everything else in the room and rattled Mrs. Thiel to wakefulness. And so Mrs. Thiel realized what was happening, too. “Get away from him,” Mrs. Thiel said, but even her voice seemed to come from under a layer of gauze, as though she’d been gagged. “Get . . .” Her words sank to nothing as her son’s eyes flew open. For one moment, he lay there, blinking, before rolling with surprising alacrity onto his side. His glare was like a bucket of water flung over the hospice workers. They were human after all, Kagome noted; all three flinched back on the chairs they’d arrayed around the bed so that their medical whites formed a sort of picket fence between Joe and the rest of the room. The life he’d lived. Just like that, they ceased to be angels, and their features resolved into ordinary, comprehensible, human ones. One of the nurses had a band-aid under the lobe of her left ear. The social worker had pretty auburn hair—just moments ago, it had seemed gray, Kagome had assumed that was a required color for the job, like a uniform—clumped in an unflattering working bun at the base of her neck. It was the social worker who spoke, as a new shiver rippled down Joe’s obscenely articulated bones. The woman’s voice was trained, all right, lulling as a two a.m. smooth-jazz disc jockey’s, but warmer. At once more detached and more genuine. “Joe,” the woman said. Beside Kagome, Mrs. Thiel beat her arms against her sides like an enraged mother eagle. But she held her place. Waited. “Joe, you’ve fought so hard, for so long. For thirty years, is that right?” To Kagome’s astonishment, Joe answered. And his voice came out fuller, with more of his joyful, prickly Joe-ness than at any time in the past two months. Also with more consonants. “Thirty-three. Got sick when I was seven.” “Thirty-three years, when virtually anyone else would have been dead in six months. Incredible. Please know, Joe. All we want is to help you make meaningful use of every meaningful second, and also provide comfort. To you, and your loved ones. We’ve been coming here a month. I’ve never seen anyone fight like you do.” Was Joe smiling, now? Oh, God, was Joe crying? The tumor seemed to float across his mouth, obscuring it, like one of those black blotches television stations use to blur victim’s features on true crime shows. “So now. Joe.” This time, as she spoke, the social worker slid forward on her chair. As if on cue, the others edged forward, also, and Kagome almost screamed, it was like watching hyenas dance in from the edge of a clearing. “What is your goal now, Joe? Can you tell me that?” At this, the woman gave a practiced but mournful glance over her shoulder toward Kagome and Mrs. Thiel. Kagome watched her auburn bun shake. “What do you still want to do?” There was no doubt anymore. Joe was crying. If there’d been a smile, too, it was gone. “Survive,” he said, in his dead man’s rasp. Then he rolled over and went back to sleep. “You bitch,” Mrs. Thiel murmured, and Kagome started to nod right along with her, wanted to raise both fists in the air and cheer or scream, and then realized her mother-in-law meant her. “I can’t take this,” Mrs. Thiel went on. “I’m going to the movies.” Already, her voice was molding back into its chirp, as though it were pottery clay she was rounding, relentlessly rounding. “I’ll be back soon. Bring you those chocolate stars you like, if they have any, Kagome. Bye, Ryan, see you tomorrow?” Moments later, she was gone, and hospice, too, leaving a message pad full of numbers to call, anytime, for help or advice, or just to talk. They promised to be back tomorrow afternoon. Kagome returned to her wooden chair and Ryan to the La-z-boy. Ryan left his ukulele on the floor. They stayed there in silence a long time. Full night fell. Kagome wasn’t sure when she realized Ryan was asleep. He had his arms crossed tight across his thin chest, his head twisted at an ugly angle, as though someone had slipped up behind and wrenched it halfway off. His leg, barely touching hers through her skirt, felt almost hot. So palpably living. Gently, she reached over, lifted his head, and leaned it in what she hoped was a more comfortable way against her shoulder. When she looked up, the trilby man was watching through the window. For the second time in less than a day, a scream jagged up her throat, but this time Kagome managed to catch it between her teeth, and her tongue and everything inside her sizzled as though she’d bit down on electrical wire. How did she know the trilby man was watching, when she couldn’t even see his face? The hat and the dark hid his features, made her wonder if there was a face under there at all, his head just looked like a blacker circle pasted on the black out there. Because it wasn’t out there. She was seeing his reflection. He was right behind her. She whirled, banging Ryan’s forehead with her own. His head rocked back, stars shot across her eyes and she swept her gaze wildly through the room but saw nothing. Wait—near the counter. By the kitchen. But that was Briney, Joe’s cat, creeping back. Tears poured through her squeezed lashes all at once, as though she’d tipped a vase that had been stored there. She couldn’t stop them, felt the shakes seize her. Then Ryan’s arms were around her shoulders, enclosing her. She let herself fold forward. For long minutes, she had no idea how long, she just leaned into Ryan and shook. He held tight. The only thing she was absolutely certain of, later, was that she’d started it. And that she’d been looking at Joe when she did. At the stump where Joe’s right ear had been, and the black, ball-shaped scar over the hole in his jaw where the second-to-last of the twenty-three surgeries she’d been through with him had focused. The little tumors swelling all over his face, seeming to wriggle when she looked away, like pregnant spiders scurrying over her husband with their sacs of young. Partially, it was triggered by the awkward way Ryan held her, with his hands seemingly affixed to her shoulder blades like defibrillator pads he was trying to place. For most of the time Joe had been able to hold her, he’d done so like that. He’d avoided dating, most of his life. Hadn’t seen the point, he said. And so he hadn’t known what to do with his hands, at first. She’d had to show him. But partially, too, it was Ryan’s heat. His pale arms, with her tears streaking them, and the surprising force of his skater’s thighs pushing against hers. It was like holding Joe, but a different Joe. Joe healthy. Joe capable of expressing the hunger she knew he felt, that was too strong for his frail frame, that he’d been afraid would shake him to pieces every time they touched. She wasn’t exactly thinking any of this, but she was conscious of it all as one of her hands slid down Ryan’s chest into his lap, and her mouth lifted and found his. It lasted longer than she could have hoped, certainly longer than she expected. Long enough for her to wonder if they were actually going through with it, and to understand that Ryan hadn’t come here only for Joe, after all. His hands had come off her shoulders at last, and they felt so good gliding on her back. His eyes were closed, but hers flicked constantly between this boy’s sweet, helpless face and her husband’s wrecked and sleeping one. It was like touching them both, touching Ryan, yes, but also Joe through him. Their mouths had come open, and she was caressing, probing, had Ryan’s belt unbuckled when she saw the cat staring at her and froze, just for a second. Which was far too long. Ryan gagged, his mouth snapped shut, and he banged her head again with his own as he scrambled to his feet. “Oh, Kagome,” he said, fumbling at his snap and his belt and not getting either and finally staring down at himself and then her in disbelief. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and burst into tears. “Ryan,” she said, and started to stand, and then she was just too tired. She watched him and offered nothing reassuring, just leaned her head into the side of the La-Z- boy and let her hair droop almost to the floor. She didn’t cry, didn’t even want to. Mostly, she realized, she wanted to be alone. When was the last time she’d been alone, for any length of time? A month ago? Three? Ryan kept crying, kept saying, “Sorry.” Not until he was at the door did he say he’d be back. She couldn’t even rouse herself to nod or wave. Then she was by herself. She closed her eyes and listened. For a moment, she panicked. Even the wind outside seemed to have stilled, and nothing anywhere near her seemed to be breathing, not even her. Then, very low, she heard the rumble of Briney’s purr, and after that a sudden, rattling gasp from Joe, followed by another in no rhythm. Then silence again. She couldn’t even hear the air entering or leaving her own body. Maybe Mrs. Thiel was right, and she was more bonsai tree than wife. Decorative and silent. And she never had anything to say. Kagome. Even the name was meaningless, her mother had taken it from some childhood chant. Opening her eyes, Kagome sat up. She considered dialing her parents in Sendai. But talking to them from this house was like shouting across a mountain canyon. Her mother’s health—and, maybe, her father’s unexpressed sense of betrayal or just loss that she’d decided to settle here—had prevented them ever from coming. And Joe’s health had prevented his going. And years had piled up, like snow in the Snow Country, so deep and so quickly. Kagome didn’t have the strength to traverse them tonight. I know you, she was thinking, nonsensically. She sat. At some point, she considered calling Ryan. Telling him he had nothing to be sorry for, that it was her fault. If there was fault. That she loved his coming to the house, and knew his presence was at least as crucial to keeping Joe alive as her own. But then she decided she didn’t need to say this. Ryan was so bright, so intuitive despite his awkwardness. Like Joe was. Had been. To Kagome’s astonishment, Mrs. Thiel came home raving drunk. She stood swaying a while over her son, glared at Kagome, and Kagome wrapped her in a blanket and took her up to bed. The woman’s hands were rigid with cold, as though she’d shoved them in an ice-bucket for the past few hours. As Kagome flicked out the bedroom light, she heard Mrs. Thiel murmur, “Thank you, Kagome. You are, without question, the easiest person in the world to go through this with.” Kagome almost threw herself back across the room, shrieked in Mrs. Thiel’s face. I tried to fuck his friend, she almost said. Wished she’d said. Easiest? Instead, she shut the door and stood a few silent seconds on her balcony, in her silent house. That would soon be empty for real. Silent for good. She didn’t open her eyes until she was halfway down the staircase. The hospital bed was empty. At first, the sight made so little sense that Kagome couldn’t process it, couldn’t begin to think what to do. Then she was flying downstairs, all but crashing onto her face as she leapt the last five steps into the living room and stared around at the kitchen, the deck—Shit and God, had he thrown himself from the deck?—and saw nothing, and no one. “Joe?” she said. Spun back to the stairs, to the deck again, expecting the trilby man to materialize out there, he’d said he was coming, warned them he was. “Joe?” Then she heard it. One single sob. From the bathroom. Skidding across the hardwood, she rattled the knob, which was locked, beat with her palm against the door. “Joe? It’s me.” “I killed Briny.” In mid-beat, with her arm still raised, Kagome froze. “What?” Sob. Then a sawing, rattling gasp of a breath. “Joe, please.” “It wasn’t me. I couldn’t help it.” His voice so clear. As though, right at the end, he’d swallowed the tumor whole, or ripped it off in one last savage spasm of defiance. “Joe.” Sobbing. Cautiously, squeamishly—which was hilarious, in a way, given what she’d seen and done and immersed herself in ever since she’d married her husband—Kagome glanced around for the cat. Briney was so much Joe’s, she’d never developed a deep-seated attachment to it. But she’d loved the way it loved him. God, did he have it in there with him? Sinking to her knees, Kagome leaned her forehead into the door and closed her eyes, willing herself through the wood. “Joe. Please.” “It’s like I had no control over my hands. Like they weren’t my hands, anymore, I wasn’t even part of it.” Rasp. Rattle. Long silence. Sob. “I think I pulled her head completely off.” Kagome stifled a sob of her own, felt her fingers curl into claws, as though she could scratch her way through, opened her eyes and saw the cat. It lay curled sleepily in the impression Joe had left in the hospital bed when he’d somehow dragged itself off it, licking a forepaw, watching her through one half-open eye. “Joe? Joe, Briney’s fine. She’s right here.” Silence. So long that Kagome caught herself making loud, bellows-like sounds with her breath, as though she could blow air through the wood, around the tumor and into Joe’s desperate, deflating lungs. She knew what was happening, now. It had happened so many times. One of the new drugs—who even kept track anymore—had reacted with one of the old drugs. Or had built up in his system, or triggered some unexpected reaction. And now he was having an episode. And there was nothing to do about it except talk him through. “Kagome?” Joe said, and his voice sounded different yet again, so small, like a seven year-old’s. “Kagome, I don’t want to die dumb. Please, I don’t want to be—” “What? What are you talking—” “What time is it?” “Huh? 1:15 or some—” “Date? What date? How long have I been like this?” Sick? Sad? Dying? She could hear in his wheeze that he was dying. The rattle had changed, gone heavy in his throat, like a motor shutting down. She started to weep, glanced sideways. The trilby man stood at the top of the stairs. All she could see of him, really, was his galoshes, the bottom of his coat, his legs up to his knees. No, she thought, shrinking back, looking frantically around for anything heavy. Something she could swing. I am coming to live in your mouth. “Won’t,” she heard Joe grunt, his breath bubbling. “Oh, God, not this way. How long? I killed the . . . I won’t. HOW LONG?” Thumping, as though Joe was pounding his own chest. Or driving his head into the wall. “Joe,” Kagome said, starting to weep. “I don’t want to be dumb.” “Dumb?” “I want to be me.” “Joe, You’ve been you since the day I—” “Date? What date? How long have I just been lying there? I killed the—” “Never,” she hissed. “Never, for one second, my husband, have you just been lying there.” She blinked, and the trilby man was closer. Three steps down from the balcony, visible to the waist now. Without even moving. I know you. Even as Kagome thought that, he was five steps down. Absolutely still, with his long arms at his sides. Like she was watching a spliced film. Because you never have anything to say. Trilby. Trilllll . . . She was panicking, frantic, wanting to flee the house and unable to move, rolling that word on her tongue. Over and over. Trilby. Useless name, for a hat no one wore. No one she’d ever known. Where had she even learned it? “I killed Briney. Kagome, WHAT TIME IS IT?!” “Constantinople,” she said abruptly, heard her husband gasp and go still. On the stairs, the trilby man winked closer. Still not moving, hands at his sides. She could see the top of the hat now, the head bent down on the chest, obscuring the face. “Come on,” Kagome muttered. Which of them did she mean? She didn’t know, wasn’t sure it mattered. “Calcutta,” Joe whispered, voice catching hard, ripping on the teeth of his cough, and Kagome threw her head back, almost smiling. Almost. “Cheating,” she said, as tears erupted down her cheeks. “Hasn’t officially changed its name yet.” “Just because . . .” Ripping, ravaging cough. Then the rattle, low and long. “ . . . the west hasn’t acknowledged, doesn’t mean . . .” “Fine. Chennai.” The trilby man’s rubber soles reached the hardwood floor. Kagome watched him come. I will not move, she was chanting, deep inside herself. I will not move. Trilby. “That’s cheating,” Joe said. Through her tears, Kagome watched the trilby man twitch closer, and gripped the doorframe to keep from collapsing. The grin that broke over her face was different than any she’d ever felt there. “How so?” she whispered. Knowing the answer. Wanting him to tell her. To have the pleasure. To play, once more. Fight, a little longer. “It’s . . . the name changed. Not the name . . . it was.” “Madras,” she said. “Madras,” said Joe. “I’m sorry, Kagome.” The trilby man was five feet away; next time he moved they’d be touching. There was nothing to swing at him. Nowhere to run, and even if there was. Mulliner. Coming to live . . . “Sorry?” Kagome said, staring at the hat tipped down, the hidden face. I KNOW you. “Joe, you have nothing—” “For not staying. I can’t stay.” “Joe. Let me in.” “Can’t . . . reach the door. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.” Weeping, glaring her defiance, Kagome turned her back on the trilby man, put her mouth to the crack between the door and the wall, and began to whisper. “I love you, Joe. I love you, Joe. I love you, Joe.” Then she remembered. Where else would she have heard such a nothing word but from her husband? Tall things, he’d called them, in the year of his interferon dreams. Whisperers, in trilby hats. Angels of death? Walking tumors, whispering in the blood? Or . . . What had that doctor said? From the top of the stairs, there was a new sound, now. A whimper, climbing towards keening. In her ears, Kagome could still hear the slow song Ryan had sung. Sworn he hadn’t sung. On her shoulders, she could feel his hands, the way they’d moved, and hadn’t moved. And in her mouth, she could taste his tongue. The sweat on his cheek that had tasted so sweet. So sweetly familiar. Mulliner. Never before, not even once . . . “Kagome?” Mrs. Thiel sobbed. “It’s a myth, you know. That we can’t kill cancer. We can kill anything. Just . . . not selectively.” That’s what that doctor had said. “Now, if your husband could oblige by stepping aside, figure a way to climb out of there, just for a month or two . . .” Had he? Kagome whirled, heart hurtling up her chest, borne on a boil of grief and nausea and loneliness and terror and hope? Joe? Mrs. Thiel had reached the bottom of the stairs, was staring at Kagome, at the closed door behind her. The rattling in the bathroom had stopped. Had been stopped for too long now. Kagome glared back, across the empty room, past her mother-in-law toward the pine trees outside. All that empty, useless wind. “No,” Mrs. Thiel said, and Kagome felt her mouth curl once more, into a snarl she’d never known she had in her. Because it had never been there. She’d seen it before, though. In those rare moments Joe didn’t think she was looking, and the pain came for him, and he somehow roused that fury in there and fought it back one more time. Whatever was coming, she thought. It was here.

