Tiny Nightmares
ALSO BY LINCOLN MICHEL AND NADXIELI NIETO
Tiny Crimes: Very Short Tales of
Mystery & Murder
Gigantic Worlds
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Anthology selection copyright © 2020 by Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-948226-62-2
Interior illustrations by Daehyun Kim
Cover and book design by Nadxieli Nieto
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020931219
Printed in Hong Kong
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For all of us, screaming in horror
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION • LINCOLN MICHEL AND NADXIELI NIETO
HEADS
GUESS • MEG ELISON
REARVIEW • SAMANTHA HUNT
GRIMALKIN • ANDREW F. SULLIVAN
DOGGY-DOG WORLD • HILARY LEICHTER
TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY VETALA • AMRITA CHAKRABORTY
WE’VE BEEN IN ENOUGH PLACES TO KNOW • COREY FARRENKOPF
LIFELINE • J. S. BREUKELAAR
JANE DEATH THEORY #13 • RION AMILCAR SCOTT
THE BLUE ROOM • LENA VALENCIA
UNBEKNOWNST • MATTHEW VOLLMER
LONE • JAC JEMC
HEARTS
PIPEWORKS • CHAVISA WOODS
THE OWNER • WHITNEY COLLINS
THE RESPLENDENCE OF DISAPPEARING • IVÁN PARRA GARCIA, TRANSLATED BY ALLANA C. NOYES
THE WHEAT WOMAN • THERESA HOTTEL
HAROLD • SELENA GAMBRELL ANDERSON
CANDY BOII • SAM J. MILLER
THE UNHAUNTING • KEVIN NGUYEN
THE MARRIAGE VARIATIONS • MONIQUE LABAN
THE FAMILY DINNER • MICHELE ZIMMERMAN
AFTERLIVES • BENNETT SIMS
THE STORY AND THE SEED • AMBER SPARKS
LIMBS
FINGERS • RACHEL HENG
CARBON FOOTPRINT • SHELLY ORIA
WE CAME HERE FOR FUN • ALANA MOHAMED
THE BARROW WIGHT • JOSH COOK
KATY BARS THE DOOR • RICHIE NARVAEZ
PINCER AND TONGUE • STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
THE MASK, THE RIDE, THE BAG • CHASE BURKE
CEDAR GROVE ROSE • CANISIA LUBRIN
# MOTHERMAYHEM • JEI D. MARCADE
LEG • BRIAN EVENSON
VISCERA
VEINS, LIKE A SYSTEM • ESHANI SURYA
CARAVAN • PEDRO INIGUEZ
DOWNPOUR • JOSEPH SALVATORE
HUMAN MILK FOR HUMAN BABIES • LINDSAY KING-MILLER
PICTURES OF HEAVEN • BEN LOORY
GABRIEL METSU, MAN WRITING A LETTER, C. 1664–66 • HELEN McCLORY
INSTRUMENT OF THE ANCESTORS • TROY L. WIGGINS
JOY, AND OTHER POISONS • VAJRA CHANDRASEKERA
VISITING HOURS • LILLIAM RIVERA
PARAKEETS • KEVIN BROCKMEIER
PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE EDITORS
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS • DAEHYUN KIM
INTRODUCTION
An argument can be made that fear made humans what we are. Literally. Our eyes evolved to see monsters lurking in the grass, our ears to hear creatures going bump in the night. Fear is also, for better or (more often) worse, the dark force that shapes society. Whether it’s politicians spreading hatred to scare up votes or the passive fear that keeps so many of us from risking change in our lives, our communities, and our world.
In Tiny Nightmares we’ve asked some of our favorite authors what scares them. These stories—from forty-two of the most exciting writers of horror and literary fiction—wander through a vast forest of horror: from ride-sharing murders and mind-reading witches to fears of childbirth and funhouse marriages from which there is no escape. They wrest from the shadows not only vampires and werewolves but also the terrors of the waking world—racism, sexism, online radicalization, economic instability, environmental disaster.
