Nightmare Magazine, Issue 64 (January 2018)

TABLE OF CONTENTS Issue 64, January 2018

FROM THE EDITOR Editorial: January 2018

FICTION A Head in a Box, or, Implications of Consciousness after Decapitation Lori Selke The Family Halli Villegas The Owner’s Guide to Home Repair, Page 238: What to Do About Water Odor Vincent Michael Zito Different Angels Lynda E. Rucker

NONFICTION The H Word: W Is for Witch Gwendolyn Kiste Interview: S.P. Miskowski Lisa Morton

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Lori Selke Vincent Michael Zito MISCELLANY Coming Attractions Stay Connected Subscriptions and Ebooks About the Nightmare Team Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

Welcome to issue sixty-four of Nightmare. We have original fiction from Lori Selke (“A Head in a Box, or, Implications of Consciousness after Decapitation”) and Vincent Michael Zito (“The Owner’s Guide to Home Repair, Page 238: What to Do About Water Odor”), along with reprints by Halli Villegas (“The Family”) and Lynda E. Rucker (“Different Angels”). We also have Gwendolyn Kiste bringing us the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview with up-and-comer S.P. Miskowski.

John Joseph Adams Books News for January 2017 One new acquisition to report:

Micah Dean Hicks’s Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, a debut novel in which dangerous machines and unnatural beastmen mysteriously arrive in a dying town already filled with ghosts, forcing a haunted brother and sister to figure out how to save their family before tortured spirits tear the town and the newcomers apart. (Spring 2019)

Aside from new acquisitions, here’s a quick rundown what to expect from John Joseph Adams Books in 2018: In April, we have Bryan Camp’s The City of Lost Fortunes, about a magician with a talent for finding lost things who is forced into playing a high stakes game with the gods of New Orleans for the heart and soul of the city. Here’s some early buzz for the book:

“Camp’s fantasy reads like jazz, with multiple chaotic-seeming threads of deities, mortals, and destiny playing in harmony. This game of souls and fate is full of snarky dialogue, taut suspense, and characters whose glitter hides sharp fangs. [. . .] Any reader who likes fantasy with a dash of the bizarre will enjoy this trip to the Crescent City.” — Publishers Weekly “Take a walk down wild card shark streets into a world of gods, lost souls, murder, and deep, dark magic. You might not come back from The City of Lost Fortunes, but you’ll enjoy the trip.” —Richard Kadrey, bestselling author of the Sandman Slim series “In The City of Lost Fortunes, Bryan Camp delivers a high-octane tale of myth and magic, serving up the best of Neil Gaiman and Richard Kadrey. Here is New Orleans in all its gritty, grudging glory, the haunt of sinners and saints, gods and mischief-makers. Once you pay a visit, you won’t want to leave!” —Helen Marshall, World Fantasy Award- winning author of Gifts for the One Who Comes After “Bryan Camp’s debut novel The City of Lost Fortunes is like a blessed stay in a city both distinctly familiar and wonderfully strange, with an old friend who knows just the right spots to take you to–not too touristy, and imbued with the weight of history and myth, populated by local characters you’ll never forget. You’ll leave sated with the sights and sounds of a New Orleans that is not quite the real city, but breathes like the real thing, a beautiful mimicry in prose that becomes its own version of reality in a way only a good story—or magic—can. You won’t regret the visit.” —Indra Das, author of The Devourers “With sharp prose and serious literary chops, Bryan Camp delivers a masterful work of contemporary fantasy in The City of Lost Fortunes. It reads like the New Orleans-born love child of Raymond Chandler and Neil Gaiman, featuring a roguish hero you can’t help but root for. It’s funny, harrowing, thrilling—the pages keep turning. The City of Lost Fortunes establishes Bryan Camp as the best and brightest new voice on fantasy literature’s top shelf.” —Nicholas Mainieri, author of The Infinite “Anyone who loves New Orleans will love this mystical adventure where gods, magicians, vampires, zombies, angels, and ghouls clash in the only city where a story like this is actually possible. The City of Fortunes expertly blends the real and the surreal, capturing the essence of New Orleans in such a unique way. In this city, just as in this story, the line between fact and fiction blurs, and your imagination is set free.” —Candice Huber, Tubby and Coo’s Bookstore (New Orleans, LA) “Myth and archetype combine with the gritty realism of modern post- Katrina New Orleans in this fast-paced novel. Throughout the twists and turns of a clever, compelling plot, the soul of the city and strength of its survivors shine through. As a southern Louisiana resident, Bryan Camp saw firsthand the devastation and impact on people’s lives caused by Katrina, and the emotion of that experience fuels the power of the story and its unique, well-crafted characters. If you like the work of Neil Gaiman and Roger Zelazny, you’ll enjoy this book. A fun, engaging read. Highly recommended.” —Les Howle, director of the Clarion West Writers Workshop

In June, we have Todd McAulty’s The Robots of Gotham, a debut novel about a future where the world is on the brink of total subjugation by machine intelligences when a man stumbles on a sinister conspiracy to exterminate humanity and a group of human and machine misfits who might just be able to prevent it. Here’s what some early readers are saying about this one:

“When the robot apocalypse comes, I hope it’s this much fun. Like The Martian and Ready Player One, Robots of Gotham is set in a high-tech near-future where something has gone terribly wrong, and it’s navigated by a hero who’s quirky, resourceful, and as likable as they come. Read it for the rock’em-sock’em-robot action—read it for the deft world-building with its detailed taxonomy of intelligent machines—read it for the sobering parallels to modern-day issues and threats. Or just read it because it’s a helluva good ride.” —Sharon Shinn, author of the Elemental Blessings series “The Robots of Gotham is a crackling good adventure, stuffed with cool action sequences. It also features serious and intriguing speculation about the potential of Artificial Intelligence, for good and bad. And it’s an engaging read, with absorbing characters, and, of course, lots and lots of nifty robots.” —Rich Horton, editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy “Todd McAulty has imagined a fascinating geopolitical future, filled it with some very cool technology, and thrown in healthy helpings of intrigue and action. The result is a page-turner that kept me riveted from the opening lines to the final chapter. Highly recommended!” — David B. Coe, author of The Case Files of Justis Fearsson “If Johnny 5 had a baby with the Terminator, the result would be Robots of Gotham: a book that explores the consequences of world domination by our Robot Overlords. (And, lest we forget the badassiest of them, our Robot Overladies.) Drones, dinosaurs, and doggies—with a plague thrown in for good measure!—the barter is banter, and death is cheap. With man against machine, machine against machine, man against man, unlikely alliances must be forged across all species, rational or otherwise. For all its breakneck world- building, constant questing, and relentless wheeling and dealing, Robots of Gotham is deceptively deep-hearted: a novel about, of all things, friendship.” —C.S.E. Cooney, author of World Fantasy Award-winning Bone Swans: Stories “Soldiers, spies, diplomats—and that’s just the machines. Wait until you meet the wise-cracking hero and his dog. Wildly inventive, outrageous fun.” —Kay Kenyon, author of At the Table of Wolves and Serpent in the Heather “Adventure, mystery, action, sinister intrigue, clever heroics, and robots—what more do you need? I couldn’t put it down.” —Howard Andrew Jones, author of The Desert of Souls

Further out in 2018, we’ll have The Wild Dead—Carrie Vaughn’s sequel to Bannerless—in July; Dale Bailey’s In the Night Wood in October; and then Molly Tanzer’s Creatures of Want and Ruin in November. We’ll provide more details about those as the publication dates draw nearer, but as always if you want more information about these or any other John Joseph Adams Books titles, just visit johnjosephadamsbooks.com. That’s all the JJA Books news for now. More soon!

• • • •

Well, that’s all there is to report this month. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the issue!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Joseph Adams, in addition to serving as publisher and editor-in-chief of Nightmare, is the editor of John Joseph Adams Books, an science fiction and fantasy imprint from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, including The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Robot Uprisings, Dead Man’s Hand, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, and The Living Dead. Recent projects include: Cosmic Powers, What the #@&% Is That?, Operation Arcana, Loosed Upon the World, Wastelands 2, Press Start to Play, and The Apocalypse Triptych: The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come. Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist eleven times) and is a seven-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams. FICTION A Head in a Box, or, Implications of Consciousness after Decapitation Lori Selke | 3703 words

This is not about the movie. The movie that launched her career, where she played the pretty wife of a headstrong cop. Pretty, blonde, smart, convincing. Unhappy. The dutiful wife, killed, dismembered, beheaded. Just like the only other woman in the film, the fatal object of sin manifest. How ironic was it that The Actress first made such a strong cinematic impression with her portrayal of a character whose severed head does indeed end up in a packing crate in the middle of a field so that The Actor—her boyfriend at the time—can have a crisis of conscience? The Actress had the rest of her life to contemplate the irony. After all, she didn’t have anything else to do but think and speak. And blink. And occasionally wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. And smile. She was already a practiced smiler. An expert. A professional. But this story is not about that box. There is no serial killer, no neat if bloody moral. It is just the ugly coincidence of fate that The Actress’s career was launched by a movie in which her head ends up in a box. Her first career, that is. Her second career was as a head in a box.

• • • •

A severed head can live an indeterminate amount of time away from its body —possibly indefinitely if fluids are renewed, oxygen delivered to the brain and waste products shunted away. A severed head may remain sensate for several seconds, though the science is obviously disputed and impossible to reproduce, at least ethically. You will hear tales of chickens blinking and opening their beaks. Of dogs’ heads held in Russian laboratories. Of convicted French criminals and their expressions of affront or surprise. Last words uttered after the fall of the blade. This particular blonde head received instant and expert medical attention. How fortunate that the crash happened just yards from Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. How fortunate that she was rich. She had impeccable health insurance. She was wearing a helmet. She had friends in high places. She was riding her beloved Vespa. A cable snapped, wrapped around her neck, caught, pulled taut. Sliced like the sharpest knife and toppled her head from the pillar of her back. A freak accident. Unpreventable. Uncorrectable. Gruesome. Unique. Her body couldn’t be salvaged; it was dragged along the road, beneath the still- hurtling scooter, and mangled beyond repair. But her head was pristine and undamaged, except for the obvious. Were her eyes open in shock, or closed by gravity and loss of blood? No one made note at the time. Their priorities were elsewhere. Both head and body were taken to the emergency doors of the hospital. That famous face was recognized immediately. One quick slice and her body was a loss, but her head, her head, that million- dollar face, those highly marketable freckles and strands of flaxen hair were still pristine, still worth recovering from the wreckage. The grand experiment began. Tubes and buckets and blood transfusions followed. Hasty arrangements of polyvinyl and pumps. Nutrient solutions. Saline and oxygenation. Artificial circulation, artificial respiration. Antibacterial swabs. On the operating table, one of The Actress’s eyes opened slowly, focused on nothing. It stared vacantly at the monitors and tubes, the green sheets and the polished metal. Then it closed again, as if she were sleeping. Her eyes moved beneath her eyelids, back and forth, back and forth. Throughout the lengthy procedures, they never stopped.

• • • •

Blondes seem to suffer the severing blade more often than most. Think of Jayne Mansfield and Marie Antoinette. Now The Actress had joined that pair, a triple goddess of beautiful blonde heads. Admittedly, she was more Antoinette than Mansfield; the latter was coarse, brazen, a publicity hog. The former, an aristocrat, bred for success. “Let them eat clean.” Although Mansfield, it will be remembered, was also a devoted mother with a genius IQ. Perhaps they were not so different after all. Why blondes suffer decapitation more often cannot be explained by science. One must resort to the mechanics of coincidence, or of superstition and mysticism. Or one can merely note the pattern without turning to theory. Empirical observation without a push to conclusion. With the help of her accident, The Actress ascended to the pantheon of Famous Blonde Heads. Blond Vic Morrow was decapitated by a helicopter blade. He was a movie star too. Madame du Barry, the mistress of Marie Antoinette’s father-in-law. Both beautiful and spoiled, both blonde, both beheaded by the Revolution. Her last words were “encore un moment!”—a proto-existential crie de couer. The truth about Mansfield, by the way, is more complicated. She was not actually beheaded. She was scalped, her head cracked open like an egg and her blonde hair left on the dashboard—or perhaps it was a wig. She was, after all, not a natural blonde. The Actress was no longer a natural blonde either. Now she was an unnatural blonde, a head without a body. An accidental head in a box.

• • • •

The Actress was also not the first head in a box. The heads in boxes reside in cornfields. They reside in gilt reliquaries inside cathedrals. They reside in garages and they reside in schoolyards. The boxes are sometimes plastic crates, sometimes of old-fashioned wood, but most often they are made of cardboard, once soggy and now stiffened with blood. But they do not speak. Before her, only brazen heads had spoken. Other heads had been preserved, but their mouths were sewn shut or their lips fused tight together by rigor mortis. The Actress was the first, but once she’d demonstrated that the technique worked—well, she was always a natural trendsetter. She was not brazen. She was golden.