—With special thanks to Norman Partridge for the loan of the nightmare . . .

© 2007 by Glen Hirshberg. Originally published in Dark Delicacies II: Fear, edited by Del Howison & Jeff Gelb. Reprinted by permission of the author. Glen Hirshberg’s novels include The Snowman’s Children (2002), The Book of Bunk (2010), and Motherless Child (2012), which will be republished in a new, revised edition by Tor this May. He is also the author of three story collections: The Two Sams (a Publishers’ Weekly Best Book of 2003), American Morons (2006), and The Janus Tree (2011). In 2008, he won the Shirley Jackson Award for the novelette, “The Janus Tree.” He is also a three-time winner of the International Horror Guild Award, and a five- time World Fantasy Award finalist. With Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison, he co-founded the Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual reading/live music/performance event that tours the west coast every fall and has also made international appearances. He lives in the Los Angeles area with his wife, son, daughter, and cats. To learn more, read our Author Spotlight on Glen Hirshberg. A Dweller in Amenty Genevieve Valentine

The Pernille’s housekeeper shows me into the music room, where they’ve shoved the piano to the wall to make room for the coffin and the table and my seat. You can always tell serious clients. They lower the lights. The tablecloth has to be white, and linen, anywhere I go; it’s in the contract. Natural fibers only, I explain if they ask. “The old ways,” I say sometimes, pitched a tone lower than usual. It usually ends the discussion. People like the old ways. The old ways sound like money. The old ways, they assume, must work—none of the dead have complained. I need the tablecloth, and a dinner service, with utensils all in silver. Silver covers on the dishes, and a silver vase, with clippings of herbs and flowers that I tell them will keep evil out. (The list is several dozen long, and some of them aren’t easy finds—verbascum, coriander, peony, rosemary, hawthorn, black mustard, all in flower, with larch bark as a wrapping—but I’ve never sat down to dinner and had any missing.) The herbs cover the smell. After you’ve touched the plate to the corpse, you don’t want whatever they’ve used on the body to linger. When I first started, I did the ascetic routine with bread and wine straight out of a wooden bowl, because it looked suitably staged and it was faster to choke down, but people who are paying you the cost of a house for your services will still serve you stale grocery store bread as their final transubstantiation on this earth, and eventually my patience ran out. You need to eat—that’s an old way there’s no getting out of—but I have standards. Now I ask for the deceased’s favorite food. It was a good idea; I deal in five-star dead. It’s sweetbreads this time, which always seems like a fuck-you from the grave. People claim them as a favorite food just to seem urbane and at peace with the transience of the flesh, when really all they want is the noodle soup from around the corner when they were drunk or the peanut butter and jelly sandwich their mom made for them once back when she had yet to be disappointed in them, which means I’m left eating fried throats and staring at the deceased across the table while we both know better. I don’t know why they bother to hide it. They can’t hide anything. It’s why I’m there.

• • • •

There aren’t many of us—you have to be born with the accidental hunger and the endless appetite. Rare gift, say some people who have no idea what they’re talking about. Most of the people who can do it just think they’ve lost their minds, unless someone recognizes them, taps them on the shoulder before the worst happens. The appetite still drives you to the brink, sometimes. But sin eaters need money like anyone else, and sins are easier to swallow than poverty is. Asking for us by naming what we do won’t get you anywhere. Most people won’t believe you; the ones who do will think you’re gauche. You find me by mentioning Ammut, the beast who stalks the kingdom of the dead to the west of the Nile: rough-fleshed and lion-footed, a crocodile’s head with impassive eyes. She sat at the weighing of the soul, reptile teeth gleaming, to consume the hearts of the sinful. (The Old Ways. Best marketing tools you can come by.) And it’s the heavy-hearted who come looking for us. Someone who’s done a lot of terrible things and has the money to turn back the clock will realize the shadow’s beginning to fall, and they’ll start going to invite-only gallery afterparties, hosting private dinners, asking quietly about who knows anything of use. Those types always know something, if they’re rich enough, and they love nothing better than a secret code; sooner or later, when they say, “I’m looking to live to the west of the Nile,” someone will write down a number, say in flat English, “I know a dweller in Amenty.” That will be my number. I’ll take care of it all.

• • • •

Riders on my contract:

1. No one in the room with me. I’m a professional; I demand the courtesy. (It’s not hard to enforce. The people who need this service don’t tend to have over-devoted families, and by the time they read my contract to the bottom they don’t much feel like arguing this one.)

2. Client confidentiality goes both ways. I don’t go to the press about what I discover—the Old Ways demand my silence, even from you—and your family never mentions my name. (This one they always break; if they didn’t, I’d never get business.) 3. The table, the white cloth, the silver, the herbs. Trappings of the trade. (This is where they get to enjoy paying through the nose for a premium service, and start to feel like they’ve gotten the best in the business. It was the same among my ancestors, I assure them, and explain canopic jars as if they’re the same thing. No one’s ever questioned it.)

4. Do not open the door, no matter what you hear.

(This is where they go quiet, for a long time, before they sign their name.)

• • • •

First sins I ever ate were my grandmother’s. She sat me down in the kitchen one day (there was a copper chicken mold hanging on the wall like a talisman in case you wanted to make chicken cake) and handed me a cookie still tacky from the tray. “You’re getting so tall,” she said, like it was my fault, and told me stories about going to school in her village, and I gnawed my way through an almond cookie that was sweet and chewy and burnt just at the edges. She’d wasted her life. She hated her husband for taking her from her home country; she’d resented my father for pinning her there and couldn’t forgive his white English wife; she’d envied every woman with a byline she ever came across. Her faith was gone. Half a dozen times she’d sat at her dressing table and wondered how hard you’d have to drive your head into the wall to kill yourself. She was going to die any day—she knew it, she knew it for sure—and she just wanted it all to be over. “There were cats everywhere, back home,” she told me. “When you walked alone at night, it was a sea of tails and eyes.” She was praying all the while, If you’re there, call my name, I’m so ready to be gone. I didn’t know what was happening. I thought I was killing her. I ate three cookies, one at a time.

• • • •

Englishmen used to eat the sins right off the body—a plate of bread and a cup of wine rising slowly as the corpse bloat set in, and sometimes a little meat if any could be spared and you could manage to finish before the flies reached it. You always could manage; you ate it all, because there was no telling where your next meal was coming from, if everyone else was healthy and young. The stories mark out where a sin eater lived—on the edge of the wilderness in some half-home, with the trees or the open sky ready to swallow him—but never how they were summoned. Was there someone assigned to the job, or did some mourner have to break first, someone who left the body and staggered over the ground beyond the safety of the town, screaming for the sin eater to hurry? They would have had to run as soon as the death rattle came, that poor soft-heart with tears in their eyes; sins have to be eaten before the body goes cold, and on a diet of true believers, a sin eater is so full he can barely lift his head. He’d have had to drag himself most of the way on all fours, as fast as he could—wolves were everywhere, back then—until he was close enough that he had to stand and look like he could do the job, to comfort the people who paid him to be outcast and hated for eating the worst of whatever they’d done. (Strange where some stories wander from home. You begin with the outcast beast in the forest who consumes the dying obligingly and whole; when he’s found and cut open and filled up again with stones, all anyone remembers is a messenger in red.) Was that first mourner also the one who cut the bread and poured the wine for the sin eater? Was that the understood office of the first person to beg mercy for the dead? Was it their wooden bowl and cup given up to the stranger, across the body of the one they’d loved? I hope it was. You could pretend that was kindness. (The Middle Kingdom knew better how to prepare a body with some circumspection; still, they left the heart in. Our kind is doomed to press food to the flesh.) There are rumors I’ve never really wanted to track down, about sin eaters who were made to drink the blood of the dead as a proof of their work—from the palm or the skull or the stomach. Corpse bowls. You’d have had to suck at the wound—blood congeals so fast, you’d have had to work for every sludgy mouthful. They’re probably just stories. Anyone who knows what happens when a body dies hopes they’re just stories. I don’t think about it. It has nothing to do with me, now, with half a dozen pieces of silver in a line between me and the dead. Of course they’re serving red.

• • • • A sin eater has to separate the taste of the sin from the food, or they’ll never eat another easy meal. I won’t anyway—for the rest of my life I’ll be accidentally confessing short-order cooks who are two days shy of a heart attack—but it can be managed, if you work at it. You have to work at it. You don’t want to taste any more than you have to. It’s tempting to eat the sins of everyone I love. It’s tempting to eat the sins of everyone good. We can ease suffering; it’s easy to mistake that for a calling. Every so often you give in. I carry something in my bag for emergencies: a granola bar I can lay against the heart of a friend gone too soon, or of a stranger shot down in the street—someone who won’t have time to make peace. You shove it into your mouth all at once, press both hands tight to your mouth to stop the burst of screaming. Bystanders assume you’re the next of kin; you looked so upset, they’ll explain later. You shouldn’t do that—sins regretted are worse than stones—but mistakes happen. You can, if you want, touch an almond cookie to the still-warm body of your grandmother, staring at her closed eyes as you eat as fast as you can manage through a dry throat, scrambling to be gone before anyone comes in and sees you. It won’t work. When your parents find you, too late, you’ll be sobbing against the rug because you got so heavy you couldn’t stand any more. When your father tries to lift you, he won’t be able. You’ll learn to stand up under it, eventually. Trick of the trade.

• • • •

You’d think some sins would taste heady, forbidden. Worth it. An affair would be sharply sweet, a murder would taste of panic and lurching triumph, a lie would taste like escape, or spring. If it did, there would be more of us. A love affair is stale breath. A murder is sweat. A lie is a fingernail of dirt. Just as well I’m choking down sweetmeats. After a while it tastes of salt, no matter what you do.

