NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE - Horror and Dark Fantasy Story Podcast (Audiobook | Short Stories)

My mother sits at the kitchen table in the moonlight, gazing at her folded hands. “Has your father returned with Lilah?” | © 2024 by Sam W. Pisciotta. Narrated by John Rubinstein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Nightmare Short Shots episode features "I Am One of Bluebeard's Dead Wives" by Bella D. Bonne (© 2024 by Bella D. Bonne), narrated by Roxanne Hernandez and "A Long Time Afterward" by Sonya Taaffe (© 2024 by Sonya Taaffe), narrated by John Rubinstein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On an unmarked road somewhere in the Appalachians, a midnight blue Cadillac rolled to a stop, gravel popping under tires, headlights peering out into the discord of dusk. | © 2024 by Russell Nichols. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We hear you laughing as you speed by on the interstate. In spite of what you might think of us, we are a proud town. We don’t need your understanding. We don’t explain. You couldn’t handle the answers. | © 2024 by Cody Goodfellow. Narrated by Nan McNamara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Nightmare Short Shots episode features "Painted Surfaces" by Guan Un (© 2024 by Guan Un), narrated by Arthur Morey and "Witches Sabbath" by Lisa M. Bradley (© 2024 by Lisa M. Bradley), narrated by Nan McNamara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nine years, fifty-two days, seven hours until hyadeic convergence. Kayla watched the hot, empty cake pan smoke on the kitchen counter. It was her husband Henry’s birthday, and she’d planned a little surprise for him. | © 2024 by Erin Brown. Narrated by Nan McNamara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Haw Par Villa in the rain was a splash of garish color. The dark red footpath, glistening wet. The ornate tiered gate that greeted visitors with a carving of a tiger, etched in gold and blue. | © 2024 by Megan Chee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Nightmare Short Shots episode features "Automaton Boy" by Sara S. Messenger (© 2024 by Sara S. Messenger) and "Phantom Taste of Apricot on My Tongue" by Richard Leis (© 2024 by Richard Leis), both narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The soldiers start rounding up us factory girls just before sunrise. | © 2024 by Thomas Ha. Narrated by Susan Hanfield and Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This poem sprang from its title, a product of old-school random-generator email spam. | © 2024 by Sonya Taaffe. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yesterday upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there . . . | © 2024 by Ally Wilkes. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the tiny abbey in the province of Tasselt—the only abbey in the region with both an abbot and his monks and a dozen nuns as well (a temporary matter that had somehow become permanent)—the abbot, whose skin had gotten paler even as the veins beneath it had become more pronounced, and who preferred darkness to light of any kind, had taken over the West section of the abbey, with its many, darker...

If you haven’t seen it yet, you will. | © 2024 by Manish Melwani. Read by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This poem began as a letter from a grandmother to her grandchild. It warns of uncontrollable wickedness and gifts them wisdom for how to survive despite it. | © 2024 by Beatrice Winifred Iker. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I first saw them one evening in May. I couldn’t tell what they were: small, like kids, like me, but they rustled, raffia fronds for skin. | © 2024 by Victor Forna. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The question is, who dies at the end of this story? | © 2024 by Carlie St. George. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is something uniquely squalid and sad about estate sales. To traipse through a cluttered house, one of a teeming crowd here to bear witness to the end of a life and all that it held, not to pay respect but instead to lunge for whatever goodies you can find. | © 202 Daniel David Froid. Narrated by Ruth Wallman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The opening line is my riff on Bach’s chorale prelude “Come, Sweet Death,” one of his most profound. | © 2024 by John R. Turner. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It didn’t come as a surprise when AJ told me she wanted to open our relationship. We’d been an item for four years, but by the middle of the third year the two of us had long since checked out. | © 2024 by James Tatum. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a nice man with a smart phone camera approaches them. It is also the phone he uses to record his real real reviews of the tacos from the authentic food trucks in Brooklyn and the scenes of the noble and earnest people at the bodegas in Queens. Places where honest people hang out and where he doesn’t make friends with anyone. | © 2024 by Mark Galarrita. Narrated by Annette Oliveira. Learn more...

When the American saw me sitting on a stone in the river, his mouth opened and closed, a brown trout caught on a fishing line. He kept his eyes on me as he hurried to pull off his socks and shoes, as if I would vanish otherwise. | © 2024 by Shannon Scott. Narrated by Annette Oliveira. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This poem began as flash fiction, and was then whittled even smaller—perhaps ironic, given its subject. I wrote this to explore how we change in a relationship, how it isn’t always healthy or best for us—or necessarily consensual. | © 2024 by E. Catherine Tobler. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I like car journeys in the passenger’s seat. They give me time to think and rethink things beyond the shape of my life. I’m not allowed to play music, but I can in my head. Places blur. Memories tangle. Pitying voices from long ago garble in my ear on the thickened tongue of regret. “Muniza,” my husband says, eyes on the road. “Your skin is slipping.” | © 2024 by Fatima Taqvi. Narrated by Janina E...

Before we left camp, we were informed about the dos and donts for living in our respective communities, considering we were strangers. Happenings that we newcomers saw as strange should not be enough reason to contravene the laws of the land. | © 2024 by Oyedotun Damilola Muees. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chuck was wire-sick again, so he hobbled up onto Jerome’s porch one sunny afternoon, need curling his spine like a bent clothes hanger. Jerome was the guy who could get you whatever you needed, as long as what you needed was wire, or crank, or a pallet of Captain Chompberry cereal, or twenty cartons of stolen Lithuanian cigarettes. | © 2024 by Keith Rosson. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more abo...