• • • •

She could have succumbed to the horror and pain of being suddenly and permanently severed from her body. The madness of nerves misfiring. She could have closed her eyes and let herself die. She could have snarled a curse and grown snakes from her head. Instead, her lips convulsed. They quivered like a fresh batch of artisanal jelly. Tayberry, perhaps. With a hint of cardamom. She retched, she cleared her throat. One eye was open and focused; the other eyelid was at half-mast. The Actress’s eyes rolled back into her head. Her jaw fell open. Her tongue moved within the cavern of her mouth, the muscle limp and meaty at first, slurring the sounds she made with her throat. The voice box intact. A thin thread of spittle slipped out the corner of her mouth. Sparks seemed to ignite off the flint of her teeth. She spit. She rolled her entire head atop that pretty swanlike neck, also miraculously preserved by advanced medical means. She bit her tongue and smeared the blood across her lips. Her gaze shot frantically all over the room, then fixed on a point somewhere in the middle distance. Such pretty blue eyes, not a bright bejeweled tone, but the stormy hue of the troubled sea.

• • • •

She had to relearn to speak. Who knew what nerve damage might have occurred, or what small parts of the brain winked out in those few crucial minutes when her head was no longer breathing? That brief window of nothingness, snapped shut by advanced medical science. Her first words sounded heavy and ponderous. Once there was a fairy tale of a girl who spoke and jewels fell from her mouth; when her sister spoke, scorpions and spiders scuttled forth. When The Actress spoke for the first time after the accident, it was boulders. Kettlebells. Concrete blocks. Slabs of marble. Lead. Her spittle was mercury and her tears were too. “Thishp izf zhe beshp gooden fee bownee freshibee effeh,” she said. Her first articulations were painful and slow. But they soon gained momentum. Her words sped up. “Too eggzh,” she said. “Aha cup olla oil. Aha cup bwow zhugah. Aha teespoo bakih powda. Acuppa dahk chocalett chipzh. Won teespoo gowned koffi. Aha cup amand flahr. Afor cup bwow wice flahr. Won teespoo baniluh ekstakt. Apinsh sawt.” “Whishk,” she articulated, gingerly. “Whishk. Hand. Held. Whishk.” “Parshmen pay per. Peeheet thee fifty. Bake thurdy minute. Coo owna wire rack.” Her diction improved with the help of a suite of speech therapists, who assigned her exercises to recover and improve her oral motor ability. She manipulated beads and buttons with her tongue and lips. She played tug-of-war with her mouth—using teeth was cheating. She grimaced through a series of stretching exercises for the muscles of her face.

• • • • It became apparent, however, that at least some brain damage had been incurred. Or, if one were feeling metaphysical, her soul had taken partial flight and remained incompletely tethered to her head. This was not entirely The Actress of old. She had lost some of her inhibitions and gained some new vocabulary. Nurses were assigned to transcribe and record everything that The Actress uttered. Supposedly it was for to monitor her therapeutic progress. “Clean clean clean clean clean clean clean clean. “Jay Z Jay Z Jay Z Jay Z Jay Z Jay. Z. Uncle Jay. JZ. JZ. Jeezy. Z Z Z Z Z Z. “N****s in Paris! N*****s in London! N****s in Barcelona! On the Riviera, under the cherry moon! N****s on the catwalk! Naples! Florence! Milan! “Nas! Nas! N***as! “******! “&@%*$***! “SEAN CARTER. “Zed. Zed. Zeta. Zeta, zulu, three. Three times two is six. Three, six, twenty- six. 26 Zulu street, Northcliff, Johannesburg. Three bedrooms. I do not sit with the deceitful, nor do I associate with hypocrites. Page twenty-six. You sabbee me, I sabbee you. Me sabbee plenty. “I need purple sprouting broccoli! Let them eat goop! “Jeezy, peasy, lemon squeezy. Freezy, sneezy, Japanesey. Day one: lemon water. Day two: spicy tuna on crispy rice. Day three: Pesto pasta with peas. Frozen peas. Frozen peas are an acceptable alternative to fresh in this and other dishes. Freezy peasy. Over easy.” It took some time for the glitchy electrical impulses in her recently-traumatized brain to smooth themselves out again. But soon enough she was spitting perfectly-pronounced words, if in a somewhat confounding order. A transcript from her first press conference includes this snippet: Q: “Is there anything you’d like to tell your fans about your, uh, transition?” A: “My name means white, it means fair, it means happy, it means Most Beautiful Woman People Magazine. It means Emmy, it means Academy Award. Golden hair and Golden Globe. I never fly coach but I own a Coach purse. My peers love me and they give me statues. Its origin is Welsh but I am a white Barbadian Rabbi’s daughter. Barbadian. Barbarian. I speak Spanish fluently even when in London. “Do you understand how powerful I am? They cut my fucking head off and put it in a box and that didn’t even slow me down. “I can sing. Would you like to hear me sing?” Q: “How did you feel at first after the accident?” A: “Queasy. I had such morning sickness when I was pregnant. I think it contributed to my postpartum depression and maybe it also had some connection to his gluten intolerance, I mean I can’t prove anything but you have to wonder. Don’t you?” Q: “Queasy was your primary feeling, then? When did that start to abate? Or has it? Has it gone away or do you still feel queasy sometimes?” A: “Sleazy. Teasy. Pleasey. Wheezy. Weezy. Weetzie Bat Cheesy. Easy Breezy Beautiful—no, wait, I don’t work for Maybelline. I’m an Estée Lauder girl. Estée, easy, geez Louisey. Louise, Louise, Eloise, Abelard. Fuck! “Get me the president. Get me my agent. Get me Oprah.”

• • • •

The Actress’s Head: The Oprah Interview

Oprah: “There were rumors of a . . . brain damage situation, after your accident.” The Actress: “Just rumors, Oprah. There were some challenges at the beginning of my recovery, but I went through an extensive rehabilitation process, including one-on-one speech therapy, and after I got used to my new status as a head in a box and recovered the use of my facial muscles and tongue, everything proceeded smoothly.” Oprah: “How do you get around your house?” The Actress: “Oh, I don’t, really, at the moment. With all the tubes and things I’m really sort of stuck in my box. The doctors are working on building a little scooter cart for me, you know, and robotic limbs are under discussion, as well—I will have the opportunity to try out a lot of prototypes, I think. The most advanced cutting-edge technology will be completely at my disposal. [giggle] But for right now, someone has to wheel me around attached to this big refrigerator- like unit that keeps my blood circulating and my brain oxygenated and all.” Oprah: “Is that hard for you?” The Actress: “I wouldn’t say it’s been easy, certainly. It’s very challenging. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, frankly, but I’m grateful for the opportunities this has provided me.” Oprah: “Opportunities? Such as?” The Actress: “I get to spend more time with my children. And I’m dictating a new book. It’s my memoir. I think it will be very inspirational.” Oprah: “Do you miss your body? Is there like a phantom limb sort of phenomenon?” The Actress: “Oh, God, sometimes I get the most terrible itch on my nose and there’s nothing I can do about it, you know? I miss having hands and I miss having feet. But mostly for practical reasons. There are definitely parts I don’t miss at all!” Oprah: “Such as?” The Actress: “I don’t have to worry any more about my bikini line . . .” Oprah: “You wrote two best-selling cookbooks. Do you miss eating, do you miss food?” The Actress: “As you know, I am fed via a tube now, and my head alone, it turns out, doesn’t need all that much nutritional input to stay alive and functioning. I miss the taste of food and I miss handling it. I was a pretty decent and creative cook, if I do say so myself. I wrote those two cookbooks, after all. All by myself, no matter what that woman says. But I will also confess that I was always more interested in feeding other people—especially my children. And I can still do that. I can still dictate recipes and give directions to my assistants, just like the old days. [mutual laughter] I just can’t stir the pot myself anymore.” Oprah: “How do your children feel about your change?” The Actress: “They’re just glad to have their mother back—in whatever form they can.” Oprah: “At this point, what are your career plans?” The Actress: “I don’t need to work, financially speaking, although the medical bills for this situation are staggering, as you can imagine. And every little bit helps. So I’m pursuing some options. Some cosmetics companies have been calling, which is very flattering. But I think I am going to try a more traditional path. Traditional, at least, if you know your classics. “I’ve decided to become an oracle. One of the strange side-effects of the accident is that when I lost my body, I seem to have gained some extra-sensory perceptions. You know how blind people can become extra-sharp of hearing in compensation for their visual deficit? Well it turns out that can kind of happen to heads, too. I can see things.” Oprah: “What kind of things?” The Actress: “I can see the future, Oprah.” Oprah: “Really? That’s fascinating.” The Actress: “Really. I’ve got a few initial clients; they pay me for predictions about stocks and sports games, elections, things like that.” Oprah: “Elections?” The Actress: “I’m not big on politics, but maybe someday, sure. I’m open to the possibility.” Oprah: “Lottery numbers?” The Actress: [laughing] “We’ll see.” Oprah: “So tell me, how do you ‘see’ the future? Is it like a movie screen, or do you hear voices whispering in your ear, or what?” The Actress: “It’s like double vision. Like somebody pulls a translucent curtain over my eyes, and I can see both what’s on the curtain and what’s behind it. Or maybe it’s more like looking through a pane of glass that’s had something painted on it—you see the glass and through the glass at the same time. Does that make any sense?” Oprah: “So is the future the pane of glass, or the curtain, or whatever’s behind them?” The Actress: “Sometimes it’s the glass, sometimes it’s behind the glass. It’s really hard to describe if you haven’t experienced it. Or done hallucinogens.”

• • • •

The Actress’s head replaces the robotic double of Dear Abby and dictates a new, wildly popular weekly advice column. Because of her peculiar new talents, she is banned from the state of Nevada and from a number of online gambling sites. Once a month, she has a private conference call with the President of the United States. “Just doing my patriotic duty,” she says to all press inquiries, and smiles, her perfect white teeth gleaming in the light from the flashbulbs that always seem to surround her, now as before. She is the most famous face in the world. And not just a face. Finally, finally, they respect her for her mind. She finds she has a taste for high-end millinery and becomes one of the most sought-after hat models in history. Elaborate women’s hats are instantly back in style. High-end hairstylists, too, send discreet inquiries, and sometimes The Actress responds. She cuts her formerly long, flowing tresses into a stylish and flattering asymmetrical bob, and later experiments with a pixie cut. The Actress enters into high-end negotiations with certain prestigious filmmakers about reviving her film career. Plans for a biopic of St. Catherine of Siena are rumored to be in the works; an earlier deal to play Anne Boleyn fell through. The Actress hires an attendant to keep her lips greased and glossed at all times. To comb her golden hair, to apply subtle and natural make-up. To pluck errant hairs and to apply sunscreen as needed—all-natural and PABA-free. With her skin so fair and so many other health worries sloughed away, skin cancer is in the center of The Actress’s radar.

• • • •

The Actress, despite her new nearly-bodiless state, still sleeps. Still dreams. In fact, she had a recurring dream. She tells no one about it. The Actress dreams that at night, after she was asleep, she has a whole body again, but only for a moment. For shortly after the dream began, her head would detach from her body, neatly, as if on a hinge. Her head would rise, and rise, and rise into the air. Beneath her neck, her body would fall away, as if swooning, into the bedcovers. But not all of her body. With a slick and slippery sound, a mass of dark and glistening entrails is pulled out of her torso. Oh, what a voluptuous feeling, that slow slide upwards. And then, the final parting, as her head flies free, trailing its heart and its stomach and lungs like the mermaid hem of a couture gown. A heart and stomach and set of lungs that, in reality, she left behind in a hospital room. It seemed like so long ago, now. Her head and entrails sail through the window, into the gloom of night. She can feel herself smile, exposing her newly sharp teeth. She can also feel a long, thin tongue uncurl from between her lips. She smells blood and vinegar on the night breezes, and the scent makes her hungry. No. Not hungry. Thirsty. She flies, free of her box, her strange contraption. Her liberated lungs fill with air. Strangely, her hair is always black in this dream. When she awakens from the dream, she finds her lips are dry, sometimes almost cracking. She tries applying virgin coconut oil before she sleeps—or, rather, she has the coconut oil applied by her assistant—but it never seems to help. She always wakes up with dry lips and a dry throat. Her assistant rushes to her side with a straw cup of spring water and applies another coating of handmade, organic hydrating cream. She licks her lips and tastes salt.