• • • •

I live in a small house way out from the center of the city, at the edge of the wild. It’s far enough away from people that when the sun sets, all I hear are the insects buzzing, and the edges of the hunger like a wolf pacing always just shy of the trees. When I eat, I have the sluggish rumble of the crocodile whose mouth is open wide. When I’m hungry, wolves. I’ve known one sin eater who lived in the middle of the city. He called himself an afterlife consultant, to be funny; he got a lot of business. His line, when clients asked where the sins went or why he did it, was, “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” He shot himself, eventually. No one would touch the body. One of his clients finally called me in, and the funeral home director stood at a safe distance as I touched my friend’s chest with a doughnut (only thing he had in the house, it soaked up a little blood), forced myself through it one bite at a time, trying not to look at anything above his sternum. It took twenty bites. By the end, I couldn’t breathe; I could see stars every time my teeth came together. There was nothing to eat. You owned all the sins you ate. I’d always wondered. He was teeming, and the doughnut was gone, and not one sin of it was mine. “He’s clean,” I said finally, had to clear my throat and try again before it sounded like words. At home, I sat at my kitchen table and tried not to look up where the copper chicken had been in a kitchen a long time ago. I smelled almonds everywhere. • • • •

Your clients will always ask you, “Where do the sins go?” as if you’re a pâtissier who’s managed to keep the weight off. For them, it’s a fair question. Keeping things in their proper places is a life’s pursuit for the kind of people who want to outsource their sins. When they see my skin is brown, when they hear my pronunciation of “Amenti,” they get a look of relief you can’t imagine. (Once, someone’s personal secretary asked me, “What’s the loss rate in your profession,” so flat it took me a second to realize she was asking about suicides. “Lower than yours,” I said, because I had some numbers for both—my clients drive a lot of people to the grave—and just before she opened the door she’d said tightly, “If you have apprenticeships, I’m all yours.” If there was one, I’d have let her. She’d been in training to eat someone else’s wrongs for long enough.) You’d think clients would ask what will happen to you, too, just to make sure their vessel’s in good shape, but they never do; what happens to you isn’t their concern. They just ask where their sins go, to make sure they won’t be pressed cheek by jowl with a stranger’s. Real estate considerations. Every sin eater has a different line for this question. Inside joke. Mine’s always been, “Sin is a renewable resource.” They usually laugh; eco-marketing terms are more familiar than death, and slightly less frightening, and they can be fond of renewable resources now after making a living off building stock markets otherwise. Every so often, you get one who actually regrets that, and you have five bites in a row that taste like wet money before they taste like salt. They’ll stop asking questions about it after that—deep down they’re desperate, they know they can’t ask too much of you—which is the point. (You keep them in the part of you that has no choice, that was born to be forced into, to hold the suffering of others whether you want it or not; the part that waits with parted teeth for anything it can consume, the part you can’t touch or reach, that deep open darkness along your spine that you can never, never fill. For fuck’s sake, don’t listen, if anyone tells you what you are. Don’t listen to the hunger. Run until there’s no one left. Starve to death, if you have to, before you do any of this. If you so much as breathe of Amenty, you’re doomed.) • • • •

Mr. Pernille and I sit in the room a while, quietly. I touch the bouquet, move the peony facing out, move my chair back from the table. The sweetmeats are battered and swimming in a butter sauce, with a side of baguette. No wonder he died so young. At least there are no almonds in it; I send back anything with almonds. When I have my nerve, I touch the end of the baguette to the body above the heart, arm out like I’m knighting it, alerting the departed to what will happen now. I come back to the table. I take a bite. Mr. Pernille feeds me his sins. The repenting comes after, that list of sorrows isn’t in the meat; you get everything first, everything they’ve ever done, long before the weighing happens, when the black- eyed beast ever opens her jaws to swallow diseased hearts whole. Sometimes a wound’s so great that the body goes into shock to protect itself, instantly—the body knows better than you do. You only realize you’ve been sliced open when you look down and see the blood. I had one, once, a bicycle accident when I was a teen, nearly lost the leg. My knee and shin are made of metal; I still have gravel embedded there. (I could probably get it taken out. I don’t ask.) But once you see the wound you can’t lie to yourself any more, and you feel every vein and artery swinging gently as your brain tries furiously to process the white noise, the ground turning to sand, the strange deflating feeling that’s all the support in your body giving out. It’s more than pain. It’s too great for pain. It’s a total system failure you can never process. The pain is what happens when you live with it; the rest, your body can’t understand. That’s the beginning of what it feels like to eat sins. A rabbit being blown up by buckshot is what it feels like to eat sins. Lighting a hill of ants on fire is what it feels like. I make it through half a plate of sweetmeats before the sounds start. The solitude rider’s in my contract not because I’ll scream (I probably will, eventually, I’ve turned my throat so raw I cough up blood after), but because before that it’s utterly silent except for silver on the plate and the sounds of someone eating. There are little taps of the knife against the table, slow and dampened like a bad dream, and the sound of reptile teeth snapping shut. Nothing else. It’s not a silence people hear much anymore; it’s not a sound that’s easy to take, when you’re waiting for something to happen. The screams are welcome. The silence almost got them thinking.

• • • •

You come into this world screaming. You go out in tears. There’s no word yet invented for what happens when you and I are in a room alone. There, it’s the old ways and no mistake; there it’s only a corpse gone purple at the bottom and two coins no one will ever take back and the bread soaked through with sweat and your sins gleaming in every maggot, and sand under my eyelids and the wrappings still waiting and four jars lined up neatly with the faces watching, and my feet aching and my body going heavy everywhere and my throat too dry to swallow but my teeth gleaming wide, and the dark night all around us and a long walk home, and far off, silent, coming closer: wolves. The sounds for that, they’ve never put a name to.

• • • • In the Middle Kingdom, you gave your symbols to the dead, but somehow Europe spreads out and out, and someone a thousand years ago comes across a sin eater dragged across the sea to absolve the sinful dying, and things become tangled. Those sin eaters give two calls at the graveside. The first is made to the assembled company, to assure the living that the sins of the dead have been consumed, that they got their money’s worth—a few coins, thrown from a distance. Sin eaters shouldn’t be encouraged to mingle with the population. The sin eater reassures everyone they’ve forfeited their soul for the privilege. It’s good for business. You don’t want them worrying about how they’re treating you. They’re grieving. When the sin eater goes, they burn the bowl and the cup and anything he touched, until nothing’s left but the splinters he carries back in his fingertips. The second call the sin eater makes to the dead, to keep them where they are. He sings out, “Come not down the lanes or in our meadows.” Nobody’s looking for the dearly departed. They want their dead swallowed and gone.

• • • • I’ve seen wolves eat. They pull their lips back from their teeth, scrape the meat from the bone, peel it neatly out from the casing of skin. A crocodile opens its mouth, and the animal vanishes.

• • • •

When I stand up from the table, there’s no sign of my being there. There’s no sign anyone’s eaten at all. I lick the plate clean; not a drop of wine left over, not a crumb on the cloth. The utensils are perfectly aligned. I drank all the water that the herbs were standing in. This is a religion of its own. You treat it seriously. Europeans of our kind got in trouble in some places, back when, from priests who didn’t like freelance transubstantiation. Poaching in the fields of the Lord. We aren’t. If there’s a Lord, he doesn’t have much use for the dear departed. Pernille’s son is waiting at the far end of the hall, holding a sealed envelope embossed with his monogram. “You must feel terrible,” he says. His eyes are filled with tears. They glitter underneath. I fold my hands around the bouquet of herbs and nod once, slowly. They love this part. They’re making a story, for later. “It is done,” I say, dropping the contractions so I sound like a seer in a play. Mr. Pernille the Younger tries hard not to look thrilled as he hands me the envelope with the very tips of his fingers. Once I was dealing with a widower who wasn’t going to rest until he knew his wife’s transgressions were awful enough to justify my price. He kept me twenty minutes, asking. He’d have demanded a list—he was one of those —except that I reminded him the Old Ways bound me to silence and he’d signed his name to it. “It must be a terrible curse,” he told me. I’d told him, “Like a bad marriage.” It’s better business to nod and look heavy. Someone will come looking soon for a house to the west of the Nile, and the new Mr. Pernille should write down my number, and mention a dweller in Amenty.

• • • •

For people who can afford to have their chefs impress you, my clients provide the lightest meals I’ve ever had. You have to breathe through all of it, you have to sit through it all until your throat shreds, but you can only eat what the dead considered sins. You can leave a four-course dinner still hungry, in this line of work.

• • • •

Mr. Pernille’s memorial service was busy—he was a powerful man—but night in a cemetery levels everything. Bodies all liquefy the same. I’ve walked here, barely able to lift my feet, because it’s important that only my own two legs have brought me. (Old ways.) I lay the bundle of herbs against the headstone. They’re a risk—not all the old ways work the same, mix traditions at your peril—but none of the dead have complained. The rosemary goes straight to the back of my throat. It’s been nearly thirty hours, but when vomited back up on the grave, the food becomes whole, exactly as it was when I sat down, unknifed, undisturbed; all that’s missing is the plate. The ground trembles underneath me, just enough to send up a layer of dust, but my hands are steady as I stick the herbs into the ground like the blade of a sword, and the dirt there trembles and falls away until the meal sinks into the grave and vanishes. I feel lighter—the walk home will be faster than the walk here—but the hunger is already stalking the edges of the vast darkness, an animal prowling for sins, impassive eyes, a jaw crammed with teeth, one paw in front of the other. I let it. I’ll take plenty of transgressions to the grave with me, but with some people, however light their conscience is, I know what they’ve really done, and it’s a sin even to ask someone else to carry that. A sin eater has to stand trial for everything he eats. My heart will be devoured someday, when I go to the west of the Nile, but not for these. Sin is a renewable resource, I tell them when they ask. Sleep well, Mr. Pernille. See you soon. The bouquet blooms from the hole in the dirt, a last gift for the dead that should keep him right where he is. “Come not down the lanes or in our meadows,” I say. The sounds that will soon be coming from the grave aren’t for human ears, and I turn my back. I’ve paid my respects. I start the long walk home to the edge of the wild, soft as lion’s paws, feeling light and ravenous. Far off, silent, coming closer: wolves.

© 2014 by Genevieve Valentine. Genevieve Valentine is the author of the novel Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti. Her short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from magazines such as Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Escape Pod, and in many anthologies, including Armored, Under the Moons of Mars, Running with the Pack, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Federations, Teeth, and The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, among others. Her writing has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. To learn more, read our Author Spotlight on Genevieve Valentine. Sunbleached Nathan Ballingrud

“We’re God’s beautiful creatures,” the vampire said, something like joy leaking into its voice for the first time since it had crawled under this house four days ago. “We’re the pinnacle of his art. If you believe in that kind of thing, anyway. That’s why the night is our time. He hangs jewels in the sky for us. People, they think we’re at some kinda disadvantage because we can’t go out in the sunlight. But who needs it. The day is small and cramped. You got your one lousy star.” “You believe in God?” Joshua asked. The crawlspace beneath his house was close and hot; his body was coated in a dense sheen of sweat. A cockroach crawled over his fingers and he jerked his hand away. Late summer pressed onto this small Mississippi coastal town like the heel of a boot. The heat was an act of violence. “I was raised Baptist. My thoughts on the matter are complicated.” The crawlspace was contained partially by sheets of aluminum siding and partially by decaying wooden latticework. It was by this latter that Joshua crouched, hiding in the hot spears of sunlight which intruded into the shadows and made a protective cage around him. “That’s why it’s so easy for us to seduce. God loves us, so the world does too. Seduction is your weapon, kid. You’re what—fifteen? You think seduction is pumping like a jackrabbit in your momma’s car. You don’t know anything. But you will soon enough.” The vampire moved in the shadows, and abruptly the stink of burnt flesh and spoiled meat greased the air. It had opened a wound in itself, moving. Joshua knew that it tried to stay still as much as it could, to facilitate the healing, but the slowly shifting angles of the sunbeams made that impossible. He squinted his eyes, trying to make out a shape, but it was useless. He could sense it back there, though—a dark, fluttering presence. Something made of wings. “Invite me in,” it said. “Later,” Joshua said. “Not yet. After you finish changing me.” The vampire coughed; it sounded like a snapping bone. Something wet hit the ground. “Well come here then, boy.” It moved again, this time closer to the amber light. Its face emerged from the shadows like something rising from deep water. It hunched on its hands and knees, swinging its head like a dog trying to catch a scent. Its face had been burnt off. Thin, parchment-strips of skin hung from blackened sinew and muscle. Its eyes were dark, hollow caves. Even in this wretched state, though, it seemed weirdly graceful. A dancer pretending to be a spider. For the second time, Joshua laid himself on the soft earth, a-crawl with ants and cockroaches, centipedes and earthworms, positioning his upper body beyond the reach of the streaming sunlight. The light’s color was deepening, its angles rising until they were almost parallel to the ground. Evening was settling over the earth. The vampire pressed the long fingers of one charred hand onto his chest, as delicately as a lover. Heat flushed Joshua’s body. Every nerve ending was a trembling candle flame. The vampire touched its lips to his throat; its tongue sought the jugular, the heavy river inside. It slid its teeth into his skin. A sharp, lovely pain. Joshua stared at the underside of his home: the rusted pipes, the duct tape, the yellow sheets of insulation. It looked so different from beneath. So ugly. He heard footsteps overhead as somebody he loved moved around inside it, attending to mysterious offices. • • • •

Four days ago: he’d stood on the front porch of his home in the deep blue hollow of early morning, watching the waters of the Gulf roll onto the beach. It was his favorite time of the day: that sweet, lonesome hinge between darkness and daylight, when he could pretend he was alone in the world and free to take it on his own terms. In a few moments he would go inside and wake his five-year-old brother Michael, make him breakfast, and get them both ready for school, while their mother still slept in after her night shift at Red Lobster. But this time belonged to him. The vampire came from the direction of town, trailing black smoke and running hard across the no man’s land between his own house and the nearest standing building. There’d been a neighborhood there once, but the hurricane wiped it away a few years ago. What remained had looked like a mouthful of shattered teeth, until the state government came through and razed everything to the ground. Their own house had been badly damaged— the storm had scalped it of its top floor, depositing it somewhere out in the Gulf—but the rest had stood its ground, though it canted steeply to one side now, and on windy days you could feel it coming through the walls. It was over that empty expanse the vampire fled, first billowing smoke like a diesel engine and then erupting into flame as the sun cracked the horizon. The vampire ran directly for his house and launched itself at the opening to the crawlspace under the porch steps. Oily smoke eeled up through the wooden planks and dissipated into the lightening sky. Joshua had remained frozen in place for the whole event, save the rising clamor in his heart.