In the shadow of these larger systemic horrors, tiny nightmares breed. These nightmares, masked and unmasked, provoke a deeper dread and implicate the reader. We are often the very thing another rightfully fears.
For creatures shaped by fear, horror stories hold a unique place. They can explore the dark cracks and dank corners of life, making us see more clearly. Many of our oldest stories are, in a sense, horror stories. Fairy tales and myths are full of terrifying transformations, hidden evils, and dire warnings about what lurks in the dark woods just outside of town. Despite this, horror fiction is still too often dismissed.
For Tiny Nightmares, we wanted to poke another hole in the artificial barrier between “literary” and “genre” fiction. We’ve collected more than forty stories from established authors of both worlds as well as emerging writers who we’re confident you’ll be seeing more of in the years to come. We have divided the book loosely into four parts, four body parts naturally—Heads, Hearts, Limbs, and Viscera—loosely held together by sinews of weirdness. The stories here are small in size—each under 1,500 words—but the nightmares are large. Each story is a tiny crack in the door to which we press our eye, unsure of what we will find staring back at us.
We hope you enjoy.
Sincerely,
Lincoln Michel and Nadxieli Nieto
1
Guess
MEG ELISON
Nobody likes it when we’re right. Not the guess-your-age guy, not the guess-your-weight guy, and certainly not me. The age guy, well, he’s never right. Because people are more likely to play along if he guesses they’re ten years younger than they are. He loses bullshit eight-cent prizes made in China and he keeps taking a dollar from every idiot in his line. The weight guy is right more often. He gets away with it because the skinny people are proud of themselves and the fat people are a source of entertainment, no matter what he says. He’s right, he’s wrong, they’re still fat.
Then they come around to me. And I am never wrong.
Sometimes I think I can do some good. Whenever I say “lung cancer,” the person I’m talking to says they’ll quit. If I say “liver failure,” it goes the same way. That one guy I told it would be a plane crash said he’d never fly again, but I don’t know if he stuck by it. I also don’t know if a plane crashed into his house while he was asleep. But what about the ones I tell it’ll be a car accident? What the hell are they supposed to do?
When Dad did it, he told people to try to take comfort in heart failure, in knowing how the end will come. “It’s the one thing in life you can count on,” he’d say. “And now you’ll know its name when it shows up. Isn’t that the definition of comfort? Familiarity?”
Dad didn’t do it at the carnival. Dad had a real job. He’d do it for friends and family, he’d do it a year before it happened, or twenty. He was right about everybody, including himself (pancreatic cancer). After he was gone, I saw that he was right about his sister, his best friend, our dog. That’s how I know I am never wrong.
I don’t know how we count as fun, us guessers. It isn’t a game. There’s no clown to shoot with a water pistol and there’s no ring to toss. The prizes are shitty and the truth is nobody’s friend. And tonight smells like candy corn and puke, and this town is like every other.
Patty, 48, 287 pounds, will die of complications from an amputated foot. She leaves with her face in a twist and goes straight to the cotton candy man. I never know when, but I suspect for her that it will be soon.
Bill, 36, 215 pounds, will die in an industrial accident involving molten metal. His face when I say that to him. Jesus.
Gus, 14, 98 pounds, will drown. God, I hate it when kids walk in here.
On and on, every night, their dazed faces all blurring into one.
Except.
Except the carnival is heading south as the summer ends. We’re chasing the heat and barreling toward our stopping point in Galveston. I’m working a cruise ship when we get there.
The age guy changed his accent to sound Southern as soon as we hit the Mason-Dixon Line. The weight guy is gearing up for Southern women who don’t ever wanna play at all, and most certainly don’t want to hear the truth when they’re made to.
And I can’t do accents and I can’t lie, so the last few weeks on the road have been real weird for me. Ever since Tulsa, I’m stuck.
Shirley, 56, 186 pounds, will die of thirst.
Caiden, 21, 125 pounds, will die of thirst.