• • • • One final strange side effect of The Actress’s unique predicament takes some time to manifest. She does not age. Her hair grows, her few gray hairs hidden by the bright blonde tones of the rest of her hair. She breathes, although she does not need to. Perpetually mid-forties yet still apple-cheeked, The Actress is frozen in time. As long as the mechanical parts of her “box”—the tubes and valves that feed her nutrients and take away her waste, that oxygenate her brain and push the blood through her veins—as long as those are maintained, she may well live forever. The Actress is looking into having solar panels installed on her rig, so that she can be even more self-sufficient. Scientists and engineers are researching carts, spider-crawlers, cyborg bodies to increase her mobility. The Actress is driving innovation. It makes her just a little bit proud. The Actress always knew she was destined for something great. Something different. People teased her about being born on third base with a silver spoon in her mouth, but she had proved everyone wrong. She was not just beautiful and talented and blessed with beautiful and talented parents. She had taste, she had skills, and now she was spearheading technology that could not only save lives but change their very texture forever. Through the intercession of fate, she had forged a new path toward immortality. Not metaphorical this time, but real. Her star is rising. She has no choice but to ascend. She is the face of the future.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lori Selke lives in Oakland, California. She has been previously published in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and The Big Click. She is also the co-editor of the anthology Outlaw Bodies from Future Fire Press. Her stand-alone novella “The XY Conspiracy” is available from Aqueduct Press.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight The Family Halli Villegas | 2367 words

The family’s house was a rambling white-frame farmhouse set on a hill. It had attics and dormers and porches. To her it seemed like there were twenty, forty, even fifty children in the family, but the actual count was thirteen. Like a family of rabbits in a warren on the hill, instead of underneath it. Not all the children lived at home; a few were off at university or had jobs in the city, but there were still enough to make the house feel perpetually in chaos. Adelaide was a distant cousin, spending the summer with the family ostensibly as a sort of babysitter, but the parents were never far from home. The children’s parents, Ruth and Jim, spent a good deal of their time in the outbuildings that served as their business, where they spun and dyed the wool from their own sheep, and then knit it into fabulous and bizarre sweaters, hats, scarves. Their company, Au Natural, was known for its striking colour combinations and the way they had of constructing the knit pieces so that they seemed to float, or to hang just ready to fall apart. They’d even had designers from Europe and fashion editors at the farm to see the pieces and order things for collections. These fashionable people always left delighted with the modesty of Ruth and Jim, who ran Au Natural like they ran their family; with a charming negligence and trust in the ability of everyone to pull their own weight. They were known as good neighbours, unpretentious successes, and the best of the new-era hippies who combined style with eco-awareness. Adelaide had to admit that the children, despite their absolute lack of respect for her or any other authority figure except their parents, kept themselves constructively busy. They built tree forts, put together little books with their own drawings and collages, knitted doll clothes under the trees in the orchard, rode their horses wildly, but not recklessly, and cared for their rabbits, ducks, dogs and cats without being reminded to. They were polite to Adelaide, but sometimes cut their eyes away when she was talking to them, to indulge in a secret amusement amongst themselves. Sometimes they would stare with wide-open eyes at her, as if she were speaking a foreign language when she tried to direct them to sit down at the table for lunch, or some such thing. Then one of them would shout, “A picnic!” And before she could say anything, they would grab blankets and pillows, the older children filling a large willow basket with leftovers and bottles of lemonade. A picnic would be spread beside the brook that meandered behind the house, under a tree, the children eating, talking about books they had read or the antics of their pets, while Adelaide sat helpless a way off on a large pillow thoughtfully set by them in the shade of the tree and watched. Often their parents would stumble on these idyllic scenes and smile and the children would surround them vying for attention, and Ruth or Jim would tell Adelaide she was doing a really terrific job, they were so happy she had joined them that summer, and the children would look at her with their secretive eyes to see what she would say. If she began to say, “Oh, it wasn’t . . .” they would roar and start some sort of noisy sport, or begin to tickle her until everyone was laughing, but Adelaide could feel their hard fingers scratching at her under the guise of play and she wished that the summer was over. One of the children in particular regarded Adelaide with absolute disdain. Her name was Mary Matilda, and she was sometimes called Mattie, and sometimes Mary Mat, or just M. Adelaide, in her own fit of rebelliousness, called her nothing but Mary Matilda. The little girl was about nine or ten, with a dark fringe of hair over her forehead and her mother’s blue eyes in a face still round with baby fat. But her skin, a matte white under the dark hair and the eyebrows like a raven’s feather promised beauty later on. She never spoke to Adelaide unless pressed and always refused to do whatever Adelaide said—not with any anger, but with the calm assurance of authority. She would turn on her heel and go out to the stables or the yard, leaving Adelaide speechless. Adelaide didn’t dare grab hold of her arm or shoulder and call her back, because Mary Matilda was a great favourite among her siblings and they watched after one another with unusual devotion. All the children were good riders, but Mary Matilda was the best of all. That summer she generally rode bareback. Adelaide would stand by the house while the children raced down the long winding drive overhung with trees on their horses. One of the boys, Edward, would lie along one of the long tree limbs and wave a flag for them to start. The children would gallop down the drive, coming to such an abrupt stop at the end that their horses’ hindquarters, foamed with sweat, would seem to almost crumple under the effort. Mary Matilda almost always won. The only one who could beat her was her older brother Matthew. Adelaide complained to Ruth and Jim, worried that the children would get hurt. Ruth laughed, and said, “The children have been riding since they were born.” “Before, honey, before they were born. You were riding horses into your third trimester.” Jim laid his arm along his wife’s shoulders. “Just about gave old Doc Johnston a heart attack.” He looked at Adelaide and winked. “Don’t worry, Adelaide, we won’t hold you responsible if anyone breaks their neck on your watch.” Then he leaned over and kissed Ruth in a way that made Adelaide blush. Matthew, at sixteen, was the oldest of the boys still at home. His eyes were reddish brown and quite large. He used them a lot when begging favours for himself: to go down to the creek at night, to sleep on the porch when it got too hot in his attic bedroom, favours that Adelaide knew he only asked her permission for as a courtesy. He would have done what he wanted anyway. Matthew would throw his long legs and arms into various attitudes of supplication as he lay down beside Adelaide on the grass and asked her what she was reading, or if she wanted lemonade, he grinned at her with white teeth, his eyes peering from beneath a flop of sandy curls. He asked Adelaide about her friends and the city where she went to school, propped his chin in his long- fingered hands while he listened, his oddly delicate wrist bones sticking well out from his too-small jersey sleeves. Matthew was considerate of the younger children and played their games, let them sit on his knee while he read to them. On rainy days Mary Matilda and the others would fall in a heap on him while he sat on the old sofa in front of the fireplace in the living room and told stories. Often while he was playing hide or seek with the children or croquet, he would leave the game and come and sit beside Adelaide to talk. Once he showed her a poem he had written, another time, he put an arm around her when they looked at a book Adelaide had brought from home. When she shrugged out from underneath, he had looked at her with the same wide eyes all the children had, guileless. Adelaide did nothing to encourage his puppy crush, but admitted to herself she found it comforting amidst the general disregard the others treated her with. The only house rule was that for two hours in the afternoon, at the height of the day, was to be quiet time. The children were expected to go to their bedrooms and read, or sleep. None of the children ever disobeyed this rule, and Adelaide was always surprised at how quietly and quickly they went up to their rooms and shut the doors. The house would fall silent, except for the sonorous ticking of the grandfather clock that stood in the entryway. Adelaide usually went out to the kitchen porch and sat on the porch swing, where she read, or looked out over the well-tended gardens and land of the family’s farm. Sometimes Matthew would join her, bringing a drink or a book, and they would talk until the first of the children came down. He didn’t come all the time, not too often, because he said his parents would be disappointed if he did not set a good example for the younger children by keeping the one house rule. When he did come, Adelaide found herself having fun for the first time that summer while she watched him goof around for her, imitating visitors to the farm, or when she caught him staring at her with his wide brown eyes, eager for her approval. One night near the end of the summer, as the family sat at the long trestle table having dinner in the farmhouse kitchen, Ruth and Jim announced they had some news to share with them. The children, polite, attentive, listened while their parents told them that Marcus and Jane, their oldest siblings, would be coming home tomorrow. Secondly, Au Natural had just signed a contract with Devaughn, the British rock star, to provide dyed wools for the line of eco-correct clothing he and his wife had started, called Gardun, which would mean a trip to London for the whole family. Lastly, Ruth and Jim had decided to adopt a baby from Africa, a little girl whose father was dead from AIDS and whose mother could not afford to keep her any longer. The children broke out in their own carefully controlled uproar, which always struck Adelaide as being somehow scripted. “A baby? Can I name her?” “I can’t wait to see Marcus and show him the new pony.” “Is Jane bringing her boyfriend?” “Are we going to be rich, Mummy?” “Do you think we can go backstage to Devaughn’s show?” Jim and Ruth laughed and answered questions animatedly, the fingers flying as they described various things, their arms flung out in gestures, with much theatrical hugging of the children closest to them. Matthew winked at Adelaide, and she noticed that only Mary Matilda sat silent. The next day during the quiet hours, Adelaide sat on the porch and waited for Matthew. She assumed his wink meant he wanted to talk to her about his parents’ news, that they shared a secret amusement at the whole thing. As she looked out over the garden and watched the small figure of Jim or Ruth, hard to tell from this distance, walk from shed to barn, she heard a step behind her. Adelaide turned and smiled, but it was Mary Matilda. “Mary Matilda, it’s quiet time.” Adelaide felt a little tremor go through her— what if Matthew came down now and Mary Matilda saw and started a general mutiny? Matthew would never come down again during quiet time. “I’m not sleepy.” Adelaide’s worry deepened. For that matter, what if Ruth or Jim came and saw Mary Matilda on the porch instead of in her room? They would know she had failed, that she had no authority over their so-well-behaved children. “Mary Matilda, you don’t have to sleep. Just lie there and read. You know the rules.” Adelaide stood up. Mary Matilda looked at her. “My necklace is caught in my hair and it pulls. Can you come upstairs and fix it.” “I can fix it here, turn around.” “No, upstairs.” Mary Matilda went in the house and Adelaide followed, knowing Mary Matilda was quite capable of causing uproar if it would make Adelaide look bad. She knew in that moment that the child in front of her, with the straight dark hair almost to her waist, the firm legs of an outdoor girl burnished with tan, the childish shoulder blades that fluttered under her striped t- shirt, hated Adelaide. Adelaide knew she hated this little girl right back, she wanted to slap her for her insolence. There was no corporal punishment allowed of course, but Adelaide felt that Mary Matilda and her attitude would only benefit from a few well-placed spankings. When they came to Mary Matilda’s small room, a little cubby hole really, with roses on the wallpaper and a small bed with a chenille coverlet, an overflowing bookcase and dresser, a closet door ajar, she lost her temper. “Mary Matilda, lie down right now.” “My hair, it’s caught. It pulls. It hurts.” Adelaide wheeled Mary Matilda around quickly, lifted her hair and saw that, just as she thought, the child wasn’t wearing a necklace. “Get in that bed, or I’ll tell your parents.” Mary Matilda’s face closed like a flower shutting for the night and she lay down rigid on her bed. Adelaide left the room and pulled the door almost shut behind her, not closing it so she could see if Mary Matilda was going to stay in her room. Adelaide would look for Matthew and tell him what happened so that if Mary Matilda made any more trouble, maybe he could stop it. She could see the little girl motionless on the bed, her white arm rigid at her side, and after a heartbeat, Adelaide began to walk down the hall. Then she heard whispers. Walking back silently to Mary Matilda’s door, wondering what trick the brat was playing on her now, she stopped just outside it and listened. “Don’t worry, the bitch went back downstairs. Come on M, I’ll let you win the next race.” Through the crack she saw his long limbs climbing on the narrow bed, the long-fingered hands tugging at something. Standing in the hall frozen, her hand at her mouth, now she heard whispers all around her, heard the soft noises, like animals in their secret places, where there wasn’t any light.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Halli Villegas is the author of three collections of poetry (Red Promises, In the Silence Absence Makes, and The Human Cannonball). Her book of ghost stories The Hairwreath and Other Stories came out in fall 2010 with Chizine Publications. She received an Honorable Mention for two of her stories in the 2010 edition of The Year’s Best Horror edited by Ellen Datlow. She is the co-editor of the anthologies Imaginarium: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing 2012 and In the Dark: Tales of the Supernatural. Her genre work has appeared in anthologies that include Cli-Fi: Canadian Tales of Climate Change, Chilling Tales 2, The White Collar Anthology, Bad Seed, Incubus, Girls Who Bite Back and Mammoth Best New Horror, 25th anniversary edition. In 2017 she won the Carter Vanderbilt Cooper emerging writer prize for her story “Road Kill.” The story is included in the CVC 7 anthology (Exile Editions 2017). The Owner’s Guide to Home Repair, Page 238: What to Do About Water Odor Vincent Michael Zito | 1571 words