• • • •

Their mother would be late getting home from work— and even later if she went out with that jackass Tyler again—so Joshua fed his little brother and directed him to his bedroom. They passed the stairwell on their way, which was capped now by sheets of plywood hammered over the place where it used to open onto the second floor. “You want me to read you a story?” he asked, reaching for the copy of The Wind in the Willows by the bedside. Michael didn’t really understand the story, but he liked it when Joshua did the voices. “No,” he said, leaping into his bed and pulling the covers over himself. “No story? Are you sure?” “I just wanna go to sleep tonight.” “Okay,” Joshua said. He felt strangely bereft. He reached down and turned on Michael’s nightlight, then switched off the lamp. “Will you cuddle with me, Josh?” he said. “I won’t ‘cuddle’ with you, but I’ll lay down with you for a little bit.” “Okay.” Cuddle was a word their dad used before he moved away, and it embarrassed him that Michael held onto it. He eased back on top of the covers and let Michael rest his head in the crook of his arm. “Are you scared of anything, Josh?” “What, like monsters?” “I don’t know, I guess.” “No, I’m not scared of monsters. I’m not scared of anything.” Michael thought for a minute, then said, “I’m scared of storms.” “That’s silly. It’s just a bunch of wind and rain.” “ . . . I know.” Michael drifted into silence. Joshua felt vaguely guilty about shutting him down like that, but he really didn’t have it in him to have the storm talk again. That was something Michael was going to have to get over on his own, since logic didn’t seem to have any effect on his thinking. As he monitored his brother’s breathing, waiting for him to fall asleep, he found himself wondering about how he would feel toward his family once the transformation was complete. He was worried that he would lose all feeling for them. Or, worse, that he’d think of them as prey. He didn’t think that would happen; everything he’d ever read about vampires seemed to indicate that they kept all their memories and emotions from life. But the thought troubled him nonetheless. That was why he wouldn’t let the vampire into his house until he became one, too; he wanted to be sure it went after the right person. It couldn’t have his family. The question of love was tricky, anyway. He felt protective of his brother and his mom, but he had a hard time aligning that feeling with a word like love. Maybe it was the same thing; he honestly didn’t know. He tried to imagine how he’d feel if they were gone, and he didn’t come up with much. That thought troubled him even more. Maybe he would think of Michael and his mother as pets. The notion brightened his mood. People loved their pets. • • • •

Michael pretended to be asleep until Joshua left the room. He loved his older brother in the strong, uncomplicated way children loved anything; but recently he’d had become an expert in negotiating the emotional weather in his home, and Joshua’s moods had become more turbulent than ever. He got mad at strange things, like when Michael wanted to hold hands, or when Mom brought Tyler home. Michael thought Tyler was weird because he wouldn’t talk to them, but he didn’t understand why Joshua got so mad about it. He listened as his brother’s footsteps receded down the hallway. He waited a few more minutes just to be sure. Then he slid down and scooted under the bed on his stomach, pressing his ear to the floor. The house swayed and creaked around him, filling the night with bizarre noises. He hated living here since the storm happened. He felt like he was living in the stomach of a monster. After a few minutes of careful listening, he heard the voice.

• • • •

Joshua opened his window and waited. He didn’t even try to sleep anymore, even though he was constantly tired. The night was clear and cool, with a soft breeze coming in from the sea. The palm trees across the street rustled quietly to themselves, shaggy-haired giants sharing secrets. After about half an hour, the vampire crawled from an opening near the back of the house, emerging just a few feet from his window. Joshua’s heart started to gallop. He felt the familiar, instinctive fear: the reaction of the herd animal to the lion. The vampire stood upright, facing the sea. Most of its flesh had burnt away; the white round curve of its skull reflected moonlight. Its clothes were dark rags in the wind. A car pulled into the driveway around front, its engine idling for a few moments before chuckling to a halt. Mom was home. The vampire’s body seemed to coil, every muscle drawing taut at once. It lifted its nose, making tiny jerking motions, looking for the scent. He heard his mother’s laughter, and a man’s voice. Tyler was with her. The vampire took a step toward the front of the house, its joints too loose, as if they were hinged with liquid instead of bone and ligament. Even in its broken, half- dead state, it moved quickly and fluidly. He thought again of a dancer. He imagined how it would look in full health, letting the night fill its body like a kite. Moving through the air like an eel through water. “Take him,” Joshua whispered. The vampire turned its eyeless face head toward him. Joshua was smiling. “Take him,” he said again. “You know I can’t,” it said, rage riding high in its voice. “Why the hell don’t you let me in!” “That’s not the deal,” he said. “Afterwards. Then you can come in. And you can have Tyler.” He heard the front door open, and the voices moved inside. Mom and Tyler were in the living room, giggling and whispering. Half drunk already. “He’s all I’ll need,” the vampire said. “Big country boy like that. Do me right up.” Someone knocked on his bedroom door. His mother’s voice came through. “Josh? Are you on the phone in there? You’re supposed to be asleep!” “Sorry Mom,” he said over his shoulder. He heard Tyler’s muffled voice, and his mother started laughing. “Shhh!” It made Joshua’s stomach turn. When he looked back outside, the vampire had already slid back under the house. He sighed and leaned his head out, feeling the cool wind on his face. The night was vast above him. He imagined rising into it, through clouds piled like snowdrifts and into a wash of ice crystal stars, waiting for its boundary but not finding one. Just rising higher and higher into the dark and the cold.

• • • •

The school day passed in a long, punishing haze. His ability to concentrate was fading steadily. His body felt like it was made of lead. He’d never been so exhausted in his life, but every time he closed his eyes he was overcome with a manic energy, making him fidget in his chair. It took the whole force of his will not to get up and start pacing the classroom. A fever simmered in his brain. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead and was astonished by the heat. Sounds splintered in his ear, and the light coming through the windows was sharp-edged. His gaze roved over the classroom, over his classmates hunched over their desks or whispering carelessly in the back rows or staring like farm animals into the empty air. He’d never been one of them, and that was okay. It was just how things were. He used to feel smaller than them, less significant, as if he’d been born without some essential gene to make him acceptable to other people. But now he assessed them anew. They seemed different, suddenly. They looked like victims. Like little pink pigs, waiting for someone to slash their throats and fulfill their potential. He imagined the room bathed in blood, himself striding through it, a raven amongst the carcasses. Strutting like any carrion king.

• • • •

He was halfway into the crawlspace when nausea overwhelmed him and he dry heaved into the dirt, the muscles in his sides seizing in pain. He curled into a fetal position and pressed his face into the cool earth until it subsided, leaving him gasping in exhaustion. His throat was swollen and dry. “I can’t sleep,” the vampire said from the shadows. Joshua blinked and lifted his gaze, still not raising his head from the ground. He didn’t think he could summon the strength for it, even if he’d wanted to. The vampire was somewhere in the far corner beneath the house, somewhere behind the bars of sunlight slanting through the latticework. “The light moves around too much down here,” it said, apparently oblivious to Joshua’s pain. “I can’t rest. I need to rest.” Joshua was silent. He didn’t know what he was expected to say. “Invite me in,” it said. “I can make it dark inside.” “What’s happening to me?” Joshua asked. He had to force the air out of his lungs to speak. He could barely hear himself. “You’re changing. You’re almost there.” “I feel like I’m dying.” “Heh, that’s funny.” Joshua turned his face into the soil. He felt a small tickling movement crawling up his pant leg. “I remember when I died. I was terrified. It’s okay to be scared, Joshua.” That seemed like a funny thing to say. He blinked, staring into the place where the voice was coming from. “I was in this barn. I was a hand on this farm that grew sugar cane. Me and a few others slept out there in the loft. One day this young fella turned up missing. We didn’t think too much about it. Good natured boy, worked hard, but he was kinda touched in the head, and we figured it was always a matter of time before he went and got himself into some trouble. We thought we’d wait for the weekend and then go off and look for him. “But he came back before the weekend. Sailed in through the second floor window of the barn one night. I about pissed myself. Seemed like he walked in on a cloud. Before we could think of anything to say he laid into us. Butchered most of the boys like hogs. Three of us he left though. Maybe ‘cause we were nicer to him, I don’t know. He decided to make us like him. Who knows why. But see, he was too stupid to tell us what was going on. Didn’t know himself, I guess. But he just kept us up there night after night, feeding on us a little bit at a time. Our dead friends around us the whole time, growing flies.” “Why didn’t you run when the sun came up?” Joshua had forgotten his pain. He sat up, edging closer to the ribbons of light, his head hunched below the underside of the house. “Son of a bitch spiked our legs to the floor of the loft. Wrapped barbed wire around our arms. He was determined, I’ll give him that. And no one came from the house. Didn’t take a genius to figure out why.” The vampire paused, seemingly lost in the memory. “Well anyway, before too long we got up and started our new lives. He went off god knows where. So did the other two. Never seen them since.” Joshua took it all in, feeling the shakes come upon him again. “I’m worried about my family,” he said. “I’m worried they won’t understand.” “You won’t feel so sentimental, afterwards.” This was too much to process. He decided he needed to sleep for a while. Let the fever abate, then approach it all with a fresh mind. “I’m gonna lay down,” he said, turning back toward the opening. The light there was like a boiling cauldron, but the thought of lying in his own bed was enough to push through. “Wait!” the vampire said. “I need to feed first.” Joshua decided to ignore it. He was already crawling out, and he didn’t have the energy to turn around. “BOY!” He froze, and looked behind him. The vampire lunged forward, and its head passed into a sunbeam. The flesh hissed, emitting a thin coil of smoke. A candle flame flared around it, and the stench of ruined flesh rolled over him in a wave, as though a bag of rancid meat had been torn open. The vampire pulled back, the blind sockets of his eyes seeming to float in the dim white bone. “Don’t play with me, boy.” “I’m not,” Joshua said. “I’ll be back later.” And he crawled out into the jagged sunlight.

• • • • He awoke to find his mother hovering over him. She was wearing her white Red Lobster shirt, with the nametag and the ridiculous tie. She had one hand on his forehead, simultaneously taking his temperature and pushing the hair out of his face. “Hey honey,” she said. “Mom?” He pulled his head away from her and passed a hand over his face. He was on the couch in the living room. Late afternoon light streamed in through the window. No more than an hour could have elapsed. “What are you doing home?” “Mikey called me. He said you passed out.” He noticed his brother sitting on the easy chair on the other side of the room. Michael regarded him solemnly, his little hands folded in his lap like he was in church. “You’re white as a sheet,” his mother said. “How long have you been feeling bad?” “I don’t know. Just today I guess.” “I think we should get you to a hospital.” “No!” He made an effort to sit up. “No, I’m fine. I just need to rest for a while.” She straightened, and he could see her wrestling with the idea. He knew she didn’t want to go to the hospital any more than he did. They didn’t have any insurance, and here she was missing a shift at work besides. “Really, I’m okay. Besides, we’d have to wait forever, and isn’t Tyler coming over tonight?” His mother tensed. She looked at him searchingly, like she was trying the fathom his motive. She said, “Joshua, you’re more important to me than Tyler is. You do understand that, don’t you?” He looked away. He felt his face flush, and he didn’t want her to see it. “I know,” he said. “I know you don’t like him.” “It’s not that,” he said, but of course it was that. Tyler had to be here so he could feed him to the vampire. He had a feeling that tonight was going to be the night. He didn’t know how he could go on much more, as weak as he was. Michael piped up, his voice cautious yet hopeful: “It doesn’t matter anyway, ’cause Daddy’s coming back.” His mother sighed and turned to look at him. Joshua could see all the years gathered in her face, and he felt a sudden and unexpected sympathy for her. “No, Mikey. He’s not.” “Yes he is, Mom, he told me. He asked if it was okay.” Her voice hardened, although she was obviously trying to hide it. “Has he been talking to you on the phone?” She looked to Joshua for confirmation. “Not me,” Joshua said. It occurred to him that Dad may have been calling while he was under the house, talking to the vampire. He felt at once both guilty that he’d left his brother to deal with that alone, and outraged that he’d missed out on the calls. “You tell him next time he calls that he can talk to me about that,” she said, not even bothering to hide her anger now. “In fact, don’t even talk to him. Hang up on him if he calls again. I’m going to get his number blocked, that son of a bitch.” Tears piled in Michael’s eyes and he lowered his face. His body trembled as he tried to keep it all inside. A wild anger coursed through Joshua’s body, animating him despite the fever. “Shut up!” he shouted. “Shut up about Dad! You think Tyler is better? He can’t even look at us! He’s a fucking retard!” His mother looked at him in pained astonishment for a long moment. Then she put her hand over her mouth and stifled a sob. Aghast, Michael launched himself at her, a terrified little missile. He wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her chest. “It’s okay, Mom, it’s okay!” Joshua unfolded himself from the couch and walked down the hall to his room. His face was alight with shame and rage. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to feel. He closed the door behind him, muffling the sounds of the others comforting each other. He threw himself onto his bed, pulling the pillow over his face. The only things he could hear now were the wooden groaning of the house as it shifted on its foundations, and the diminished sound of the blood pumping in his own head.

• • • •

Their father left right after the hurricane. He used to work on the oil rigs. He’d get on a helicopter and disappear for a few weeks, and money would show up in the bank account. Then he’d come home for a week, and they’d all have fun together. He’d fight with their mother sometimes, but he always went back out to sea before things had a chance to get bad. After the hurricane, all that work dried up. The rigs were compromised and the Gulf Coast oil industry knocked back on its heels. Dad was stranded in the house. Suddenly there was no work to stop the fighting. He moved to California shortly thereafter, saying he’d send for them when he found another job. A week later their mother told them the truth. Joshua still remembered the night of the storm. The four of them rode it out together in the house. It sounded like Hell itself had come unchained and was stalking the world right outside their window. But he felt safe inside. Even when the upper floor ripped away in a scream of metal and plaster and wood, revealing a black, twisting sky, he never felt like he was in any real danger. The unremarkable sky he’d always known had changed into something three dimensional and alive. It was like watching the world break open, exposing its secret heart. His father was crouched beside him. They stared at it together in amazement, grinning like a pair of blissed-out lunatics.