Evan, 28, 146 pounds, will die of thirst.
My line dries up right away. They think I’m being an asshole. I can feel sweat collecting in the small of my back and rolling down. The night is way too warm. My mouth feels sticky like cotton candy.
Oklahoma City and it’s midnight and still above ninety degrees.
Lorna, 39, 159 pounds, thirst.
Jake, 47, 180 pounds, thirst.
Bobby, 5, 41 pounds, thirst.
This crowd is drunker and thinks I’m joking. They drink more, they suggest I drink more. I am beginning to think we should drink all there is while we still can.
Galveston is where I figure it out. I haven’t kept up with the news while we’ve been on the road, and when I get it, it’s almost too hysterical to figure out. All the papers are saying the same thing. The bill is coming due. We’ve been putting off doing something about this for years and now it’s too late.
I look up at the seagulls at the marina and I know what they’ll all die of. Thirst.
I never make it to the cruise ship. Some asshole sees me doing my act at our last stop and he finds me. Tells me he’s too smart to die of thirst, and he’s right. He says he knows what I am. He says I need to come with him and he says a number that makes up my mind for me.
I’ve been on this ship now for six months and I don’t think I’ll ever get off it. They have some of the best dew-collecting and condensing machines in the world. The ship is comfortable. The food is fresh; there are hydroponics on board and they know what they’re doing. But I never see them. The man who brought me here keeps me locked up in my room and visits me once a day. He won’t let anyone else in here. He says I’m his surety against the inevitable end.
Knowing might be a comfort, but it isn’t a surety. And there still might be time to change this. But I know what I know, and I and everyone on this ship will die of a gunshot wound. Soon.
The man who brought me here is named Chris. He’s about forty-five and I’d say a buck thirty soaking wet. And he’s going to die after drinking a poison that is neither as painless nor as quick as he was told it would be.
I am never wrong.
Rearview
SAMANTHA HUNT
Starlings loop overhead. It’s a cloud of birds. Part of the flock disappears as light on light. The other part blackens the pale sky like a finger reversing velvet.
A mother and daughter, humans, watch the birds’ rigid coordination. The flock makes a low rumbling sound as if the birds, taken together, are one thing rather than many. A hive. A body. A mind. If the humans knew the word for this flock, a murmuration of starlings, they’d understand now how these birds got the name. But these humans know very little. Their mobile devices are not working. There’s no connection.
“They never collide?” the daughter asks.
Her mother shrugs.
Birds twist. It’s dangerous, wonderful. It’s fearfully unanimous, or just plain fearful, when many think and act like one.
“Maybe a falcon’s near and they’re scared shitless.” The mother doesn’t usually swear in front of her daughter. “Poopless, I mean.” The birds are directly over their heads. Poopless could be a good thing.
Earlier: Mother and daughter drive through the night. The mother breathes audibly to calm herself, but she’s not calm. The mother checks to see what might be following them. She catches sight of her daughter asleep in the backseat. All that’s precious; life, sleep, breathing. The rear window is a square of darkness, a black screen. There’s much the mother doesn’t remember, dark squares in her own brain. Anything at all might be following them.
At a rest stop the mother destroys her mobile phone in the toilet.
Back on the road she tunes the radio. Announcers banter. They say so many dumb things, scripts that follow a bad idea of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman. Giggles. Teasing. Nonsense to fill the airwaves. There’s a story about how our past digital lives—old status updates and social media posts—will haunt us forever. Everything stupid we ever did. Everything cruel continues to exist as part of the public record, forever. “A young man lost his job when the bosses found photos of him urinating on a friend’s head. Not a good friend, I hope. Hahaha.”
“Oh, Mike! You’re bad! You’re so bad!”
It hasn’t rained in a long time.
The mother exits the highway. Her e-toll pays the debt.
The town is a remote mountain holiday spot in the off-season. The shops are closed except for a grocery. The mother pulls over for human supplies. They will need food. They will need water.