Turn the crystal knob on your kitchen faucet and shut off the water. Step back. Wave the air in front of you, cough, snort, pinch your nose, do whatever you must to clear the repulsive smell clogging your nostrils as if you’ve just inhaled rotten meat. Think of the dead crab you found when you were ten years old, its body washed to shore in Rhode Island, and you brought it home and kept it all summmer long in an empty pickle jar on your dresser, even as the crab’s shell turned a sick, dark grey and erupted with crawling pink worms that scavenged the flesh, until one day in August when you opened the jar. Compare that hideous stench—choking, miserable, terrifying—to the odor here now, the same, coming from the water in your house. Try the knob for the hot water. Repeat above. Sniff your hands, flinch, scrub them dry on a dishtowel until they hurt. Wonder how long the stink will stick to your skin. Check the bathroom down the hall, and the one upstairs; open those faucets, now wring them closed, barricading yourself against the fumes rolling like invisible poison from the water. Run the bath, and discover the same. Stop and think. Consider the toilet. Push the handle so that the bowl empties, the water shrinks away, the water replenishes. Cringe at the odor filling the bowl, the room, your lungs again as you stifle the urge to vomit, the toilet waiting patiently under you. Get out before this happens. Return to the kitchen, take the last clean glass from the cabinet, and fill it with a shot from the faucet. Hold the water to the light, and wonder how it can look so clear, so pure, when Holy Jesus Christ it smells so utterly rancid. Pour it out, discard the glass into the garbage pail. Notice how the rankness persists even when the faucets are off, as though once released it has permission to reside here forever. Open windows. Spray cologne around the house like a rite of exorcism. Hold a cloth over your nose, hoping to filter out whatever impurity has invaded the air you breathe. Speculate why this makes you afraid. Dig around your workbench in the basement until you find the book Margaret bought you for Christmas the first year you were married, The Owner’s Guide to Home Repair. Refer to Page 238 in the “Plumbing” chapter, which contains three medium-sized paragraphs pertaining to water odor. Follow these suggestions: Call on your nearest neighbor, a retired old widower named Ellis who shares your public water supply, who is always happy to help when Margaret asks him as a favor to collect your mail while the two of you visit her parents in the Hamptons—an annual event which cannot be avoided, despite your dislike for her parents, despite your reluctance to allow Ellis as a witness to your private affairs, your substantial bills, your letters from the banks that require secret trips to the mailbox when you are home to intercept and hide them before Margaret can see. Ask Ellis if he’s noticed any trouble with his water. Thank him when he checks and says no. Pretend to be interested in dinner some night, you, him and Margaret, then hang up on the lonely old man. Remove the panels in your ceilings, room by room, and examine the pipes, spend hours hunting for old iron that may be a source of bacteria, the kind that stinks like death. Crinkle your nose at the smell in these crawl spaces, but find nothing that matches the descriptions and illustrations in your book, just smooth black PVC tubes slithering through walls and floors like huge headless snakes. Decide you will not call a plumber to snoop around your house. Return the ineffective Owner’s Guide to Home Repair to its drawer in the basement. Go without washing, so that your hands smudge, your fingernails darken with grime, your body turns sticky and unpleasant after a week without showering. Conclude that something is dead, that somewhere in the belly of those PVC snakes winding through your house a small animal has fallen prey, crawled through a drain or a corroded hole to die and decompose. Imagine a rat like this, twisted and slick and gooey like some awful melting candy, souring the water as the current runs through the clogged pipe and discharges like pus into your sinks and tubs and toilets. Take apart the panels in the ceiling again, begin a second sweep of the piping, this time examining every surface, every joint, every connection so closely that it takes hours to satisfy yourself there are no open cracks. Make trip after trip to the hardware store, buying new pipes of shiny copper and steel to replace any that warrant concern, any that appear weakened or crusty, any that you can possibly suspect as the source of decay. Replace them all but find nothing unusual, no dead rat, no carrion of any sort, once you’ve taken the old pipes apart and peered inside. Try the faucets again. Surrender at last to the nausea that has haunted you for days. Pour your sickness into the sink as the reeking water urges you on. Call the public water authority. Tell them about the smell. Tell them you cannot live like this. Realize that the man on the phone is indifferent to your distress, that there is nothing he will do to help you, not when two thousand homes in your district share the same water source, and you are the only one to complain. Realize what this means. Feel your heart strike, the painful spasm in your chest, your breath faster now. Interrupt the man’s suggestions, the same useless ones you’d been offered by The Owner’s Guide to Home Repair, and ask for the exact source of your water— though of course you know the answer before he tells you, before the words bash your skull like a blow from the eighteen-inch cast iron wrench in your toolbox: Timber Lake Reservoir. Think of Margaret. Think of her that evening last month when she discovered your lies, your business failures, how desperate you’d become. Think of the words she shouted, words like fraud and criminal and divorce and jail. Think of her later that night at Timber Lake, splayed on the shore like the crab you found in Rhode Island. Hang up on the man repeating Sir? Sir? and recall the drive in the darkness to Timber Lake, Margaret finally silent on the floor in your backseat, her head soft and broken, the trees black like prison bars as you pulled off the road and picked a path through the elms down to the water, a stumbling, strenuous trek with Margaret in your arms and your cramped fingers hooked through the handle of your largest suitcase, until at last you collapsed at the shore and filled the suitcase first with rocks and then with Margaret. Remember how cold the water felt as you waded into the lake, towing the suitcase until you could go no farther without being pulled under, out where it was deep enough to push Margaret off inside her submersible coffin, sending her sinking and sliding down the slope of the lake floor to an untold resting place. Imagine her now at the bottom of that reservoir, stuck in the black muck and vile reeds, the suitcase waterlogged and fallen apart, her corpse fat and half- devoured by fish, Margaret fizzing with decay—particles of death peeling away from her, set free into the water, into the supply, into the pipes, a funeral procession of stink and foulness, Margaret’s body coming home speck by speck in the currents. Moan as the stench intensifies, burning your throat. Moan in fear. Lie in bed at night and listen to the pipes in your house moaning, too, the pressure mounting as the water pushes harder and harder through the catacombs of steel and copper winding hidden within your home, making each pipe tremble and rattle and bang from inside the walls, the ceiling, the floor, above you, below you, next to you. Cover your ears, try to ignore it, now cover your nose and shake your head to dispel that unforgivable odor, the fury of the pipes, the memory. Detect a whisper, coming from your bathroom, what could be a trickle of water or could be her voice: Darling. Deny it, deny it, you can’t. Stagger from your bed, every footstep a bare white scream, force yourself to the bathroom. Flip on the light, look around you. Listen to the pipes tearing at the walls, the porcelain tiles wild with echo, the odor fiercer and fiercer, like a hand around your neck, dragging you to the shower stall. Whimper, you pathetic thing. Throw open the curtain and step inside. Vomit, the odor so intense. Raise your dirtied face to the showerhead knocking and quaking above you, scream no no no, but you must. Accept it all, the memory, the monstrous pounding of the pipes, the stench of slaughterhouses, reach out a hand and turn the water on. Let her rush over you, hot and angry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Vincent Michael Zito is the author of the novel The Return Man (available now from international publisher Hodder & Stoughton), a contributor to popular horror anthologies such as the recent Eulogies series, and an active member in the Horror Writers Association. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, daughter, and two magnificent dogs. He writes horror at night, while masquerading as Creative Director at a New England ad agency during safe daylight hours.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight Different Angels Lynda E. Rucker | 5036 words

In the swelling, oppressive heat of a Georgia midday, Jolie came home. She choked on the red clay dust clouds billowing from beneath the wheels of the old Chevy that dropped her off a half-mile past the end of the paved road. They had picked her up walking on the Calhoun Falls highway headed out of town. Jolie could see the concerned faces of the snot-nosed kids with whom she’d shared the back seat pressing against the window, until the car dipped down a hill and out of sight. Her fingers were slick on the strap of the overnight-sized suitcase she carried, and she let it slip to the ground. Something rustled in the underbrush and she closed her eyes: snakes, maybe? Black racers, rattlers, moccasins, moving fast and striking swift before she had time to run? She breathed in deep and smelled the honeysuckle twining there on the side of the road, and the mellow reek of cow shit in the pastures beyond, and the secretive stink of her own sweat. The smells were almost as good as a time machine. They took her back to that last summer of 1985. “The last summer” she’d called it then, too, even before she’d ever really believed she’d be leaving. She had spent it in cool church sanctuaries, wearing ugly pantyhose and uglier shoes, slipping out after Bible study to make out with the college-bound boys. She imagined that something in those aloof intimacies might transfer that power of escape to her. Even after the scholarship, her father said she wasn’t going off anyplace where she was going to get ideas about being better than she was, better than all the rest of them. She called the place a shithole, a redneck, white-trash, low-class goddamn piece of shit town. Kind of town you wanted to raise your kids up in, the city elders said, while unbeknownst to them, their kids were doing speedballs down at the river and humping one another with the frenzy of dogs in heat. Kind of place everyone talked about running far, far away from, and no one ever did. Those same kids grew up to be city elders themselves, and talked about what a good, God-fearing community they all resided in. So Jolie held out little hope for escape until that late August night when ashes fell through the air like they came from the sky, from heaven—if heaven could ever be so generous, so just. The firemen said her father’s last careless cigarette had freed her; wherever her salvation had come from, Jolie had not believed until then that she would ever leave. She picked her way up the clayey dirt road, here where the pine forests harvested by timber companies had grown back at last, round this bend where the heavy summer rains sent you sloughing off into the ditch if you weren’t careful to drive real slow. Now over this hill and home again. The house stood at the end of a stretch of gravel; a white clapboard front she’d never seen, rebuilt since the fire. A new porch, too. Her mouth was dry and the air filled with the sounds of beating wings and hissing tongues, as though the moment she set foot here again, they had awakened. As though ten long years had not passed for them at all. Get thee behind me, she told them. As she trudged toward the house that was nothing like her memory, her sister LuAnn stepped out onto the porch, shading her eyes, and spotted her. LuAnn’s mouth dropped open, and she ran as fast as her short chubby legs could carry her. Her teeth were stained yellow and her hot tears washed Jolie’s neck as she threw her arms around her. She smelled like coffee and cigarettes. Where had she been and how did she get out there, LuAnn wanted to know; she had been waiting by the phone all morning for her call. Jolie didn’t answer any of her queries. She couldn’t think of what to say, and couldn’t imagine how to tell LuAnn just how badly she’d need her first moments out here to be alone ones. “You didn’t let somebody bring you out here, did you?” LuAnn asked. “Oh, honey, you did, didn’t you! You ought not to have done that. You can’t never tell about people nowadays.” LuAnn had put on a fair amount of weight in the last decade and a half, but her face remained the same; small and sharp, ringed with frizzy curls. “You ain’t going away again, are you hon?” LuAnn went on. “You know you can stay here, long as you want.” It was the invitation you extended to someone coming home in defeat, the last job lost, the apartment broken into, another man gone, the precarious life crumbled. “I just got tired,” Jolie said, and it was mostly true. Her grand escape had been the grandest thing in her life so far; peoples’ lives in the cities up north were just as dead-end as anyone’s back home. Up north was just one long endless waiting for something that never came. Up north was purgatory. LuAnn stepped back and the sun behind her lit up her light-colored hair like a halo. Jolie squinted, still trying to study LuAnn’s features, wondering if she might go blind in doing so. Would it truly be such a bad thing to sear her corneas useless? She could stand the lack of sight, as long as it truly left her in darkness and not gazing eternally at a bleached, white, shining light. She’d always heard heaven described as a great lit place, and thought there was nothing more horrific than a God who disallowed you your secret crevices, your hiding places. You’d be like an inmate sentenced to solitary confinement under a hellish burning bulb for all eternity. “Let’s get you something to eat,” LuAnn said, hustling her up on the porch. Tears gleamed bright in her eyes. “I can’t hardly believe you’re standing right here in front of me. I used to say, Ray, the one thing I wish for before I die is that my sister—” Her mouth turned down now, ugly though she meant kind sentiment; her chin shook. “It’s all right,” Jolie said, touching her uselessly on the back and shoulders. But she stopped short at the threshold. In her dreams she always returned home to a ruin, gutted throughout, when in truth only part of the house had burned. LuAnn had been long gone by the time of the fire, sharing an apartment with a girl in town; perhaps then she felt under no obligation to preserve any reminders of that fateful night. But it was not only the rebuilding which had altered the look of the place. She let LuAnn push her past the screen door into a living room where a cream-colored furniture set had replaced their parents’ heavy old wood pieces. Jolie missed their weighty quality. That kind of furniture kept things anchored. Beyond, the kitchen, which had always hung heavy with stale cooking odors, was modernized beyond recognition. All the cabinets had been torn out and replaced with new ones; even the floor was retiled. Jolie ran one hand along a light beige countertop. Everything here was cool and distant, welcoming her with the disinterested air of duty. “Beulah and them called earlier,” LuAnn said. “They want to come over for dinner tonight and see you. I told them you might be wore out; I’d have to check with you first.” Jolie tried not to conjure any pictures of her aunt but they came anyway: a pinched, pious woman who’d probably been born old, though Jolie had seen pictures to the contrary. She dyed her hair a severe black above wrinkled skin, as if that fooled anyone, and had always made Jolie feel as if she smelled bad, or had snot smeared all over her face. “I want to see the rest of the house,” Jolie said. She realized she was desperate to see it, she wanted to touch all those surfaces again and stand in the middle of rooms and try to bring it all back again. “I want to see my old room.” LuAnn kept one hand on her back as she led her up the stairs, down the hallway. “I think if I don’t keep touching you, you’ll disappear,” she said with a clipped nervous laugh, and she swung open the door of the room at the end of the hall. “I’m afraid we let your old room go all to seed, hon.” Jolie stepped past her into a shadowy stillness. Heavy blinds covered both windows. For a moment she imagined she saw the squares of her old posters still on the wall, and the rickety bookcases crammed full, but LuAnn flicked the light on and she saw she’d been mistaken. It had become a room of cast-offs, of ugly lamps, appliances that didn’t work, boxes no one would ever unpack. Jolie let her breath out. It had never been a sanctuary for her. When she was a little girl, her mother and Aunt Beulah had come back from a shopping trip with a picture of Jesus for her to hang on the wall. Jesus was supposed to be floating in some cloudy heaven, His arms outstretched to welcome her and love radiating from him in great jagged halo-like bursts of yellow and orange. But Jolie wasn’t fooled. She knew that what Beulah and her mother had told her was holy light was in fact the flames of hell, the flames she’d heard so much about. And if Jesus could be sent to burn in hell, then anyone could be. She was sure to be consumed by those same flames. Her mother told her to hang it on the wall so Jesus could watch over her all the time, but Jolie knew that was just so Jesus could spy on her and report back to God. And maybe God would let him come back up from hell. “I am hungry after all,” Jolie said, not wanting to be in the room any longer. She hoped that wasn’t where Ray and LuAnn planned to put her up at night. She wouldn’t be able to sleep, even with that picture long gone, even with the room all changed. She’d still be able to see those flames before her in the darkness, the coiling and hissing of the serpents Jesus had trained to do his bidding, the cool beatific smile promising her something she didn’t yet understand.