• • • •

Joshua heard a gentle rapping on his door. “I’m going to the store,” his mother said. “I’m gonna get something for your fever. Is there anything you want for dinner?” “I’m not hungry.” He waited for her car to pull out of the driveway before he swung his legs out of bed and tried to stand. He could do it as long as he kept one hand on the wall. He couldn’t believe how tired he was. His whole body felt cold, and he couldn’t feel his fingers. It was coming tonight. The certainty of it inspired no excitement, no joy, no fear. His body was too numb to feel anything. He just wanted it to happen so he could get past this miserable stage. He shuffled out of his room and down the hall. The vampire needed to feed on him once more, and he wanted to get down there before his mother got back. As he passed by his brother’s door, though, he stopped short. Somebody was whispering on the other side. He opened the door to find his little brother lying prone on the floor, half under the bed. Late afternoon shadows gathered in the corners. His face was a small moon in the dim light, one ear pressed to the hardwood. He was whispering urgently. “Michael?” His brother’s body jerked in alarm, and he sat up quickly, staring guiltily back. Joshua flipped the light switch on. “What are you doing?” Something cold was growing inside him. Michael shrugged. “Tell me!” “Talking to Daddy.” “No.” “He’s living under the house. He wants us to let him back in. I was afraid to because Mom might get mad at me.” “ . . . oh, Mikey.” His voice quavered. “That’s not Dad. That’s not Dad.” He found himself moving down the hall again, quickly now, fired with renewed energy. He felt like a passenger in his body: he experienced a mild curiosity as he saw himself rummaging through the kitchen drawer until he found the claw hammer his mother kept there; a sense of fearful anticipation as he pushed the front door open and stumbled down the porch steps in the failing light, not even pausing to gather his strength before he hooked the claw into the nearest latticework and wrenched it away from the wall in a long segment. “We had a deal!” he screamed, getting to work on another segment. “You son of a bitch! We had a deal!” He worked fast, alternately smashing wooden latticework to pieces and prying aluminum panels free from the house. “You lied to me! You lied!” Nails squealed as they were wrenched from their moorings. The sun was too low for the light to intrude beneath the house now, but tomorrow the vampire would find the crawlspace uninhabitable. He saw the vampire, once, just beneath the lip of the house. It said nothing, but its face tracked him as he worked. The sun was sliding down the sky, leaking its light into the ground and into the sea. Darkness swarmed from the east, spreading stars in its wake. Joshua hurried inside, dropping the hammer on the floor and collapsing onto the couch, utterly spent. A feeling of profound loss hovered somewhere on the edge of his awareness. He had turned his back on something, on some grand possibility. He knew the pain would come later.

• • • •

Soon his mother returned, and he took some of the medicine she’d bought for him, though he didn’t expect it to do any good. He made a cursory attempt to eat some of the pizza she’d brought too, but his appetite was gone. She sat beside him on the couch and brushed the hair away from his forehead. They watched some TV, and Joshua slipped in and out of sleep. At one point he stared through the window over the couch. The moon traced a glittering arc through the sky. Constellations rotated above him and the planets rolled through the heavens. He felt a yearning that nearly pulled him out of his body. He could see for billions of miles.

• • • •

At some point his mother roused him from the couch and guided him to his room. He cast a glance into Michael’s room when he passed it, and saw his brother fast asleep. “You know I love you, Josh,” his mother said at his door. He nodded. “I know Mom. I love you too.” His body was in agony. He was pretty sure he was going to die, but he was too tired to care.

• • • •

A scream woke him. The heavy sound of running footsteps, followed by a crash. Then silence. Joshua tried to rouse himself. He felt like he’d lost control of his body. His eyelids fluttered open. He saw his brother standing in the doorway, tears streaming down his face. “Oh no, Josh, oh no, oh no . . .” He lost consciousness. • • • •

The next morning he was able to move again. The fever had broken sometime during the night; his sheets were soaked with sweat. He found his mother on the kitchen table. She had kicked some plates and silverware onto the floor in what had apparently been a brief struggle. Her head was hanging backward off the edge of the table, and she had been sloppily drained. Blood splashed the floor beneath her. Her eyes were open and glassy. His brother was suspended upside down in the living room, his feet tied with a belt to the ceiling fan, which had come partially free from its anchor. He’d been drained too. He was still wearing his pajamas. On the floor a few feet away from him, where it had fluttered to rest, was a welcome home card he had made for their father. The plywood covering the open stairwell had been wrenched free. The vampire stood on the top stair, looking into deep blue sky of early morning. Joshua stopped at the bottom stair, gazing up at it. Its burnt skin was covered in a clear coating of pus and lymphatic fluid, as its body started to heal. White masses filled its eye sockets like spiders’ eggs. Tufts of black hair stubbled its peeled head. “I waited for you,” the vampire said. Joshua’s lower lip trembled. He tried to say something but he couldn’t get his voice to work. The vampire extended a hand. “Come up here. The sun’s almost up.” Almost against his will, he ascended the stairs into the open air. The vampire wrapped its fingers around the back of his head and drew him close. Its lips grazed his neck. It touched its tongue to his skin. “Thank you for your family,” it said. “ . . . no . . .” It sank its teeth into Joshua’s neck and drew from him one more time. A gorgeous heat seeped through his body, and he found himself being lowered gently to the top of the stair. “It’s okay to be afraid,” the vampire said. His head rolled to one side; he looked over the area where the second story used to be. There was his old room. There was Michael’s. And that’s where his parents slept. Now it was all just open air. “This is my house now,” the vampire said, standing over him and surveying the land around them. “At least for a few more days.” It looked down at Joshua with its pale new eyes. “I’d appreciate it if you stayed out.” The vampire descended the stairs. A few minutes later, the sun came up, first as a pink stain, then as gash of light on the edge of the world. Joshua felt the heat rising in him again: a fierce, purging radiance starting from his belly and working rapidly outward. He smelled himself cooking, watched the smoke begin to pour out of him, crawling skyward. And then the day swung its heavy lid over the sky. The ground baked hard as an anvil in the heat, and the sun hammered the color out of everything.

© 2011 by Nathan Ballingrud. Originally published in Teeth, edited by Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but spent most of his life in the Deep South. He has worked as a bartender in New Orleans and a cook on offshore oil rigs; currently he’s a waiter in a fancy restaurant. His stories have appeared in several anthologies and year’s best collections. He won the Shirley Jackson Award for his short story “The Monsters of Heaven.” His first book, North American Lake Monsters: Stories, came out from Small Beer Press in 2013. He lives in Asheville, NC, with his daughter. To learn more, read our Author Spotlight on Nathan Ballingrud. NONFICTION The H Word: Being in the Presence of the Dead Joe McKinney

Recently I was reading Peter Clines’ stunningly brilliant novel, 14, and came across this passage:

“No,” said Nate. “To be honest, I think I’m going to sleep in the lounge. Maybe forever.” “You’re not sleeping in the lounge,” said Veek. He shook his head. “I know it shouldn’t freak me out. I know he’s been there all along, but still . . .” “It’s normal,” said Tim. “Everybody freaks out when they see their first dead body. No matter how long it’s been dead.” Nate looked at him. “You’re not freaking out.” “It’s not my first dead body.”

A few days later I read the following in a short story called “Father’s Day” by Michael Connelly: The victim’s tiny body was left alone in the emergency room enclosure. The doctors, after halting their resuscitation efforts, had solemnly retreated and pulled the plastic curtains closed around the bed. The entire construction, management and purpose of the hospital was to prevent death. When the effort failed, nobody wanted to see it. The curtains were opaque. Harry Bosch looked like a ghost as he approached and then split them to enter. He stepped into the enclosure and stood somber and alone with the dead. The boy’s body took up less than a quarter of the big metal bed. He had worked thousands of cases but nothing ever touched Bosch like the sight of a young child’s lifeless body. Fifteen months old. Cases in which the child’s age was still counted in months were the most difficult of all. He knew that if he dwelled too long he would start to question everything—from the meaning of life to his mission in it.

It seemed like a strange coincidence that I should come across those two passages in the span of a few days, because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how horrific it is to be in the presence of the dead. In our world the closest most of us get to this experience is seeing the occasional mangled deer or crushed squirrel on the side of the road. But those we quickly pass by and just as quickly put out of our minds. When it comes to people, most of us know the dead only as waxy, foreign looking shells on display in coffins at the occasional funeral. Our world today has largely divorced us from experiencing the many strange and conflicting feelings that come with being in the presence of the dead. We don’t know that horror as much anymore, no matter how many times we see it on TV, and so I wanted to talk about that today. Being in the presence of the dead is one of the most raw and traumatic experiences in life, and in horror fiction too, and I want to talk about why that is. Why do the dead make us feel the way they do? Is a dead body simply a memento mori, or is something else going on? In my day job I’m a patrol supervisor for the San Antonio Police Department. I work the west side of San Antonio. The Wild, Wild West, as we call it. The cops who make the calls, who make the arrests, who keep the peace in the busiest part of the city, they work for me. I’m the one they call when they have major crime scenes that need managing, or when something just doesn’t look right. What that means is that I have to see a lot of dead bodies. And I mean a lot of them. Not too long ago one of my officers called because he had a decomp (that’s police parlance for a body that’s been rotting in place for a good long while) and he wasn’t sure if it was suicide or homicide. I showed up to the apartment and there was the dead guy, seated on the floor (or almost on the floor; his butt was about two inches off the carpet). He had a noose around his neck, though you could barely see it because his skin was so bloated and gummy with rot that it had sort of oozed over the rope. “So, what do you think?” the officer asked. “Suicide,” I told him. “But he’s sitting down. Wouldn’t he have rolled over or something when he started to choke? That’s like an instinct, isn’t it?” “No,” I said. “What you’re looking at is an act of will. If you want to do something bad enough, you’ll see it through.” He looked from me to the body and shook his head. “Besides,” I added, “look at all that medication in there in his bathroom. Those drugs are for hepatitis and cancer. He did this because he was hurting pretty bad. And look up there.” I pointed to the ceiling where our dead guy had nailed the rope to the rafter. “He could have used one nail to do that, but he used a whole handful. He did that because he didn’t want the rope to slip off. And look at where he chose to do this, here in the bedroom, so his relatives coming in the front door wouldn’t have to see him. I bet if you look around here you’ll find a note. Probably in the other room, out of sight of the bedroom.” The officer nodded. We both stood there, staring at the body. The apartment didn’t have air conditioning, and it felt like we were standing inside an oven, even though it was the middle of the night. The smell was really bad. Then the officer chuckled nervously and said, “So, Sarge, I guess this is one for your next book, huh?” I offered him a bland smile. Cops develop their gallows humor long before they learn that it’s actually a defense mechanism against the horror of confronting your own mortality, and this officer was one of the young ones. He still had a lot to learn. “Go look for the note,” I said. He stiffened. “Yes, sir.” When he was gone I found myself staring at that dead man’s face. Suicides always get to me. Something about standing in the presence of someone so desperate to take control of their pain and their emotional devastation that they would resort to this makes me feel numb. In the other room, the young officer was clumsily knocking around. Something fell over and broke. I almost called out to him to be careful, but held my tongue because my mind was already drifting from my day job to what I consider my real job. I was thinking about what that officer had said about my next book. So many people seem to have that opinion about horror, and about zombie fiction in particular. To them, a book about shambling dead things eating the living must be nothing but gratuitous violence and gore. What else could it be? Well, I take exception to that. I started writing because I was scared of the future. My wife and I had just gotten married. Then we had a daughter, and the world suddenly seemed so much more complex. In the wink of an eye, I went from a carefree young cop—a lot like the one in the other room knocking stuff over—to a man with more responsibilities than he could count. I had a mortgage and bills and aging parents and schedules to manage and a kid to raise. For the first time I started wondering if I had enough insurance, and how I was going to pay for my daughter’s college, and if there’d be enough savings for my retirement. And in a terrifying moment of self-reflection, I realized I needed a will. In short, I had obligations and commitments coming at me from every angle. I’d been writing stories for a good long while at that point, starting sometime in my early teens, but never with the intention of doing anything with them. I would write them out on a yellow legal pad, staple the finished pages together, and leave them on the corner of my desk until the next idea came along. Never once did it occur to me to do something with what I’d written. I just threw the already written stories away and forgot them. But then came adulthood, and parenthood, and I found myself groping to put the world in order, to regain some of the control I felt I’d lost. I realized that writing could help me with that. I realized that I could focus my anxieties and make something useful of them. And so I started writing a science fiction novel. It was a big space opera epic, and it was pure trash. Every word of it was awful. The reason? Well, it wasn’t authentic. It wasn’t me. The real me, the kid who sat at his desk filling up yellow legal pads rather than going out bike riding with his friends, was a horror junkie. I was crazy for the stuff. Horror was my first literary love, and I figured seeing as love was what drove me to return to writing that I should write what I love. I was feeling like the world was rushing in at me from every side, so I wrote a zombie story about characters who had the living dead rushing in at them from every side. That’s when things started to click. That’s when it all made sense. It made sense because I was finally tapping into a real source of fear. I sincerely believe that fear is the most authentic, and the most useful, emotion available to the storyteller. It is as vital as love, and indeed, gives love its profundity, for what makes love, and family, and everything we treasure so valuable but the fear that it could all go away in the blink of an eye? That’s why being in the presence of the dead has such a terribly arresting effect on us. On all of us, no matter how hardened by experience we may have become. Like Bosch in the passage quoted above, I have seen more dead bodies than I care to remember. I have seen a dead baby that’s been tossed into a dumpster. I have seen what a man looks like when he’s been beaten to death with a hammer. I have seen suicides by shotgun, and the body of a prostitute eaten by turtles along the banks of the San Antonio River. I have met the surprised and terrified gaze of a rape-murder victim as the dirt from a shallow grave was swept from her eyes with a fingerprint brush. The dead arrest us. They seize us in the sense that we are not free to walk away from the cold hard reality that we too will die. In his essay, “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud writes that there “is scarcely any other matter [. . .] upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times, and in which discarded forms have been so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death.” Freud argues that we’ve changed so little in our reaction to death, and to the dead, because being in the presence of death elicits such an overwhelmingly powerful flood of emotion, fear being tantamount among them. He even goes on to suggest that that flood of emotion is really a manifestation of the primitive fear that the “dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor and seeks to carry him off to share his new life with him.” I don’t think any of us believe this in a literal sense, no matter how much we may enjoy The Walking Dead, but I do feel there’s an important truth being said here. Looking at a dead body—and here I’m talking about the raw ones, the bodies found in situ, not the porcelain-faced products of the undertaker’s craft found in open casket funerals—forces us to confront how very fragile our hold on life can be. That’s terrifying stuff. It’s not like a fear of snakes, or a fear of heights. Those fears you can manage. You can avoid high places. You don’t have to look down. You don’t have to go into pet stores, or to the reptile house at the zoo. But you do have to face death. It waits for all of us, and being in the presence of the dead makes that truth impossible to deny. But that’s really the easy answer, isn’t it? To say that we fear the dead because we will one day become them is so obvious it’s almost trivial. It belies the terrible import of the message. One might say that the real horror comes from the surprised, confounded look in the eyes of the dead man. When he woke up that morning, did he consider that it was the last morning he’d ever see? Did he go through that day tying up all the loose ends of a lived life? Or did he leave behind a whole litany of things undone? That’s what gets us about being in the same room as a dead body, isn’t it? The idea that death can come at any time, no matter what safeguards we put in place against it? Yeah, maybe. I can’t help but wonder though if there isn’t something else lurking just outside of our heretofore-enumerated thoughts on the matter. After all, this is a dead body. We are in the presence of the dead. A little respect is warranted. But why? There’s the rub. Why do we care about someone else’s end, someone we may not know from Adam? Why do we look on a corpse, a vessel we know to be devoid of thought and emotion and perhaps even a soul, and feel something akin to a spiritual experience? I suspect the answer lies in our power for empathy. The sociopaths among us may shrug and say, “Yeah sure, whatever,” but the rest of us can’t do that. We look upon the dead, we stare into their eyes, and we see a glimpse of the numinous. We see that which we should be able to put into words, but can’t. We see the ineffable. We see the end that will not be named, and once experienced, can never be translated. Like the coming of age story, the meeting with death remains a personal and ultimately inexplicable experience. The dead are a cypher for us, the living, and as such represent the final reduction of our fears. You can’t get any more finite than a dead body. Once you’ve stood in the presence of the dead, you’ve experienced the end all and be all of fear. That’s as intimate as it gets.