The tires stop spinning, stop lulling. The daughter wakes. Alone in the car, she reaches for her phone without thought. It’s what she does. She texts a boyfriend. It’s late. He forgets himself. He writes, Send me dirty pix. The girl considers his request. A shadowy breast shot might be nice. Mother returns. Daughter hides her phone.
“Where are we, Mom?”
They arrive at a cabin deep in the woods. It’s surrounded by infinite pines, maples, oaks, trees of all sorts. There are no other houses. No power lines. Just the woods. Underneath the trees, deep in the soil, fungi attach themselves to the trees’ roots. These mushrooms, though really it is one big mushroom, suck some of the tree’s sugar from the roots. In return they serve as a telephone operator for the forest. They connect one tree’s roots to its neighbor’s to its neighbor’s. Trees communicate through the fungus. They do not speak English. They do not speak in words humans would understand.
The door to the cabin is padlocked, so the mother smashes the lock with the lip of a shovel left on the landing.
“Mom!” The daughter’s surprised her mom had it in her. Like a professional bad guy. Breaking and entering.
The lock gives easily. Mother and daughter inch into the dark cabin.
“Where are we, Mom?” Again.
“Shhhh.”
They sleep wrapped like spoons in a room where mounted deer watch the bed, watch them sleep.
The sun rises. The daughter takes a short walk to a dock on a quiet lake. No one’s there. She snaps some photos of the lake and attempts to post them but there’s no coverage. There’s no connection. The starlings soar overhead. Her mother joins her at the dock. They drink coffee. The birds obey silent commands. The birds make their murmur without even trying. It’s a chorus, a group, a pixelated mob blurring to one.
Near sunset, mother and daughter prepare a small meal. They build a fire in the cabin. They burn wood. They warm a can of beans and nibble on some cheese.
“Before GPS,” the mother says, “lost was possible. You could not know where you were. No one could find you. Before. You have no idea.”
The daughter nods. “Where are we?”
Mother ignores. “Also,” she says, “clocks could be wrong. Like, the clock in your car might be ten minutes fast or a watch could run slow. Things could be inaccurate. Different. Not like now.”
The daughter’s cell phone rings.
“I said no electronics.”
“It’s just Tony, Mom.”
The boyfriend.
The mother grabs the ringing phone. There are no bars, no connection. The mother’s hand trembles. She answers. “Hello?” No one’s there. Or no one who speaks is there.
The mother throws the phone into the fire.
In the night the mother wakes. Someone is in their room. The past does not have to try hard to find us, especially not at night. So the mother isn’t surprised. “You found us,” she whispers. “The phone?”
“I’ll always find you,” the person says.
The mother pulls the bedcovers up over her body, making a poor shield.
“I am you.” The stranger approaches the bed. Her face is revealed in the low light. The stranger is not a stranger. She is the mother, only younger and skinny as a junkie.
“Please,” the mother says. “I’m clean now. I’m a mother now.”
Junkie shrugs. She sits on the edge of the bed, prepping a syringe. “You tried to kill me,” she says. She pulls down the bedcovers, like a lover accessing the mother’s body, her body.
“Don’t. Please.” It’s a whisper. But the mother lies still. Maybe she is crying. Maybe she is grateful. She hasn’t had a hit of anything in years.
The mother does not fight. The drug enters her blood. She convulses, a worm. She nods off, asleep or asleep-like. Her arm is pierced by the syringe and a history that never leaves, a history so haunted. The arm lands across her daughter’s sleeping body with a hard thud.
The daughter wakes to two mothers. “Who are you? What are you doing?” she asks the younger one.
The junkie smiles.
“Mom?” The daughter shakes the mother in bed beside her, trying to wake the mother she knows. “What did you do?” The daughter lunges at the intruder. She attacks, but the junkie mother is cruel and desperate. She fights viciously. And the daughter can’t bring herself to fight very hard at all. What if she hurts her mother? What if she hurts her mother before her mother has a chance to become her mother?