• • • •

LuAnn scooped up scrambled eggs and pieces of rubbery bacon onto plates for both of them, and set one in front of Jolie. “I know it’s bad for you,” she said, “but Ray’s got high cholesterol and we don’t never get to eat nothing like this. I’ll make a stir-fry tonight, that all right with you?” She didn’t wait for Jolie to answer, but went right on talking about neighbors, and people they’d gone to school with. Jolie remembered them only vaguely, as if she’d dreamed them, perhaps. “You remember old Donny Spinks?” LuAnn said, and that was a name Jolie did know. Old Donny had lived in sin a few miles up the road from them with a woman maybe half Indian or Oriental, nobody knew so they just called her a half-breed. Even the church ladies refused to go out there to witness. Donny’s land bordered on Jolie’s granddaddy’s field, a patch of dark woods leading to the junked yard and broken-down house where he lived. He had plenty of money, people said, even though he lived like a pauper there. When she was nine, old Donny had saved her from getting snakebit by the creek down the hill from his house, chopping off a rattler’s head just before it struck at her. She had only seen him a few times before that, walking down the road or filling up his grocery cart at the Winn Dixie in town, where people gave him a wide berth. That day she’d followed him up into his backyard, a tangle of weeds grown up half as tall as Jolie and old tires rotting next to a half-gutted washer and dryer, a refrigerator, a sun-faded, rain-soaked couch with foam bursting out of the fabric. He had tried to get her to go inside and have a drink of water, but Jolie was not going to set foot inside that house. A woman’s figure stood just on the other side of the screen, watching them. Jolie didn’t ask to go to the bathroom, either, even though she was about to pee in her pants. Walking home that day, she’d stopped on the side of the road and squatted in the woods, letting the warm urine trickle out onto the leaves. Afterwards her panties felt moist and dirty. “He died last year,” LuAnn said. “Awful how it happened. I guess his daughter went out to see him—I didn’t even know he had a daughter, did you? Anyway, he’d been dead a long time. Drank himself to death. They said the animals had got to him some. And his daughter, well, I guess she’s just as crazy as he was, cause she waited a whole three days before she called anybody. She just set out there with his body, I guess. It must have stank to high heaven.” “God,” Jolie said, and forked up some of the bacon and eggs. She chewed for a long time, but the food just stayed there, an unshrinking clot of grease and fat lingering in her mouth. She was embarrassed to think of seeing anyone she’d known. She who’d headed so proudly north without an inkling of the handicaps she toted with her, from the drawl that marked her as an ignorant redneck the moment she opened her mouth to that Jesus, burning in the flames, damned for all eternity and assuring her of her own fate, too. And she didn’t want to see Beulah or her cousins, either; she didn’t want to see anyone at all. She only wanted to be in the woods again, the way she’d been as a child, mapping the marshes and following the old sawmill roads and happening upon the bleached- white skulls of long-dead cows, their eye sockets huge and mortal and empty. She used to think she could find God out there. The preacher called that kind of thinking paganism, which was the next thing to worshipping the devil as far as he could see. At night Jolie dreamed of the devil, a huge brown reptilian creature reared up on powerful haunches, with a thick pointed tail. Hunched, as though he’d only recently learned to walk erect, his head was huge, vicious curved horns erupting on either side of it. In her dreams he tunneled up from someplace in the woods, and came up from a hole in the ground near where her mother used to plant jonquils in the spring. For months afterwards Jolie avoided that part of the yard after dark. The only place she really felt safe was the old barn in Granddaddy’s pasture. “You stay away from there, Jolie,” her father had told her. He said it was full of rusty nails and rats, and she could fall through a floorboard in the loft, or get bit by something and die of lockjaw. Jolie rarely defied her parents as a child, but she’d found that one private place irresistible. “Ray’s getting off his shift at the plant soon,” LuAnn said, her gaze straying toward the clock on the oven. “I got to go pick him up, you want to come? He’ll be tickled to death to finally meet you.” “I think I’ll stay here and take a nap,” Jolie said. She could hardly wait to see LuAnn backing her car up the driveway. Her breath came in short, tight, anticipating gasps; she was alone here at long last.

• • • •

Her granddaddy’s property could be reached by the road if you were willing to walk a couple of winding miles, but the shortcut was through the woods. Jolie’s head pounded from thirst, and salty sweat dripped from her upper lip into her mouth. She slapped at a constant irritation of gnats and mosquitoes whining round her. The heat made breathing difficult. She thought about snakes, poisonous snakes sunning themselves, the quick lash of a viper’s tongue. The sky would fill with the sounds of their beating wings. She did not know if she would be strong enough to will them away. She pressed on. The pond in the middle of Granddaddy’s pasture had lost much of its water, and a brown ring of mud surrounded it now. The rowboat she’d been forbidden to play in as a child, even to sit in for fun, had vanished. The barn beyond shimmered like a mirage in the heat. At the opposite end of the field, Donny Spinks’ woods grew dark and tangled as she remembered them, no signs saying they were leased to the One Shot Hunting Club like most of the land around here, not even a Posted: No Trespassing warning. She wondered who claimed them now. Donny’s daughter, she guessed, gone away to wherever she’d come from in the first place and letting the place run even wilder than before. The barn had fallen into worse repair, the formerly padlocked doors unsecured and sagging on rusty hinges. Jolie pushed them apart. Inside, it smelled of abandonment and decay. When she was a kid she’d pulled loose boards apart at the back and slipped her skinny body through. Birds rustled in the eaves above and sunlight spilled through splintered wood. While the stalls had in some cases collapsed entirely, the ladder to the loft still stood. Jolie gripped it with both hands and set a foot on the first rung, bouncing a little. It held firm. The first few times she’d climbed the ladder had been scary ones. Once she’d made the mistake of looking down, and the earthen floor below her spun while she clung to the rungs, unable to move at all for a long time. Now Jolie lifted her other foot, and was suspended above the ground. She waited another moment, testing for the slightest indication of a give to the board, but felt nothing. One foot up, one hand over. The next rung felt steady, too. Again she waited before lifting the other foot and placing her full weight there. You came back for this. Halfway up, she stopped and looked down. The floor of the barn was very far away. She’d hurt herself badly if she fell. She didn’t allow herself to look down again as she climbed. One rung did feel soft and rotted as the toe of her shoe pressed it, and she bypassed it, contorting her body to step up two rungs at once. And now, at last, the loft above. Scattered sunlight lit patches of dusty boards. No one had used this as a real hayloft since her father was a child. She’d slept up here, and read enormous old books pilfered from her grandfather’s library. And then, one long Indian summer when she was nine years old, it had been taken from her, her last sanctuary, her last private spot. She’d been awakened by the noise of someone groaning, someone hurt in the barn. Peering through the opening, down past the ladder, she’d realized that the padlock was not secured; a space of light showed through the doors. She took the rungs swiftly. Heart pounding, she made her way down the row of empty stalls, sneakers scuffing on the hard-packed floor. In the last stall on her right, a naked man moved atop a woman, making the groaning noise. Jolie’s hand flew to cover her mouth and stifle the little noise that tried to escape. She had heard puzzling talk of sex around school, fourth graders whispering as though it were some forbidden country someone occasionally stole back from with a little more information. She’d never imagined it would look so absurd. A second later the woman opened her eyes and Jolie recognized her Aunt Beulah. “Wade,” Aunt Beulah said to the man grunting and heaving atop her, her eyes locked with Jolie’s and that was when Jolie realized that was her father there with her aunt. But he wouldn’t stop; and Jolie stood like she was frozen, still staring at Aunt Beulah, Aunt Beulah still staring back, so long it seemed like just this side of forever. At last her father gave a final heave and was still. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he snarled at Aunt Beulah, rolling off of her, and in the act of doing so caught sight of his daughter. For a moment their eyes met, and Jolie had the horrible feeling that her father was going to try to say something to her, try to talk to her. She tried not to look at him at all, especially not below his waist where his thing dangled. It was enormous, and made her think of some sort of weapon. Her father opened his mouth, and Jolie broke into a run. She ran past him to the front of the barn and slammed the doors apart so hard that splinters tore into her palms. Remembering, Jolie wished now she’d never climbed into the loft; she couldn’t think how she’d ever get back down that rotted ladder. Now the sounds of fornicators in ecstasy rose up from below; or was it the groans and shrieks of the damned? The stench reached her nostrils a second later. She’d been staring out at the field, into the sunlight, and the brilliance of the day outside made it difficult for her to see the dark interior. But she knew what the smell was: old Donny Spinks, dead like LuAnn had told her, in a pool of his own vomit. And she couldn’t stop remembering. That long-ago day she had run as fast as she could, across the field and into the woods, woods she didn’t know like she knew the others, because she’d been told to stay off other people’s property, woods she could get lost in. Donny Spinks came upon her there, crying by the creek, the rattlesnake chittering inches from her as it poised to strike. Donny’s axe came down right by Jolie’s head and she started screaming, thinking he meant to kill her. After he took her up in his yard, she saw how he’d combed his hair up in neat tufts so no one could see the horns sprouting there. He didn’t look like the devil in her dream at all, not right at first, but Jolie knew better than to be fooled by appearances. She saw how the mark of the beast was woven in with the military tattoos across his arm, and she saw the flames reflected in his eyes. Was Jesus there too, trying to get out? She wasn’t sure whose miracle had saved her. Did it matter anymore? Twenty years later, maybe it did. A sob escaped her there in the loft, and Jolie took another step forward toward the smell. Another, and another—and before her now, a whole nest of dead snakes, ripe and rotting, their bodies swollen with maggots. The sob nearly turned into a giggle of relief before she realized that he had changed himself into something else, wasn’t that what the devil did? Changing himself into a serpent, what did it matter one or many, live or dead? How else could snakes get up into a loft, if not through some divine or diabolical influence? Jolie had tried to tell her mother what had happened in the loft. She had tried to tell her that very afternoon that she got home from Donny Spinks’ house, and her mother had slapped her and called her a nasty, terrible little girl. She sent Jolie straight to her room, where the picture of Jesus waited. He was extending His arms out to her and begging her to save Him. As she stared at Him, she thought she saw the flesh on first His arms and then his face begin to blacken and pop. You see how it is, He told her as blisters on His face burst and oozed. Then His head narrowed and flattened, His eyes slid back until they were on either side of His head, and a long forked tongue snapped out at her. You ssssee, he hissed. Are you going to help me? The snakes before her now were dead, not hissing, not speaking to her. Jolie stumbled backward from them, and the board with most of her weight on it gave way with a sickening crack. One foot plunged through the rotted wood. She crashed to one knee, half of her body still on solid floor. She leaned backwards, palms down behind her, and scooted herself back. Her raw and bleeding leg she held out stiff before her. Jolie began to breathe very deliberately. She would have to get back over to the ladder and down again, but the recklessness which had possessed her earlier had fled. She lay flat on her back, hoping to distribute her weight across the boards, then rolled over on her stomach and began to drag herself across the loft. The air, suffused with the reek of the dead things in the corner, bore down on her, hot and fetid. When she reached the ladder, she looked at the nails and upper rungs and wondered that she’d made it to the top. She pulled on one of the nails holding the ladder secure and felt it give, bits of wood crumbling. She would set her weight on it, and the entire structure would collapse. The floor was too far away to jump. If she did not descend soon, the floor here could give way, too. She needed another miracle, a miracle like with the rattlesnakes, and the fire. Jolie was the only one who knew how the fire had really happened. It hadn’t been her daddy’s cigarette like the firemen had thought. She had looked out the window and seen them coming, a whole army of them, carrying torches as they flew across the sky, coming at last to bring her freedom from that place, just as Jesus had promised her when she was a child. They’d been terrible creatures, not at all like the pictures in her Bible, or hanging up in the Sunday school rooms at church. Angels or demons, she wasn’t sure: some vile combination of the two. Through the long terrible night that followed, of smoke-burned lungs and seared flesh and desperate attempts to contain the fire before it spread to the woods, Jesus came to her. He told her everything was okay; it was Him that woke her up and got her out of the house before the smoke choked her to death like it did her parents. He told her she was free now, but she had to run north and never look back. He and the devil had a lot still to work out, and she better go while she could. Jolie dragged herself forward another few inches, hiking her shirt up and scraping her stomach on the rough boards. Her foot struck another soft patch of wood and punched through. Another sob rattled her breathing. Now she was too frightened to move forward at all. Things fouled quickly in this heat; her own body would ripen and burst just as the snakes had. “Oh, God,” she said out loud, without thinking, and then, “Oh, Jesus,” because she’d never thought much about God, but Jesus had always been there for her. She didn’t like having the dead things out of her sight. She was afraid to shift so that she could see them. She panted hard, the rotting-flesh smell turning her stomach, the fear clenching her insides up in knots. By the time anyone found her it would be too late. Already her stomach swelled, the maggots breeding inside her. Jolie stretched her hands out and pulled on the ladder again. A piece of wood the size of her hand crumbled away, leaving the shaft of the rusted nail entirely exposed. And then she heard the terrible rushing in the air as they descended at last, the serpents with angels’ wings. They disguised themselves that way so you couldn’t tell who sent them, but Jolie was no longer fooled. Her hand grabbed for the solid top rung of the ladder, wanting only to reassure herself of its remaining strength. The rung split in half as she grasped it, one piece tumbling to the floor below. Jolie moaned. They were all around her now. They lined up alongside her and folded their flat smooth heads in pious prayer, while their forked tongues slipped from their mouths and their snake bodies writhed in unseemly ecstasy. Jolie let them settle their feather-soft wings on her, run their tongues along the length of her body and back again. A gentle swell from their wings lifted her from where she lay, flat on her stomach, and she could see out the window at the front of the loft, see the drying pond glistening, and the fields golden in the noonday sun, and the cool dark of the woods beyond. ©1999 by Lynda E. Rucker. Originally published in The Third Alternative. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lynda E. Rucker grew up in a house in the woods in Georgia full of books, cats and typewriters, so naturally, she had little choice but to become a writer. She has sold more than 30 short stories to various magazines and anthologies including F&SF, Nightmare Magazine, The Year’s Best Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Horror and Dark Fantasy, Supernatural Tales, and Postscripts among others and has had a short play produced as part of an anthology of horror plays on London’s West End. She won the 2015 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Story and is a regular columnist for UK horror magazine Black Static. Her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, was released in 2013 from Karōshi Books, and her second, You’ll Know When You Get There, was published by Ireland’s Swan River Press in 2016. NONFICTION The H Word: W Is for Witch Gwendolyn Kiste | 1310 words