Joe McKinney has been a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a homicide detective, a disaster mitigation specialist, a patrol commander, and a successful novelist. His books include the four part Dead World series, Quarantined, Inheritance, Lost Girl of the Lake, The Savage Dead, Crooked House, and Dodging Bullets. His short fiction has been collected in The Red Empire and Other Stories and Dating in Dead World. His latest novel is the werewolf thriller, Dog Days, set in the summer of 1983 in the little Texas town of Clear Lake, where the author grew up. In 2011, McKinney received the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel. For more information go to joemckinney.wordpress.com. Artist Gallery: Dave Palumbo

Dave Palumbo is a freelance illustrator and oil painter based in Philadelphia. Widely published, he has done editorial, concept, and promotional illustrations for publications ranging from Scientific American and The New Yorker to Lucasfilm, Heavy Metal, and Marvel. Palumbo’s work has been shown in galleries from New York to Paris and has earned him a Chesley award and three Spectrum medals. He can be found online at dvpalumbo.com.

[To view the gallery, turn the page.]

Artist Spotlight: Dave Palumbo Julia Sevin

How did you get started in the arts?

I come from a family of painters, actually. My mom, stepfather, brother, and some other extended family members are all in the same line of work. I believe that the biggest boost that gave was having so many role models present to reinforce that this is a completely viable career to pursue. It relieved me of the mystery and doubt that most aspiring artists struggle with. I think that I also had an early interest because my dad was really into comics and used to give them to me and my brother to read and draw from. So as a kid, I really enjoyed drawing and started taking it seriously in my teens. I didn’t start learning to paint until I went away to college, though, and I didn’t start doing illustration until a few years beyond that.

Can you name some of your influences?

Starting to make lists like that can get out of control really quickly. If I were to say who is influencing my current work the most, the top names that come to mind are Jeremy Geddes, Sam Weber, Antonio López García, and Alex Kanevsky. But there are so many others. I’m sure it would be a list as long as my arm of peers and contemporaries and then another twice as long of artists no longer with us who have either helped shape my aesthetic or even taught me directly, and I always hate leaving people out.

Do you draw ideas from fiction?

I don’t know that I pull ideas from casual reading so much, though I do enjoy it. Gene Wolfe has written some really terrific and visually rich stuff. I also like Neal Stephenson and William Gibson quite a bit, and then this is the old “all time favorites” list: Treasure Island, Dune, The Hobbit, etc. Again, I start making a list and am tempted to just go on and on.

What keeps you awake at night—what are your fears?

If we’re talking Fears, capital “F,” the sort which are terrifying however unlikely to actually occur, one of my very biggest is being adrift in the ocean with no vessel and no sight of land. At night. That is a really hard one to beat. In terms of themes which can work into paintings, I think the scariest stuff tends to be based around human cruelty. For example, I’ve been a zombie movie fan quite a long time. In particular I enjoy the 1970s era of zombies. If you put aside the often exploited psychological horror of being attacked by loved ones, though, they are not really that scary. Really, they are just animals with particularly ugly features and a vicious attitude. No scarier than a pride of hungry lions or a pack of wild dogs. And while I wouldn’t want to have a pack of wild dogs chase me down, it doesn’t terrify me. It doesn’t disturb me. Human beings are much more interesting. Humans have choice and complex thought. One of the best side-by-sides that I can make is to compare the farmhouse scene in The Road to just about any zombie movie and you tell me which one is more upsetting. Sadism and psychopathic impulse are really scary. Also, not being able to trust your own mind. Unreliable memories, confusion, uncertainty if you are sane or not. That’s some pretty scary shit, too. Do you have a life philosophy?

In general I believe that whatever it is that you spend your time doing, you should try to do it well. Do things the right way, not the easy way.

If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?

I love movies and photography. I don’t know what specifically I’d be doing, but cinematography seems like it would have been an interesting path to pursue.

What’s your dream illustration job?

There’s that old go-to answer: one that pays well and lets me do whatever I want. Realistically, there are so many things that I am a fan of and that inspired me to get involved in this line of work, and any opportunity that I get to touch those influences is a gift.

What are you working on right now?

Actually, I’m currently working on covers and other material for Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens reboot, which is absolutely a dream job. Of any existing property which I would be excited to be involved in, that is way at the top of the list.

Originally hailing from Northern California, Julia Sevin is a transplant flourishing in the fecund delta silts of New Orleans. Together with husband RJ Sevin, she owns and edits Creeping Hemlock Press, specializing in limited special editions of genre literature and, most recently, zombie novels. She is an autodidact pixelpusher who spends her days as the art director for a print brokerage, designing branding and print pieces for assorted political bigwigs, which makes her feel like an accomplice in the calculated plunder of America. Under the cover of darkness (like Batman in more ways than she can enumerate), she redeems herself through pro bono design, sordid illustration, and baking the world’s best pies. She is available for contract design/illustration, including book layouts and websites. See more of her work at juliasevin.com or follow her at facebook.com/juliasevindesign. Interview: Jeff Strand Lisa Morton

Jeff Strand may sometimes be called “the clown prince of horror,” but in truth he’s a multi-talented author whose work spans styles and genres. He started writing screenplays while still in college, but by the late 1990s he was regularly selling his comedic short horror stories. His novels run from the demented slapstick horror/comedy of Benjamin’s Parasite to the more traditional werewolf tale Wolf Hunt to the intense psychological thriller Pressure, and he’s also provided some of the wittiest genre awards hosting around as emcee of the Bram Stoker Awards presentation for the last few years. His most recent releases are the young adult thriller I Have a Bad Feeling About This and the collection Dead Clown Barbecue.

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Since you’re known as the funniest man in horror, let’s start with something obvious: Why do horror and humor go so well together?

Well, they both often feature the element of surprise, and they both often involve terrible things happening to people. A lot of seemingly innocuous jokes (“I’ve got good news and bad news.” “What’s the good news, doc?” “Your test results came in, and you only have a week to life.” “That’s the good news??? What’s the bad news?” “I’ve been trying to call for six days.”) really aren’t very far removed from horror. I never thought to myself “Eureka! I shall combine the two genres and make my fortune!” I’d always wanted to write humor, and I got into horror in a big way in high school, but my first horror/comedy novel, Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary) was just supposed to be a whodunit mystery. In fact, my agent at the time kept saying “Don’t make it funny! Don’t make it funny!” Somehow, though, it mutated into this dark, grisly, black- comedy-filled book that I still described as a “mystery novel.” Readers and reviewers called it a horror-comedy, and I quickly embraced that label. But it was never a case of “Humor and horror go great together! That’s what I’m gonna write!”

Some authors use humor to relieve tension after a scare, but you’ve been successful in integrating humor throughout your horror tales. Is there any method to your madness?

A lot of it is instinctual, but it varies from book to book. It depends on the balance of humor and horror, which is usually something I lock down pretty early. For example, Benjamin’s Parasite is a comedy in terms of characters and structure. Its primary purpose is to make the reader laugh. Then, on top of the jokes, I tried to make the “body horror” elements as disturbing as possible, so that you’re cringing while you’re laughing. On the other hand, Dweller is a horror novel. Much of it is very downbeat, and the main character makes a lot of self-destructive decisions. Yet my goal was not to drag you down into a pit of nihilistic despair, so the book needed plenty of comic relief. And also, it was important to embrace the absurdity of a kid becoming best buddies with a monster that lives in the woods. So the humor in that book is all character-based, and it doesn’t bleed into the tragic or horrific moments. With something like the Andrew Mayhem series, which is equal parts horror and humor, I try to make it as funny as possible while being careful to never take away from the threat. There’s a lot of silliness, but they’re playing with real knives. Though I allow myself the creative license of characters who keep their wit at a time when most people would be silently wetting themselves, Andrew Mayhem never takes a casual attitude about the danger he’s in. A book like Stalking You Now, meanwhile, plays the characters straight, and the humor comes from a situation that keeps spiraling out of control. So there aren’t that many “jokes,” just the narrator’s frustration at how things are playing out. So you can take my body of work and call almost all of it “horror/comedy,” but the method changes a lot with each story.

Do you ever find yourself reading a straight horror novel and thinking, Oh, author, you really need to lighten up . . .

No, ironically, I’m much more likely to be annoyed by inappropriate humor than by a novel taking itself too seriously.

Humor and horror are two genres that frequently run afoul of political correctness. Do you ever worry about that, or do you pride yourself on having no boundaries? I don’t worry about it much, but I definitely have boundaries. Though many children have tragically lost their lives in my fiction, I wouldn’t write an explicit child-death scene unless it was absolutely essential to the story. Sexual violence is almost non-existent. (My story “The Origin of Slashy” is a dark comedy about a rape victim, but there aren’t any rape jokes in it.) I wouldn’t mine real-life tragedies for humor. My work is ghoulish and demented yet not very often politically incorrect. I’m not interested in pissing people off. I love boundary-free humor and horror (I’m a huge fan of both The Onion and Edward Lee) and I’m most assuredly not in a constant state of self-censorship; I just tend not to get into genuinely offensive territory. I’ve got a friend who takes unrestrained delight in the outraged reactions to his dead baby joke book, but when I do a story like “Mr. Twitcher’s Miracle Baby-Chopping Machine,” it’s really not handled in a way that’s pushing people’s buttons. An exception is my novel Fangboy, which is written in the style of a children’s fairy tale. It has no profanity, sex, or graphic violence, but it does have quite a bit of politically incorrect humor. Ironically, because of the lack of any blatant adult content, it’s a book that many reviewers describe as being suitable for children. This kind of horrifies me, because the novel has a character called The Magical Negro. Obviously, the character is not making fun of black people, he’s making fun of the wise, mystical black character who exists in certain movies only to help solve the problems of rich white people . . . but kids don’t know that!

Your work makes frequent use of children—even your first professional short story sale, “Scarecrow’s Discovery” (from Horrors: 365 Scary Stories) begins with adults but ends with children. Why do children work so well with your style?

Honestly, it’s just a coincidence, sort of the way so many of my books have a forest setting, even though I would never say “Ooh! I just love to write about the forest!” Pressure and Dweller both covered long time periods in the character’s lives, so it made sense to start with them as children. Andrew Mayhem has young kids because I thought it would be funny to have a hero who also had to constantly deal with babysitting responsibilities. My stories “Gramma’s Corpse,” “It’s Bath Time,” “Hologram Skull Cover,” “The Story of My First Kiss,” “Drain Bamage,” “Abbey’s Shriek,” “Roasting Weenies by Hellfire,” and “One of Them” all feature kids, so clearly this is an accurate observation on your part and there is probably some deep psychological explanation for it, but I think it’s just coincidence that the stories work out this way.

Pressure (2007) is probably your most acclaimed novel to date, and—despite an incredibly funny first chapter with a twelve-year-old stealing condoms— seems to have a very different tone from many of your other stories. Tell us a little about how Pressure developed.

Pressure spawned from an idea I had in the early 1990s, when I thought, “What if you saved the life of a serial killer, not knowing what kind of person he was, and he was eternally grateful?” I wrote a big chunk of that book, but of course it was a bad book because that’s what I was writing then. Though I never finished it, I kept coming back to the idea, and through several incarnations of the story I realized that what I liked was the friendship between this introverted college student and a sadistic psychopath. I ditched the life-saving element, and once I came up with the idea of spanning it over at least twenty years at different points in their lives, I had the concept for Pressure. It wasn’t written to be a major departure from my other work. It actually has more humor than something like Mandibles, but the big difference is that Pressure doesn’t really mix the humor and horror. It has both elements; just not often in the same scene, and the book is so dark that nobody is saying, “Oh, what a jolly romp that was!” When Earthling Publications bought the novel, I’d established myself as a funny horror guy, so it made sense to promote it as “The first serious novel from Jeff Strand!”

Wolf Hunt is in some ways your most traditional novel, since it deals with a standard genre trope (a werewolf). Is that why it’s the one you recommend new readers start with?

Wolf Hunt is not necessarily the book of mine that readers like the best, but it’s the one that the most readers like, if that makes sense. The fact that it’s a werewolf novel unquestionably contributed to its success. I tend to recommend it as a good starting point because it’s right in the middle of my horror/comedy spectrum. I’m always a little nervous when somebody says, “Hey, I really enjoyed The Sinister Mr. Corpse! I’m off to read Pressure next!” because the tones of the two books are so far apart. “WTF??? I was expecting a laugh riot and now I’m bummed out! Death to Strand!!!” Wolf Hunt is the middle ground, so if somebody likes that one, it’s less of a leap to the unrestrained silliness of A Bad Day for Voodoo or the bleak misery of Dweller.

You’ve written four books about the character Andrew Mayhem. Describe Andrew to a reader who hasn’t met him yet.

He’s the hero of the novels Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary), Single White Psychopath Seeks Same, Casket For Sale (Only Used Once), and Lost Homicidal Maniac (Answers to “Shirley”). He matures a bit over the course of the series, but when you meet him in the first book, he’s an unemployed, married father of two who is perhaps not the most responsible guy in the world. Andrew Mayhem is very self-aware and self- deprecating, and he tries to do the right thing, but despite his well-meaning nature, his poor decisions and overall bad luck means that he often finds himself facing vicious psychopathic serial killers. On your website bio (and by the way, I think you have the longest website bio ever, and possibly the most entertaining), you credit your early involvement with the Horror Writers Association with helping your career. How important is it for writers to network with other writers?

When I joined HWA in 1994, I didn’t know a single other author. This was before online social media, so I had no real access to them. I was actively pursuing a career as an author and I’d submitted manuscripts using information I got from Writer’s Market, but I was still weirdly uninformed about the writing business. The HWA newsletter was a treasure trove of information. Things really changed when I got online and joined the GEnie service, which had a private bulletin board exclusively for HWA members. Suddenly I got to interact with actual published writers! I’d already read a lot of their books! The education I got from that message board was invaluable, though not always what I wanted to hear (reading posts by Rick Hautala was a pretty good way to shatter my rose-colored glasses). I’m sure there are authors who perfect their craft in solitude, send an unagented manuscript to the slush pile, are discovered by an enthusiastic editor, and go on to be rich and famous. Generally, though, contacts are an essential part of the business, and HWA is how I started making them.

Your first YA book was A Bad Day for Voodoo, and now I Have a Bad Feeling About This is coming out. How did you get into writing YA?

When the book came out, I did a guest blog called “How To Become A Young Adult Author In 34 Easy Steps.” It all ties into the networking thing above. The simplest answer is: “Leah Hultenschmidt at Sourcebooks emailed me and asked if I’d ever considered writing a young adult novel.” Which makes it sound really easy. In truth, it was a convoluted years-long web of connections that led to the book contract. I’d written a young adult novel about fifteen years before that, a comedy called Elrod McBugle on the Loose, for an editor at Harcourt Brace who’d been insanely enthusiastic about my novels How to Rescue a Dead Princess and Out of Whack and wanted me to write something specifically for the young adult market. He enjoyed Elrod but said that he needed something with a serious theme, at which point I thought, “Screw serious themes! I write all-funny, all-the-time books!” and didn’t send him anything else. I guess your question wasn’t “Have you done anything really stupid in your writing career that you regret?” So: Leah Hultenschmidt at Sourcebooks emailed me and asked if I’d ever considered writing a young adult novel.

I know you keep saying that I Have a Bad Feeling About This isn’t horror . . . but it’s about hired killers descending on a kids’ summer camp. Are you sure there’s not a little horror in it?

Even in my most shameless and corrupt efforts to sell this book to Nightmare Magazine readers, I couldn’t say that I Have a Bad Feeling About This is a horror novel. Yeah, there’s a bear attack and the possibility of a creature living underneath an outhouse, but if I say, “Oh, okay, there’s a little horror in it,” I’ll get angry emails from people calling me a damned liar, and then I’ll have to write back and say, “It wasn’t my fault! Lisa Morton coerced me into saying that with a leading question!” and then they’ll get mad at me for trying to deflect the blame, and it’ll be a great big mess. I believe that readers who have enjoyed my other works will also enjoy this one, but, nope, it’s not horror.

You also have a brand new short story collection (Dead Clown Barbecue). With eighty-five short stories to your credit, is it your preferred form, or would you still rather dive into a novel?

I still prefer novels, if only because a short story is about three times as much work for me as writing the same number of pages in a novel. Short stories are fun because I can often be much weirder or sillier than I would be in a longer project, and I can write from the point of view of truly despicable characters that I wouldn’t want to follow for an entire novel. But in the end, if somebody held a roaring chainsaw up to my face and said “Novels or short stories? One or the other? Choose, motherfucker!” I’d have to go with novels.

You’ve mentioned starting a great many more projects than you finish. What determines whether you finish a work or not?

Deadlines. When I’m not on deadline, I can write anything I want, and it’s a glorious feeling, and if I’m not in the mood to work on this book I can work on that book or maybe even start a whole new book that’s going to be really cool and, oops, am I really working on seven novels at once? What tends to happen is that if I get pulled away from a project for too long I’ll just lose the enthusiasm to return to it, even if I love what I’ve already written. In theory, the novel that’s already 100 pages underway should be the more appealing option, but more often I’m just in the mood to start a brand-new book. I’ve got something called Blister that I think would be a fan favorite, but I keep getting pulled away from it! Sometimes I’ll find fatal flaws in the premise that I wish I’d discovered a few chapters earlier. Other times I’ll just decide that it’s the wrong book to be working on, career-wise. I purposely try to post about works-in-progress to give myself some accountability to finish them . . . but it doesn’t usually work.

You’ve collaborated with J. A. Konrath (on Suckers), James A. Moore (on The Haunted Forest Tour), and Konrath, Blake Crouch, and F. Paul Wilson on Draculas. Do you enjoy the collaborative process, or are you more of a go-my-own-way guy?

All three collaborations were very different kinds of experiences, all were rewarding, and I’m proud of all of the finished projects. In the end, though, I’m still much more of a go-my-own-way guy. There’s material in all three books that’s way better than what I would have come up with on my own . . . but, jeez, I hate losing disagreements over creative choices. And if a collaboration is going to work, you have to compromise. So I get to share credit for fantastic scenes that I didn’t write, yet there are also scenes where I’m thinking “No! No! No! That’s wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” I prefer to hog all of the creative control until the editor steps in. Also: J.A. Konrath? Very, very fast. Jim Moore? Very, very fast. Me? Not that fast. So I was always playing catch-up with my co-authors!

Likewise, you haven’t done many stories (are there any?) set in another writer’s universe or involving their character. If someone approached you about doing, say, a tie-in novel, could you do it and enjoy writing it?

I’ve been offered two opportunities to write tie-in novels for major properties, and both times I leapt at the chance. In the first case, the editor left the company, and in the second, the publisher wasn’t able to finalize a deal with the rights-holder. I’m not necessarily saying that there won’t be moments when I want to claw my eyes out during the process, but, yeah, I could do it and enjoy it. I have, in fact, recently completed my first-ever tie-in project, a short story for a franchise that I’m not allowed to blab about yet.

In 2001, you were President of EPIC (Electronically Published Internet Connection), an organization dedicated to e-publishing. At the time, did you think e- books were going to become so important to the marketplace?

At the time of my two years as EPIC Prez, the majority of the publishing industry thought that being e-published was worse than being unpublished. (Somebody even pointed me toward a message board thread that was basically “Jeff Strand is such a nice guy and so talented . . . it’s so sad that he gave up on having a real writing career.”) (By the way, screw you guys!) You couldn’t argue with the “I don’t want to read books off my computer” logic. The Rocket Reader was cool but expensive, and ultimately an inferior reading experience to paper, but there was always the expectation that there would be a reading device that would change everything. We thought it was going to be the REB1100. Oprah was giving it to her audience on her annual My Favorite Things episode, so I watched the show, thinking that this was going to be the moment where e-books went mainstream. The studio audience squealed with delight when they got their e-book readers, and then Oprah proudly announced that their gift cost was three hundred dollars, and the audience members went into orgasmic glee over their expensive gift while viewers across the nation went, “Whoa! Three hundred bucks? Screw that!” By the time the Kindle came around and really did change everything, I was at the point where I was allowed to identify myself as an “author” instead of an “e-book author.” In a delightful irony, the industry started to take e-books seriously right around the time that I finally had a mass market print release.

Given your lifelong love of comics and art, when will we see a Jeff Strand graphic novel? Just for fun, I wrote the script for the first issue of a horror/humor (mostly humor) series called Town of Turmoil . . . and I haven’t really done anything with it. “Graphic novel market research” is on my to-do list. Any comic book publishers who want to make millions and millions and millions of dollars are welcome to contact me.

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of nonfiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark Delicacies, The Museum of Horrors, and Cemetery Dance, and in 2010 her first novel, The Castle of Los Angeles, received the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. Recent books include the graphic novel Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times (co-written with Rocky Wood, illustrated by Greg Chapman), and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Appearing in 2013 were the novellas Summer’s End and Smog, and the novel Malediction. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Isabel Yap E.C. Myers

Many of us grew up hearing ghost stories and local urban legends like the ones in “Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez?” Did you have a particular one in mind when you wrote this? What inspired it?

I wrote this for week three at the Clarion Workshop last summer. I kept trying to write another story that I had fleshed out more, but it was going nowhere and I needed to submit something the next morning. I put that story aside, went online, and pestered my best friends back in Manila to tell me the ghost stories they remembered from our Catholic girls’ school. Our campus has a resident ghost named Ursula, and her story is the one where her body gets buried in the tree. A lot of the other stories were also campus legends, but with twists or embellishments. I tied them all to one particular ghost called “Anamaria,” because I wanted to give these urban legends a name. I also wanted this story to be as faithful as possible to private school life in Manila, because it’s such a big part of who I am—so the setting and the interactions were inspired from memory, mostly.

What’s your writing process? How did this story develop?

My writing process is a lot of idea-gathering, which can take weeks, and then a few false starts. Sometimes I have a “power line” I want to write, a structure I want to try, or a particular sense that I want to evoke. Once I think I’m on the right track with the first page or so, I can usually sit down and finish a story in a few days, propelled by tea and Nutella. If possible I get some distance and then do a few rounds of revisions, though I like to try writing as close to the finished draft as possible. Because I wrote this story at Clarion, I was lucky to get some feedback on it from my class and instructors right away. For this story, I wrote down all the ghost tales my friends were recalling and added them in, while I was working on the main plotline involving Mica and Hazel. The alternating structure grew out of that process. When I finished, I had to ask one of my fellow Clarionites to unlock the printer room because it was past midnight. As I went to meet her I was jumping at everything, because I had freaked myself out remembering all those ghost stories. I actually slept with the light on that night.

You grew up in Manila, where this story takes place, and you’ve published many stories and poems in Filipino magazines and journals. What differences do you see between Filipino and Western speculative fiction?

I think the main differences are in the necessity of context: the setting, the culture, even the way the characters act. Most elements in Anamaria Marquez would probably be familiar to Filipino readers, whereas foreign readers might need more context with things like opening one’s third eye or wearing a scapular. In both Filipino and Western speculative fiction, there tends to be more fantasy than science fiction, but in my experience Filipino fantasy tends to be contemporary fantasy, or magic realism. There is less experimentation with secondary worlds or high fantasy. Another big difference, at least for me, is the mindset towards publication. As a Filipino writer, for a long time it didn’t occur to me that I could send my work anywhere. I had no idea there were magazines that published speculative fiction exclusively. Even after moving to the U.S. for college, I didn’t think to try. It was only when I was applying to Clarion that I thought, Hey, maybe I should give this a shot. The good news is there’s a growing community of Filipino speculative fiction writers, owing largely to the annual Philippine Speculative Fiction series. Originally edited by Dean and Nikki Alfar, the series has given Filipino writers the rare opportunity to share their work. The fourth book in the series was my first-ever publication, outside of school literary folios. I would highly recommend the series to anyone interested in learning more about speculative fiction in the Philippines; the eBooks are available on Amazon and Flipside Publishing.

Have you ever had a paranormal experience? Do you believe in ghosts?