Growing up, I never remember fearing witches. Instead, I feared the men who burned them. As a strange, bullied child who always took magic for granted, I tacitly assumed if witch-hunts ever started again, I wouldn’t be safe. Somebody would quickly recognize me as “wrong” and tie me to the nearest pyre. Witch hunts were the stuff real nightmares were made of. Men would yank you from your bed in the night and lock you up in a dark cell. Your chance of a fair trial was non-existent. And they did this ostensibly for the good of your neighbors and your family, to protect them from you. They did it for your own good too. Repent prior to your execution, even as the flames seared your flesh, and your soul would be redeemed, they said. They would murder you to “save” you. I comforted myself it was better to know of this risk. Fairy tales taught us that anything can be defeated, right? If a wolf was at the door, I would recognize it for what it was, and I could do my best to lock it out. So the question swirled in my mind: who were these inquisitors? How could I spot them in a crowd and be on my guard against them? (As if, in my child’s logic, identifying them would be enough to protect me.) The witch-hunt illustrations from the Middle Ages revealed very little. The inquisitors looked so ordinary, just like average men. This didn’t help. After all, men were everywhere, and they couldn’t all be inquisitors lying in wait. Could they?

• • • •

At its most basic, witchcraft is about power. It’s about finding strength, even when society has denied you everything. As such, magic has historically been a refuge for women. During the European witch-hunts, which claimed somewhere between 30,000 to 100,000 lives, men were victims too, but the majority of those executed were female. Witch-hunts were, above all else, a matter of misogyny. Women who became too strong, who ventured too far outside the parameters of what was “good and normal,” had to be stopped by any means necessary. Because of its inherent dread, horror has long plumbed the depths of witchcraft. But the genre hasn’t always done a great job with its depictions. All the way back to Shakespeare, the Weird Sisters are blamed for leading Macbeth into his murderous rampage, as though he were such an innocent from the get-go. In cinema, Witchfinder General is often considered a classic, but it’s told almost exclusively through the male gaze, with the only major female character relegated mostly to the background of what should have been her story. And sorry, Christopher Lee, but human sacrifices in wicker effigies almost certainly never happened. This was a fabrication Julius Caesar repeated based on a second-hand account. Yes, it was the old friend-of-a-friend urban legend that firmly established that lie in the popular mindset. In more modern cinema, 2015’s The Witch serves up a biting critique of religious hysteria, but also presents the eponymous character in an entirely standard fashion. That is, a godless woman left alone in the woods could only end up a lascivious monster. And while I love Black Phillip as much as the next horror fan, Thomasin’s signing of his book at the end is typical Inquisition propaganda: that all feminine strength was satanic in origin, and not even inherently feminine at that. Because a woman can’t have power on her own; she must borrow it from a man. Of the film’s inaccuracies, however, it’s an early scene that sticks with me most. After the witch kidnaps the family’s baby, she takes him back to her hut where she strips his fat and makes a flying ointment. This boldly perpetuates a lie the Inquisition used to condemn innocent women. Some witches did make flying ointment or similar-looking salves—out of, among other ingredients, lanolin. Even if you weren’t practicing magic, this gelatinous cream might have been on hand in your house. Because of its strange consistency and its ubiquity, the inquisitors could use this as go-to evidence of infanticide. No matter that no babies were missing; they had their “proof” and that was good enough. It might seem easy to dismiss these erroneous images in horror films as all in good fun, but there’s a danger in such logic. Denying women’s experiences has been second-nature to us since the dawn of civilization. In using the baby fat myth, the real-life implication is clear: a woman can tell the truth—that it’s only lanolin—but they’ll call her a baby killer and burn her anyhow, all while repeating their false accusation until it’s accepted as the only reality. The lies of witch hunters make more sense to us than the truths of women. And these falsehoods gain power the more they’re repeated. As a rule, we elevate stories that replicate familiar narratives, in part because they make us feel safer. We know these tales. The world is a chaotic and uncertain place, but at least we have predictable stories to guide our way. But there’s no safety in lies. Continuing to reproduce these myths—without commentary, without adding anything new to unravel the fallacies that created them—borders on reckless. It maintains a status quo, even as it might pretend to challenge it. And now, in an increasingly dangerous world, we can’t risk being even a small part of the problem.

• • • •

This past year, I finally got the answer to that question from my childhood. Our modern-day inquisitors have been revealed, with their hate-filled tweets and their endless barrage of cruel legislation against anyone who doesn’t fit their narrow definition of “what’s right.” Like wolves, they’re at the door now. But something else is happening too. In the midst of these uncertain times, as grassroots activism is flourishing, people are returning to witchcraft. As if it’s comfort food, they’re seeking it out as a refuge. A month after his inauguration, thousands of witches across the country made news when they united to perform a binding spell on Donald Trump (one of the components: an orange candle). What made fewer headlines is that many witches continued to perform this spell every month as part of a growing faction who sees political activism and witchcraft as not being so far apart. And why not combine the two? After all, during a protest, is chanting together not a form of magic spell, of hoping to change the world with the power of words? It’s not too late to reclaim our lost narratives. We no longer have to accept the lies that have stripped us of our power, stories perpetuated once by the likes of Caesar and the Inquisition, now perpetuated in different though equally damaging permutations by a presidential administration that never should have existed in the first place. Even today, when witch-hunts are considered ancient history, there are those who continue to openly malign witchcraft. In some countries, practicing magic remains illegal, and women are still stoned to death for showing the vaguest inclination toward anything occult. There are also those who malign it not due to moral panic, but for intellectual reasons. Witchcraft is foolish, they say. It’s pseudo-science, it’s New Age malarkey. But whether or not the magic objectively works is almost beside the point. Witchcraft is for the lost, the forsaken, the Other. It’s about synergy even in the darkest times. It’s women—and men too—coming together and refusing to accept a society that won’t acknowledge everyone as equals belonging to this same planet. Witchcraft is resistance, plain and simple. And there’s nothing more powerful than that.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gwendolyn Kiste is the author of And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, her debut fiction collection from JournalStone, as well as the dark fantasy novella, Pretty Marys All in a Row, from Broken Eye Books. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Shimmer, Black Static, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, LampLight, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye as well as Flame Tree Publishing’s Chilling Horror Short Stories anthology, among others. A native of Ohio, she spends her days hanging out on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh where she lives with her husband, two cats, and not nearly enough ghosts. You can find her online at gwendolynkiste.com. Interview: S.P. Miskowski Lisa Morton | 4029 words

Three-time Shirley Jackson Award nominee S.P. Miskowski was raised in Decatur, Georgia, but later moved to the Pacific Northwest. After receiving an M.F.A. from the University of Washington and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, she seemed poised for a career as a writer of mainstream fiction (she cites Flannery O’Connor as an early influence), but instead found her way into the horror genre. She debuted with Knock Knock, the first of a series of books set in the fictional town of Skillute. Since then, she has provided acclaimed short fiction for such anthologies as Haunted Nights, The Madness of Doctor Caligari, October Dreams 2, Autumn Cthulhu, Looming Low, and Cassilda’s Song. In the latter half of 2017, she published her first collection, Strange is the Night, and a new novel, I Wish I Was Like You, and received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly for both. She and her husband, game writer and novelist Cory Herndon, recently moved to Canada.

While still at college, you edited a small-press magazine. How did that evolve your own writing?

This was a tiny magazine I edited and published quarterly with a friend for about four years. But the slush pile was astounding. At the height of the magazine’s popularity we received about a hundred stories each month. Reading fiction from writers all over the country—all over the world—gave me a new sense of what was out there. I was able to perceive the writing world beyond my own efforts and the efforts of my classmates. Reading the slush pile as an editor sharpened my preferences. After a while I developed an awareness of what I craved as a reader, and what I was tired of seeing. I applied this to my own stories —what was necessary, and what I could reasonably expect a reader to assume. I came to trust the reader to make certain leaps, fill in gaps in an imaginative way without being led and told everything all the time.

Many horror readers first became aware of your work with Knock Knock, a ghost story that’s the first installment in your Skillute Cycle (Knock Knock, Delphine Dodd, Astoria, and In the Light). Even though the fictional town of Skillute is located in the Pacific Northwest, these books have a Southern Gothic edge. What defines Southern Gothic for you?

Southern Gothic has a sinister undercurrent. The combination of places which are broken down or falling down, or informed by shameful history, and people who somehow still make their way despite the growing detritus and redundancy, there’s a sense of unease and inevitable collapse. I think of this as a thin line between the material world and whatever life force propels individuals. Southern Gothic focuses on this line, and you get a powerful understanding of what drives people, so there’s both a social and psychological awareness—and this might be stated or it might be presented ironically through juxtaposition and understatement. I think I’ve applied this way of seeing a community, and the forces shaping people in that community, to the Skillute Cycle. Each character is a unique person, but no one escapes the influence of the community’s history. And if the history is brutal and horrific, this comes out in some form in every individual.