I do believe in ghosts, but not just as scary things that haunt people. I believe in spirits, in things that remain, in visitations from the other world. I have never seen or felt a ghost, even if there were opportunities for that to happen; now I think I actually repel ghosts. I do have good friends who see or hear ghosts, and I know they aren’t making that up. Again, this is a cultural thing—I think it would be very hard to find a Filipino who would say “No” when asked this question. As a race, we are pretty attuned to the fantastic. A friend of mine was visited by her dead grandfather in a dream, trying to tell her something; another friend told me about an uncle who was cursed by fairies when he hit an anthill on a golf course.

Mica and her friends are clearly fans of horror, like the Chucky movies and The Ring. What are some of your favorite horror stories, shows, or movies?

I am actually really weak when it comes to horror. I saw The Ring and parts of The Exorcist when I was in fifth grade, and for months walking in the dark really scared me. My best friends are horror lovers, and they know when we go out that I can’t watch horror movies with them. That being said, I do like hearing scary movie plots once others have watched them. Still, I liked the film Drag Me to Hell (which was more of a comedy); I was impressed by the videogame Fatal Frame II: The Crimson Butterfly (though I couldn’t finish it); I loved the manga 20th Century Boys by Naoki Urusawa, which has horror elements; and I will never forget R.L Stine’s The Night of the Living Dummy. I wouldn’t say Mica is necessarily a fan of horror films . . . though she is certainly aware of the important ones. Those movies were pretty pervasive in the 90s and 2000s. Kids knew them and had an inkling of the plot, even if they had never watched those movies themselves, even if horror didn’t appeal to them. There’s a lot of pressure not to have fears as a kid, and to understand all cultural references. I think eventually you get used to the idea so much that it’s no longer scary—hence the girls just making their own Sadako.

What other work do you have out now or forthcoming, and what are you working on?

I have stories recently published in Horror: A YA Anthology and MAXIMUM VOLUME: Best New Filipino Fiction 2014. I also have short stories that are in slush piles or being revised, including one about brain-hackers, and a love story set in a bathhouse. But my main goal for 2014 is to finish a book-length manuscript. Another big project is writing more regularly, and submitting things once I finish them. For the longest time, I wrote mostly fan fiction, and I still do when I think a certain story needs to be told. I love fandom; it’s where I learned to write. But nowadays I’m trying to get myself to come up with my own stories more often, whether or not I have an externally imposed deadline. It’s a challenge, but I’m hoping it’ll get easier over time.

E.C. Myers was assembled in the U.S. from Korean and German parts and raised by a single mother and a public library in Yonkers, New York. He has published short fiction in a variety of print and online magazines and anthologies, and his young adult novels, Fair Coin and Quantum Coin, are available now from Pyr Books. He currently lives with his wife, two doofy cats, and a mild-mannered dog in Philadelphia and shares way too much information about his personal life at ecmyers.net and on Twitter @ecmyers. Author Spotlight: Glen Hirshberg Britt Gettys

“I am Coming to Live in Your Mouth” is one of several horror pieces you’ve written over the years. What is it about the genre that fascinates you, and is there anything that sets this story apart from the others you’ve written?

I honestly never think about genre when I sit down to write. I’ve loved ghost and horror stories since before I could read, I think, because of the imagery, the way they pick and gnaw at primal emotions, the way they cross cultural and temporal boundaries. But mostly it just seems that when I’m doing my best and most provocative work, horror is what I’m writing. This story is one of the very few I’ve written that was inspired by another writer—or, in this case, another writer’s dreams. The fabulous Norm Partridge told me once about a work dream he’d been having about a figure who emerged from an elevator late at night, crossed to Norm’s desk, and said, “I am coming to live in your mouth, because you never have anything to say.” Norm said he was way too scared of the phrase to use it. So I asked if I could steal it. This story is what happened when I started playing with those words.

It’s often a matter of some controversy for an author to write from a cultural and ethnic perspective that is different from his or her own. What was it like to write from the point-of-view of a Japanese woman? Do you have any advice for other authors looking to write about a character who’s different from them in some way?

To me, unless you’re writing autobiography—and even then, because memoir, obviously, is mostly memory —you are always writing through a perspective that is different from your own. That’s an underestimated part of a writer’s job: not just to imagine someone else’s point- of-view, but to inhabit it. When I’m writing about someone far from me—culturally, chronologically, racially, whatever—I’m usually doing that because of someone or something I’ve encountered and explored already. I do a bit of research and try to check myself, sure. But then I try not to worry too much about it, to write the story I’m writing, and do that truthfully and carefully and well. Ironically, I’ve found that appropriation happens most frequently when people worry too much about each other’s differences, not too little.

As your story progresses, a parallel between the husband’s tumor and Death, the figure, becomes apparent. Was this a choice you made deliberately, or did the symbolism occur organically as you wrote the piece?

I’d have to say it happened organically, because I try to avoid one-to-one symbols, or at least to avoid planning them. This story, in particular, plays on and derives its impact from ambiguity. I think there are a lot of different ways to read this one, right down to the ending, which some readers have told me is a surprisingly gentle, even mutedly happy one. Sometimes I think they’re right.

You’ve written not only short stories, but four novels as well. Do you find one form more difficult or rewarding than the other? Is your written process for a novel different from your short story process?

My process seems to be different for every single piece I write. I wish I had a formula I could count on. Sometimes, I have to outline completely. Sometimes, I have to avoid outlining or knowing anything about where I’m headed. Sometimes, I need dozens of drafts, and sometimes pieces come out all but whole the first time. By nature, I’m fond of control, and so my biggest challenge, every single day, is to sit down and let go and allow whatever it is I’m writing to dictate its own terms. If I try to wrestle, I’m going to lose.

What projects are you working on currently?

I am in the process of finishing Good Girls, the sequel to my 2012 novel Motherless Child, which is receiving a major press update and reissue from Tor in May. There will be a final novel in that series after that. I’m also, almost, two-thirds of the way through a new story collection, and I always seem to have at least two stories in process on any given day.

Britt Gettys currently attends Pratt Institute where she is pursuing a BFA in Creative Writing. She is the editor of Pratt Success, a student run blog, sponsored by Pratt’s Center for Career and Professional Development, which reviews the work of current Pratt students and alumni. Additionally, she illustrates graphic novels and her work has been featured in three Pratt sponsored exhibitions. An Editorial Intern at Lightspeed and Nightmare Magazine, Britt hails from Seattle, Washington where she spends her time writing, cosplaying, and painting. Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine Erika Holt

Did you conduct a lot of research to write this piece? Do you often incorporate mythology into your work? Do you enjoy tracking myths through time and space?

I think the development of mythology is one of my favorite things about Story, full stop; the elements that stay the same across centuries, the ones that carry a thousand miles, the ones that change to suit the speaker and the listeners and the times, the ones that can be strangely specific in creepy ways, the ones where the meaning is fixed and the ones just waiting for new meanings. In researching sin eating, it was interesting to find localized traditions versus much wider constants, and how different mythologies and traditions approached the same concept of devouring sins, while leaving room for interpretation. And I’d have to say all stories, whether or not they’re conscious of it, are incorporating mythology into their work; some of the mythology in this story is intentional, and some of it’s probably by accident. Sin eaters carry a heavy burden and suffer terribly from their work. At one point the protagonist states that someone “is born to be forced into it” but then also suggests running from this fate; starving to death if necessary. Can sin eaters choose not to do what they do?

For me, sin eating is particularly interesting as a perceived supernatural ability exactly because of the balance of revulsion and power involved—the actual ability is both incredibly powerful and completely terrifying. And that’s one of the questions the story poses; if you’re born into an expectation of that magnitude, with such compulsion for doing it and such consequences for refusing, what does it mean to refuse? Does taking up the profession mean giving up any hope of staying yourself? Will the narrator’s own refusals be worth what she suffers for them?

It seems the events in this story could serve as a metaphor for many real-world issues including those relating to class, race, and privilege, to name a few. Do you agree? Was this your intention?

I think some themes in any story serve as metaphors for real-world issues, even (maybe sometimes especially!) if they’re not intentional. So while sin-eating was definitely something I wanted to explore in both a literal and metaphorical sense, the narrator is explicitly mixed- race, and her own perception of her abilities is caught between her cultures and their mythologies, as well as strangers’ and clients’ very literal and real-world assumptions about those. And there’s absolutely a class dynamic at work; the narrator is using a power that has essentially no upside to get one over on the people so privileged and terrible they hope to be able to buy their way out of sin. In that way, I think, she’s the last judge at the threshold.

In addition to fiction, you also write nonfiction including reviews of television shows and movies. Has this exercise informed your fiction writing in any way?

I thought I was my own worst critic before I started professionally writing about how story is constructed in film and television. Turns out I had been going easy on myself. What’s up next for you?

My second novel, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, comes out in June from Atria, and I have a few short stories slated for later this year, as well as a novella, Dream Houses, which should be out in October. Between those, I’ll probably be watching TV!

Erika Holt lives in the cold, white North (i.e. Calgary, Canada), where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in numerous anthologies including Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead, and Tesseracts Fifteen: A Case of Quite Curious Tales. She has co- edited two anthologies: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring 1920s alien burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. In her spare time she works as a lawyer and at the public library. Author Spotlight: Nathan Ballingrud Lisa Nohealani Morton

Tell us a little bit about “Sunbleached.” How did you come to write it?

“Sunbleached” is unusual for me, in that it’s a story that never would have existed if not for a themed anthology. Ellen Datlow asked me to write one for Teeth, the book of young adult vampire stories she was editing with Terri Windling. I was hesitant. Vampires had saturated the genre, and they’d become such diluted, boring, vapid creatures that the very thought of them turned me off. I had no desire to write young adult; I had some uncharitable thoughts about the rapid advance of the market, and the way writers seemed to be flocking to this new wellspring of money, rather than following some artistic compulsion. (I admit that those thoughts were reactionary and not terribly well-considered. But that was my mindset at the time.) The more I thought about it, though, the more it seemed like a challenge I wanted to meet. I remembered what vampires meant to me when I was growing up, and I wanted to honor that. I thought that if I was a teen picking up a book like this, I’d be excited to find a bloody, brutal story about a genuinely scary vampire. So I took a shot. It’s become one of my most well-received stories.

Vampires seem to go through alternating periods of “beautiful and seductive” and “hideous and terrifying” in fiction. “Sunbleached” features a vampire with a foot in both worlds. Do you have any thoughts on that dichotomy? Did you set out to subvert pop-cultural expectations of vampires (à la Twilight) or was it just what the story required?

Well, the vampire plays both roles so well. It’s an extraordinarily versatile monster. In recent years we’ve seen the vampire become a romantic hero, almost entirely devoid of threat. That’s as boring to me as the vampire which is nothing more than a feral killing machine. When I wrote the one in this story, I was very much thinking of the Dracula paradigm. I even wanted to include the mist and the turning into a bat. Of course there wasn’t a place for that, and that’s probably a good thing. But I was committed to the idea of a vampire being a merciless predator which relied on seduction to capture prey. The challenge was to do that in a way I hadn’t seen done before, and which would also let me heighten the scariness. How would a creature like this still use seduction when it was pushed to its most extreme point? It had no beauty left; it could barely even move. I also wanted to set the story in hard sunlight. So, yeah, I approached it with the intent to subvert the expectations that I would have, were I a reader coming to a vampire story. As the story started to grow around those self- imposed restrictions, I started to get very excited about it. There’s something terribly sad about the use of seduction as a tool for capturing prey, too. That’s where the vampire achieves so much of its power (and I’m a big believer in the enduring power of old tropes). Everybody wants to be loved. The need for it can ruin people.

What are you working on these days? Any new or upcoming publications readers should keep an eye out for?

I have two stories appearing in anthologies this year: one, “The Diabolist,” I can’t say anything about because the editors have not gone public with the table of contents yet. The other is “The Atlas of Hell,” which will be in Ellen Datlow’s Fearful Symmetries. It’s the first story featuring what will be a recurring character, which I thought would be fun. So it’s kind of a new thing for me. I’m working on a novel which will be finished this year, very different in tone from what I’ve been doing before. There are also more nebulous projects in the works: a tourist’s guide to hell; a scrapbook chronology of a family of monsters living amongst and interacting with a small Southern town over a period of a hundred years; and an idea for turning “Sunbleached” into a novel.

Do you have a favorite fictional vampire?

If I had to pick a single one, it would be Dracula, hands down. He straddles the divide between beguiling and terrifying so wonderfully. That scene in which Harker looks out his window at night, and sees Dracula crawling down the outside of the castle wall like some huge insect, sent a chill through me that probably changed my life. He’s still the ideal vampire in my mind. That being said, the ones that scared me the most were the townspeople of Salem’s Lot. My first experience with them was the Tobe Hooper television miniseries, when I was a kid. Watching characters I’d come to know make that change was profoundly scary to me. I will never forget the vampire sitting in the old rocking chair, his eyes glowing in the early twilight. Born and raised in Honolulu, Lisa Nohealani Morton lives in Washington, DC. By day she is a mild-mannered database wrangler, computer programmer, and all-around data geek, and by night she writes science fiction, fantasy, and combinations of the two. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Hellebore and Rue. She can be found on Twitter as @lnmorton. MISCELLANY In the Next Issue of

Coming up in April, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Dale Bailey (“Sleep Paralysis”) and Martin Cahill (“It Was Never the Fire”), along with reprints by Nancy Etchemendy (“Nimitseahpah”) and Lucy A. Snyder (“Magdala Amygdala”). 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 bestselling author Darren Shan. It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Nightmare. Looking ahead beyond next month, we’ve got new fiction on the way from Adam-Troy Castro, Damien Angelica Walters, Mari Ness, Desirina Boskovich, and Łukasz Orbitowski (a renowned Polish writer making his English language debut). Thanks for reading! Stay Connected

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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.