In an older interview you said, “The Skillute Cycle (Knock Knock, Delphine Dodd, Astoria, and In the Light) was a challenge to write. Throughout the project I felt slightly out of my element, creating a town with a complex history and mythology.” What about that made you feel out of your element? What special challenges did creating a fictitious town’s history bring?

Well, when people who haven’t lived in the south try to imagine it, they think largely in terms of rural settings. In fact there are complex, thriving, urban areas of the south. My parents were not happy living on the farms where they grew up. They wanted out. They dreamed of cities and opportunities. We lived in an old, slightly rundown part of Decatur, Georgia. The houses there were fixer-uppers, with broken windows and ceilings lying in pieces on the floor. My dad made our house livable; he practically built it. There was a feeling of reaching upward, to more freedom of choice and more prosperity. We visited my grandparents and aunts and uncles on weekends and holidays. My real life was just outside of Atlanta, and this rural landscape we visited was exotic to me as a child. My country relatives considered me a city kid. This had as much to do with my being the first generation to go to racially integrated schools, as it had to do with where we lived. We were quite different in our views, and at a certain point—probably near the beginning of middle school—I rejected that rural southern world. It wasn’t feeding my soul. It seemed to me an ancient and self- degrading society, and I broke away. So, when I decided to write a book set in a fairly isolated location, I had to dig deep to recall what that isolation felt like. And to admit how deeply it could alter a person’s point of view, I had to recall some negative things about my family. Because the Skillute Cycle is, in part, about these limited perspectives and how people who feel they can’t escape them create a worldview to explicate those limitations. It’s about digging one’s heels in and self-justifying, which is something we all do. But in an isolated place like Skillute, defining self as part of the landscape fits right in with the ghosts arising from the history of the town. The challenge was to imagine such ghosts, to fill in the blanks in the kind of place I had rejected earlier in my life.

There seems to be a growing amount of horror and weird fiction set in the Pacific Northwest, especially Seattle. Is a Pacific Northwest Gothic subgenre being birthed?

The Pacific Northwest has an eeriness I associate with cloud formations. You don’t get the wide, open sky of the desert or the plains, or the vast horizon of an ocean. Clouds form a weirdly low “ceiling” here, close and dark. There is this gray canopy most of the fall and winter, and even into the spring. More than the rain, this dark, low sky defines the place. It isn’t a very treacherous or difficult landscape. It’s more somber and moody. The people are quiet and self-reliant— because you never know when the bridge or the power or the ferry might shut down, and you need to be ready. Even in the city, you need to be ready to hunker down with candles and friends and someone who can play a musical instrument.

You’ve noted that many of your stories are about characters who rely on “the illusion of control.” Isn’t that almost a requirement for characters in a horror story? Are your characters just perhaps likelier to hang onto that illusion for longer?

I would say many of my characters are, in fact, vaguely aware of their shortcomings, and they fear being put to the test. They don’t necessarily admit a fear of loss of control, but there are signs of it everywhere in their lives, stray distress signals. And yes, this is something we find in horror fiction—the barely concealed fear of what is out there, the false bravado of the person ill-equipped to face what’s coming.

How do you see your work fitting into the “weird fiction” category?

My writing, for the most part, fits a category I would describe as fiction of unease or growing suspense and distress. I just finished reading the Joan Didion memoir Blue Nights, which is about the death of her daughter but also, in a greater sense, about the gradually accumulating unease as Didion slips from middle age into the next phase of life, a phase of strange losses—people, places, strength, language—and a new knowledge of mortality as a certainty, a physical reality replacing the mere anxiety and anticipation of middle age. Suddenly she fears the moment when she must stand up after sitting for a long time in a folding chair. This simple act, and the possibility that she will fail at it, consumes her thoughts. As a college student I was enamored of Virginia Woolf’s writing. Not so much the stream-of-consciousness style but all that it implied—this space between the world in which we act and speak, and our innermost impulses and responses to things we never discuss. This is what Didion was trying to get at in her memoir. I’m still fascinated with the amount of ourselves we keep buried, and in most of my work I try to locate these buried layers of existence. This is probably what (at least partially) defines my work as “weird fiction.”

In 2013 you did an “H-Word” editorial for Nightmare, “In Search of Horrible Women,” in which you said this: “We don’t accept women as complete and fallible. People who are infallible or unassailable can’t be real. How can they demand rights? How can they insist on taking charge of their own bodies and actions?” If women in fiction can be presented as fallible, then can fiction affect real social change?

It can, but (I think) only by chance. While I believe what Ian McEwan says about fiction building empathy, I don’t think a writer has absolute control over how and where and when any of her ideas will be received. And certainly not over how those ideas will be interpreted. One of my favorite episodes of the old series The Day the Universe Changed demonstrated how the same social and scientific concepts of an era fed into vastly different political movements. You may design a really great story promoting social justice, but it may be read in a context you didn’t anticipate. More reliable is the writer’s personal worldview, if it plays out in the work at a subconscious level. For example, as a teenage fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing, I took to heart his admonition not to create disposable characters. His opinion was that throwaway or minor characters in fiction underscored our tendency to think of some real people as minor characters. That idea is fundamental to everything I write. You won’t hear one of my characters making a plea for compassion and justice but you will get a sense that every character comes from somewhere and is on his or her own journey, however small a part they may play in the story as a whole. Everyone has significance, if not in this story then somewhere else.

In an earlier interview, you talked about your affection for Asian horror cinema and said that the Japanese films “Ringu and Ju-on changed my life as a storyteller.” How, exactly?

Since I don’t hold any specific beliefs regarding an afterlife, I could never quite understand the purpose of a ghost lingering in time and space. But I’d written quite a few stories about revenge—usually petty revenge on a small scale, awful little acts perpetrated by people who feel unrecognized or cast aside. This is one of my obsessions. I can only recall committing one such act, and it was painfully small and inconsequential, but I’ve always wondered how someone justifies doing real harm. I was raised to think seriously about the possible consequences of careless actions, and it’s always astonishing to me when someone lashes out without thinking. Even more shocking is a step-by-step plan for vengeance. The angry spirits portrayed in my favorite Japanese horror films opened up the possibility of a subliminal connection between the living and the dead, a craving for violent expression that can cross material boundaries. It opened my imagination to the idea of the ghost as an expression of the same energy that allows someone to harm another person.

You’ve provided work for a number of themed anthologies. How do you transform an existing theme into an S.P. Miskowski story? Usually I do a lot of research and reading to prepare, especially if I’m unfamiliar or only slightly familiar with the theme. Joe Pulver has invited me to submit stories to a number of anthologies whose theme I found intriguing and understood fairly well, but not as well as I wished. So I did the research. For The Madness of Dr. Caligari, for example, I watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari quite a few times, first paying very close attention and then letting the film play while I checked in and out, viewing casually. I read essays about it, and about the culture of the Weimar Republic. Then I set all of it aside and tried to forget about it. My original intention, to build a story in the time and place where the film was produced, gave way quickly to what interested me most about the film—the nested narratives and the deeply unreliable narrator whose sanity keeps wavering. My story, “Somnambule” developed organically from the crossbreeding of these elements with my childhood memory of a woman who was abused by her husband. There was such urgency in the tales she told my mother, and at the same time there was something else wrong with what she said. She wasn’t telling the whole story, and I always wondered what was going on around the edges of the violence that played such a big part in her life. To answer your question, I prepare and prepare, and then I let what I’ve read work on my imagination and my experiences without judging or forcing how the theme plays out—at least until I have a first draft and can start looking at the story more objectively and structurally.

[Full disclosure: I recently co-edited with Ellen Datlow the anthology Haunted Nights, which includes S.P.’s story “We’re Never Inviting Amber Again”] I’ve read “We’re Never Inviting Amber Again” probably almost ten times (including a couple of very slightly different drafts), and one of the things that fascinates me about the story is that it’s nearly impossible to define what makes it so creepy—it’s like a magic trick that I can’t quite figure out. With something like that story, how do you build that beneath- the-surface dread in—do you start with a situation and then work on the emotional context, or the other way around?

Thanks very much. That means a lot from a storyteller of your talent and accomplishments. I appreciate it. And I’m not absolutely sure, but I think this is an effect that comes from making lots of notes that are not used overtly in the story. When a story is finished, I probably have almost an equal amount of material “left over” in my notebooks. I know more about the characters and their lives and relationships than I spell out explicitly. And I suspect these “secrets” break through the surface of the narrative from time to time, giving it (I hope) depth and ballast.

You’ve recently received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly for both the collection Strange is the Night and your novel I Wish I Was Like You. The review for the collection referred to you as a “rising star.” Did that feel strange, given how long you’ve been writing?

It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s a long life when you begin telling stories as a toddler and go on writing stories through school, college, graduate school, and beyond. It seems like a long time, but there are several segments to it. I wrote stories and poems as a child and as a student. I was on a traditional path, with a collection and a novel and a respected agent in New York, when I threw it aside to study and work in theatre. For about fifteen years I only wrote plays—no stories at all. I had an MFA. I had day jobs as a teacher and then as an editor. Most of my plays were produced by brave artistic directors at little fringe companies in Seattle. I was fortunate enough to work with very talented people, but I grew more and more frustrated with the writing itself. I didn’t like what I was doing. And it was around 2010 that I came back to short stories, this time with those Japanese films informing my imagination, and with a powerful sense that I needed to work hard to catch up. I could never get back to where I was when I took that detour into theatre, but I wanted to see how far I could push myself, how deep I could go. Not commercially, per se, but in terms of my ability to tell a story that mattered to the reader.

Near the beginning of I Wish I Was Like You, the protagonist (Greta) tells us that she “wasn’t even a huge Nirvana fan,” and yet the novel’s title seems to be a nod to a line from the Nirvana song “All Apologies.” Did that lyric just happen to fit the novel too perfectly, or is there a little intentional clue to Greta’s character there?

It occurred to me early on that the swagger with which I wanted to endow the character’s voice could not be the swagger of, say, Philip Marlowe. His experiences were not hers; his voice was not hers. I’ve read detective and crime novel pastiches that employ the rhythms of the world-weary private eye, and some of them don’t work because they’re placed in a different universe. I knew my character came from a dreary suburban background and I wanted her to have a voice and outlook equivalent to that of Marlowe, but not an imitation. I aimed for this downbeat, slightly depressed teen attitude. And like most of us as teens, she denies a lot of things that are perfectly obvious. It creates an ironic tension because she’s aware but she isn’t always correct. This song is her song whether she admits it or not. “I wish I was like you—easily amused.” She’s a wise-ass. She rejects so much of the world and yet she longs to be part of it, and this longing continues to drive her even after death.

One of my favorite lines in I Wish I Was Like You is, “No wonder suburban kids crave violence.” Has that always been true?

Yes. I’m going to commit to this and say yes. I think the more boredom you make kids deal with, the more trouble you’re asking for, and the suburbs are nothing if not boring. They lack the cultural stimulation of the city and the possibility of physical adventure in the country. This isn’t a new view. Look at the novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Read the stories of John Cheever. The main problem is, you move to the suburbs to get away from something, and that thing is life. You seek a calmer setting, a place where you can sit down and breathe and relax. Well, that’s why I moved to the suburbs, anyway. But I’m middle-aged. It isn’t a dreamy place for teenagers. No matter how busy they are, they can still find time to blow things up and set things on fire and generally act out—because they’re experiencing the frenzy of youth in the most boring place imaginable. Yes. I’ll stick with that.

While reading I Wish I Was Like You, you describe Greta’s murder right up front (this is not a spoiler!), but she examines her own corpse as she drinks and smokes. In fact, that wasn’t the only time in the book that I wondered if she was actually dead. Did you intend to have your readers thinking that?

My intention was to make the knife-edge between life and death as sharp as possible. I wanted her to behave quite naturally. It should all be nonchalant, with a sort of hardening into the situation as she goes along. She doesn’t know what she can do until she does it. Especially in those early moments of figuring out what the hell is going on. Believe me, if I’m wrong about an afterlife and I come back, the first thing I’m going to do is take up smoking again.

I love Lee Todd Butcher, the failed crime novelist within the novel. Was he based on anyone in particular?

He started out as a composite of three writers I’ve known. Then, one day, he got up off the sofa and went out for a drink. Lee Todd is his own guy.

Lee Todd describes the motive for writing thusly: “The thing about fiction . . . and I don’t care what genre we’re talking, whether it’s mainstream, or sci-fi, or porn, to be convincing you’ve got to feel the urge to write it, right down in your gut.” Is this a macho washed-up mystery writer talking, or do you share that view?

My view is more generous than his. If someone tells me he wants to write a book, I say, “Write it.” Try your hand at writing. You’ll work hard or you won’t and the work will turn out to be interesting or it won’t. You’ll stick with it or you won’t. None of these things are of any consequence in the grand scheme of things. This is where Lee Todd and I agree. Writing is not the end of the universe unless it’s your universe and you love it. You may find out that you have the engine that keeps going and creates fiction. Or you’ll get sick of the process and try some other field of endeavor. That’s fine. I don’t believe everyone can write fiction, but I don’t believe it’s my job to decide who writes it and who doesn’t. Lee Todd feels a desire to tell people bluntly whether or not they’ve got the right stuff. I tend to be wary of self-appointed gatekeepers while admitting that they may be partially right.

You once suggested that the increased sadism and violence in the horror films of the early 2000s was due to more awareness of real-life horrors like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. What horror is coming out of the current state of the country?

Yes, I think I said the growing fascination with torture expressed a collective need to understand what our leaders were doing in our name, and why. The madness and inexplicability of it demanded exploration through our most popular forms of “entertainment.” Today’s era is about paranoia. It’s about lies and whisper campaigns, racism, casual violence, and ignoring the suffering of other people. This will undoubtedly feed into the horror genre with more films like Green Room and Get Out. There’s a strong social undercurrent to even the most intimate horror originating in the U.S. I expect this will be the case for years to come. Having a real-life monster at the helm makes horror the predominant genre of our time.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, and award-winning prose writer whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening”. She is the author of four novels and more than 130 short stories, a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, and a world-class Halloween expert who has been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Real Simple Magazine, and The History Channel (for The Real Story of Halloween). She co-edited (with Ellen Datlow) the anthology Haunted Nights, which received a starred review in Publishers Weekly; other recent releases include Ghosts: A Haunted History and the collection The Samhanach and Other Halloween Treats. Lisa lives in the San Fernando Valley and online at lisamorton.com. AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS Author Spotlight: Lori Selke Setsu Uzumé | 713 words

Between Curve, SF Weekly, and your other magazine experience, pop culture seems like familiar subject matter for you. Is it a love-hate relationship, or something more nourishing?

I think it’s mostly a love-hate relationship. I think popular culture is fascinating and worth looking at from a number of angles, but most engagement with it is pretty shallow. I get frustrated. And then I take out my frustrations in fiction.

Tell me about the genesis of this story. How did it come together?

It started with the title, or the first half of the title anyway. The head in the box. I had to write a story that would justify using the title. I just started riffing on the idea, and all sorts of weird stuff came out. So I knitted it together into a story.

I loved the subtleties through which you examined ideas like objectification. At one point you describe the head as an “it,” and then later describe “her” eyes. Once she separates from her body, what is preserved? What falls away?

The head in a box obviously has resonances with the brain-in-a-jar trope of classic science fiction (and the head-in-a-jar parody of Futurama). There’s a lot of tension between autonomy and lack thereof when you’re a head in a jar (or a box). You can’t move on your own, you’re entirely dependent on outside technology and outside caretakers for your existence, but at the same time you’re free from a lot of mundane concerns: you can eat whatever you want, nobody’s going to ask you to make your bed or take out the trash, etc. Which is a lot like celebrity is imagined to be by many people, too, if you think about it. You have a stylist, a dietician, a trainer, a chauffeur, a housekeeper, and so on. You’re freed from everyday concerns and allowed to exist on a more rarefied plane, at least in theory. That’s at least part of what’s going on in the story, a sense of celebrity, concentrated down to its essence. And yes, a lot of that involves objectification. A lot of engagement with celebrity culture is like playing with dolls. (We’re back to that love-hate thing again.) So, as a celebrity, do you become a doll? Can you? Or do you have to repress something of yourself to do so, even if you’re literally reduced to just a head? And boy do I believe in Freud’s “return of the repressed,” so . . .

What are we meant to make of The Actress by the end of the story? She seemed caught at the nexus of so many competing forces—politics and prescience, beauty and monstrosity—what would a person like her do with immortality?

Well, of course I left the ending open for a reason—I’m ultimately more interested in the reader’s answers than mine. So you tell me!

I miss Oakland so much. What are you up to out there? What can we look forward to next from you?

I love living on Oakland. I’ve been here longer than I’ve lived anywhere else, including where I grew up (East Lansing, Michigan, for the curious). I’m raising twins who are just about to transition to middle school, and I’m getting certified as a TESOL instructor and expect to be transitioning to a formal M.A. program sometime in the next year or so. So that’s all keeping me busy. I’m also a part- time bookseller and a full-time freelance nonfiction writer. As a result, finding time to focus on fiction can be challenging (not to mention finding time for more mundane things, like sleep). I do manage to write a monthly(ish) free music newsletter called “The Earworm of the Month Club.” You can sign up for it (and view the archives) at tinyletter.com/lselke. In the meantime, I am slowly working on a collection of stories about women and bodies and autonomy and violence and stuff. This story obviously fits into that groove.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Setsu grew up in New York, and spent her formative years in and out of dojos. She likes swords, raspberries, justice, the smell of pine forests after rain, and shooting arrows from horseback. She does not like peanut butter and chocolate in the same bite. Her work has appeared in Podcastle and Grimdark Magazine. Find her on Twitter @KatanaPen. Author Spotlight: Vincent Michael Zito Erika Holt | 955 words

“The Owner’s Guide to Home Repair, Page 238: What to Do About Water Odor” has an interesting structure and style, in that it’s written in second person, present tense and in the form of an instructional manual. Which came to you first—the structure or the story? Was it a challenge to write?

I’m not a germophobe, but I’ve always had a distrust of tap water. There’s just something unsettling about the way it works—how it flows from a mysterious source we never see, bubbling through dark underground pipes, deposited in our sinks and tubs by intricate systems that we don’t understand beyond the deceptively simple twist of a faucet knob. And yet we make ourselves utterly vulnerable to it. We drink it from tall glasses, and let it soak our clothes and our dishes, and bare our skin to it in the shower. It’s part of us, and when it’s dirty, we’re repulsed on a deep, primal level; living in the real world, we’ll never have to face down a werewolf or a vampire—but we all know the horror of encountering brown-tainted water in a gas station restroom or, God forbid, our own homes. The idea for “Owner’s Guide” came from a memory I had of foul-smelling water in an apartment I once rented. Pipes were eventually replaced and the odor went away, but I’ll never forget that creepy-crawly, vaguely sinister feeling of violation and how much it bothered me. Not just the fact that this key element of my hygiene was somehow rotten, but the big unanswered question behind it all: why did the water smell? Even now, I’m not really sure I want to know the truth. Instead I wrote “Owner’s Guide” to solve that mystery in its own way. Originally, I began to write the story from a traditional third person point of view. But as I researched possible (realistic) causes for the odor, I found myself consulting an actual homeowner’s guide with a chapter title that I later used for the story. It struck me that the dry, impartial text of the guide would be an interesting contrast with the actual horror of my protagonist’s situation. And so I decided to try something a little crazy—a story told through a set of instructions. From there, the story was fun to write . . . but tricky. I gave myself a rule that every sentence had to be an instruction, had to begin with a verb. That was potentially limiting in terms of sentence variety, and so I had to play around to keep the structure from becoming tedious to the reader, spinning it in different ways to avoid monotony. My goal was to write the story in a way that once it got rolling, you’d actually forget the structure and just enjoy the narrative.

This story is reminiscent of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” in that both characters seem haunted by crushing guilt and suffer a slow descent into madness as a result. Are you a fan of Poe or of gothic horror in general?

Now that you mention it, Edgar Allan Poe was my first encounter with horror fiction. As a young boy, I owned the Illustrated Classic Edition Tales of Mystery and Terror, a so-called “young reader’s book” with pictures every other page. One illustration in particular scared me so much that I’d cover half the book with my hand each time I reread the story, and even now I can see it in my permanently damaged imagination. It was the old man awake in fright—peering into the darkness with his hideous “vulture eye” as he hears the sound of his murderer creeping toward the bed. So although I never consciously planned a thematic overlap between “Telltale Heart” and “Owner’s Guide,” I guess it’s not surprising. That old man is still watching everything I do.

You’ve written a lot about zombies, including your first novel. What interests you about zombies?

Thirty years ago I cowered at my first zombie movie, Return of the Living Dead, and since then zombies have been my monster of choice. I think the horror works on levels both visceral and psychological. Just the thought of being engulfed by a mob of rotting cannibals tearing open my guts is enough to quicken my pulse, as if my fight-or-flight response is on standby and ready to go. Evolution has made me afraid of being eaten. And at the same time, zombie horror also upsets our higher emotions. Those shambling corpses are our wives and husbands and friends and family—and yet to them, we’re nothing more than meat. It’s the ultimate in unrequited love, that fear we all have. How do we handle that imbalance or face that rejection? And do we dare switch roles, imagine ourselves as the zombie—dehumanized, empty, unable to think or feel or recognize our loved ones? I tried to explore some of that in my novel The Return Man. Anything you’re working on now that you’d like to share with our readers?

For the moment I’ve set aside zombies and ghosts, and I’m currently at work on my next novel, a young adult murder mystery entitled The Whisper Tape. Hopefully you (or a young adult you know) will be able to enjoy it soon. Until then, thanks for reading “Owner’s Guide,” and thank you to Nightmare Magazine for giving me this opportunity to share my unhealthy thoughts.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER Nightmare assistant editor Erika Holt lives in Calgary, Alberta, where she writes and edits speculative fiction. Her stories appear in several anthologies including Not Our Kind, What Fates Impose, and Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead. She is also co-editor of two anthologies from EDGE and Absolute XPress: Rigor Amortis, about sexy, amorous zombies, and Broken Time Blues, featuring such oddities as 1920s burlesque dancers and bootlegging chickens. Find her at erikaholt.com or on Twitter as @erikaholt. MISCELLANY Coming Attractions The Editors | 125 words

Coming up in February, in Nightmare . . . We have original fiction from Theodore McCombs (“Six Hangings in the Land of Unkillable Women”) and Emily Cataneo (“Seven Steps to Beauty for a Girl Named Avarice”), along with reprints by Laura Anne Gilman (“Exposure”) and Joe McKinney (“Sabbatical in the Ohio Methlands”). We also have the latest installment of our column on horror, “The H Word,” plus author spotlights with our authors, and a media review. 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 Nalo Hopkinson, A. Merc Rustad and Nibedita Sen. Thanks for reading! Stay Connected The Editors

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If you enjoy reading Nightmare, please consider subscribing. It’s a great way to support the magazine, and you’ll get your issues in the convenient ebook format of your choice. You can subscribe directly from our website, via Weightless Books, or via Amazon.com. For more information, visit nightmare- magazine.com/subscribe. We also have individual ebook issues available at a variety of ebook vendors, and we now have Ebook Bundles available in the Nightmare ebookstore, where you can buy in bulk and save! Buying a Bundle gets you a copy of every issue published during the named period. Buying either of the half-year Bundles saves you $3 (so you’re basically getting one issue for free), or if you spring for the Year One Bundle, you’ll save $11 off the cover price. So if you need to catch up on Nightmare, that’s a great way to do so. Visit nightmare-magazine.com/store for more information. About the Nightmare Team The Editors

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief John Joseph Adams

Managing/Associate Editor Wendy N. Wagner

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Assistant Editors Erika Holt Lisa Nohealani Morton

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

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

ANTHOLOGIES

THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 1: The End is Nigh (with Hugh Howey) THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 2: The End is Now (with Hugh Howey) THE APOCALYPSE TRIPTYCH, Vol. 3: The End Has Come (with Hugh Howey) Armored Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 (with Joe Hill) Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 (with Karen Joy Fowler) Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017 (with Charles Yu) Brave New Worlds By Blood We Live Cosmic Powers Dead Man’s Hand Epic: Legends Of Fantasy Federations The Improbable Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!! and Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects Lightspeed: Year One The Living Dead The Living Dead 2 Loosed Upon the World The Mad Scientist’s Guide To World Domination Operation Arcana Other Worlds Than These Oz Reimagined (with Douglas Cohen) Press Start to Play (with Daniel H. Wilson) Robot Uprisings (with Daniel H. Wilson) Seeds of Change Under the Moons of Mars Wastelands Wastelands 2 The Way Of The Wizard What the #@&% Is That? (with Douglas Cohen)

NOVELS and COLLECTIONS

Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey Shift by Hugh Howey Dust by Hugh Howey Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn Sand by Hugh Howey Retrograde by Peter Cawdron Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories by Hugh Howey Creatures of Will and Temper by Molly Tanzer The City of Lost Fortunes by Bryan Camp The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty The Wild Dead by Carrie Vaughn In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker

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