Tiny Nightmares Read online

  Fields surround them. I have to feed this child, the mother thinks. When her back is turned she feels her daughter’s eyes slice at her back, unbearable. She senses threat, sourceless and unprecedented: Why? Is it this house? Has her daughter made it so tense? Who is her daughter? Who knows the child’s thoughts?

  I am a bad mother, the mother thinks. I failed to buy bread. She microwaves a leftover hamburger patty and hesitates. But her daughter’s eyes glint and she says she will eat it, plain, wrapped in a napkin. No, she doesn’t want rice.

  This daughter wants to vomit. She feels it too, a tension like each kitchen surface hides a needle. The tension has built for weeks but unexpectedly unfurled this morning, and now this farmhouse, their home, feels like hands around her throat. She longs to run.

  “No,” she says again, so the mother shuts the rice cooker. The mother decides to eat like her daughter, chewing meat out of a napkin. They stand at the table, across from each other, sucking up crumbs from the blue paper. Out of loyalty and deep love they both stay. But they don’t understand the feeling all around them. Their eyes are cold. They look out the window on the farm. This beautiful American farm. Who are we?

  The wheat woman is coming across the field.

  The daughter sees this specter from the kitchen window. Slow stroll toward the farmhouse, bare feet curdling soil with each step. She makes a sound like worms within her throat. She might have flaxen hair, the daughter thinks, a word learned from an English storybook. “What color is flaxen?” she asks, knowing her mother cannot answer. The mother cannot read English text. When the mother looks out the window she cannot see the wheat woman, she sees only the slow tractor of her American husband, green beast wading through gold crop, back and forth before the window like a parade of provision.

  My daughter is a small woman, the mother thinks. I built a frame for us. I came to this life to escape but I feel hunted, when I should feel at rest.

  The daughter can’t breathe. Guilt seems to compact her, for no reason. She feels like she has hurt her mother, but her mother before her is unharmed and neither of them can trace the pressure to its source of shame. The wheat woman walks closer.

  “Mama,” the girl says finally. “I have to tell you. There is a pale woman coming now, across the fields. She is coming here to kill you and take your place in our home. She is beautiful with flaxen hair.”

  Who is my daughter? What is my daughter? The mother sets her meat-filled napkin down. She feels, incredibly, that the child really wants to hurt her. She feels her daughter’s words and eyes like knives, aimed at her exposed neck.

  So this is the feeling that makes the house so tense. All this time, that wheat woman drew near.

  “Do you love Dad?” the girl wants to know. She forces meat down her throat. She longs to sprint outside and burrow into wheat. Instead she waits. She repeats the question in two languages.

  “We’re not from here,” the mother finally says. “I’m not. It’s this place that’s wrong for us.”

  “The wheat is wrong?”

  “Wheat fields.”

  “They’re the only fields I’ve ever known.”

  She has arrived.

  The wheat woman is stooping at their doorway. The wheat woman wants to come inside. She’s silhouetted, flaxen, soft, and solid. The mother still cannot see her, but she can smell her, the rich smell of smoked meat, warm lumber.

  It’s a tender smell. Her daughter looks pinched and vulnerable in the midday light. Her daughter stares at the opening door. Her daughter yearns for the relief she might find.

  “Come here,” the mother says to her daughter. She opens her arms. “Please, come to me. Don’t welcome her.”

  They wait to see if the daughter will come. In the daughter’s sight the wheat woman’s mouth cracks open. The wheat woman says, “I love him so.” Meanwhile, the mother feels wordless. She has short black hair, speaks English with an unrelenting accent, and her husband calls her his Suzie Wong. She understands the ghost her daughter sees. She knows the hunted, panicked feeling, the need to run to wheat, to make it end. To burrow your body in the surfaces of this land.

  “Mama?”

  “I can’t rest. That’s this feeling.”

  “Where are we from, then? Tell me.”

  “I can’t. There’s no place now.”

  The small, mean-faced daughter backs away from the table. Through the open door, wheat rustles as if alive. The air is humid and heavy. The tractor’s hum recedes, then nears, then falls again.

  “Welcome me,” the wheat woman says. “Welcome rest.”

  Her words twine with the tractor’s hum. The wheat is high and whispering. The daughter longs to let her in. She could let her mother go and thus be free of her mother’s burdens, of feelings that smear her own sense of self. The house as tense and sharp and twisted as barbed wire. She grasps the feeling close. She lets it cut her.

  Then she turns her back on the door and takes her mother’s hand. The mother’s fingers are cold and hard as bone. “I can’t rest either. I can’t breathe. I’ll stay with you. I remember.”

  Like fireworks, the wheat woman screams. Outside, the man leans from his tractor and yells to his wife, and to his daughter, of promises and possession. “Take pity,” the wheat woman sobs. “In your denial, I will die.” But mother and daughter turn their backs, they have no pity. They must be small and mean and sly and hunted. They know the wheat wants to consume. And so they dig.

  Above their heads, the tractor roars.

  Harold

  SELENA GAMBRELL ANDERSON

  Margo Childress had only one father, a tragedy, but he’d built a library with comfortable, modern furniture and double doors that locked, absolutely, from the inside. Opposite the doors stood a high wall of crumbling ginger brick, but one of the bricks was missing and in the cave lived a tiny man. A lover of tweed and wool and tasseled loafers that shimmied with each step, the man walked to the edge of the cave, a Yorkie clinging on to him like a comma. He was one inch tall and middle-aged with black eyes, Margo saw, that when looking at hers showed a gleam of mischievous recognition. To borrow an expression that she would grow to despise only after using it time and time again when recalling that first spark of illogical affection, Margo felt as though she had known him all her life. And struck with the need to do something about him, to do anything, she named him Harold.

  They’d met by happenstance on another unremarkable afternoon in August when the sun was shining but the rain fell in slashes. Margo’s stepmother, Wanda, had hijacked the living room with her bizarre movies and white zinfandel. Always the last to stroll into a room, Wanda had been told that she had a presence. She had tried to become an actress known all over the world, but she never got any farther than the Texas-Louisiana border because life sometimes can be that way. Now she lay on the sofa, naked as a skating rink, belting out her failed monologues:

  “I had to sit next to him, praying and drinking alone with him, listening to his dirty jokes. I had to drag him into bed with my bare hands. But after that last indiscretion—I said, That’s enough of this! So I won control over this house—control over him and everything. He didn’t dare fight back, and look what it’s cost me! Nobody in this world can possibly know what winning has cost me.”

  “Must be terrible,” said Harold. He bounced the Yorkie in his arms, looking past Margo. “Parents, you say? What a bunch of manure!”

  “Not really,” Margo said. She’d actually seen a bunch of manure the time Wanda had had it delivered in a truck that dumped it right onto her father’s convertible.

  “Why is it that parents are so boring?” Harold said. “Because they’re groan-ups.” He laughed at himself. Margo joined in but too late. The Yorkie, startled by the noise, tried to make eyes with anybody.

  Each night Margo listened with her eyes half closed as Harold told her stories. Softly, he read about an ancient wedding, the girl marooned from some desert, the king punch-drunk in love, the castle dually filled with
golden light and the mercy of God. “I am black, but comely,” he read. “Look not on me, because the sun has looked on me. Tell me, O you whom my soul loves, where you feed. Put me like a seal over your heart. Like a seal on your arm. For love is as strong as death.”

  “Don’t read about them,” Margo said quickly. “They’re dead.”

  Next door a band was playing. A muffled horn-and-flute arrangement drifted dreamily through the air like jellyfish. Through the library windows Margo saw her father and his wife dancing brain-to-brain.

  “They’re dead,” Margo said again.

  Each time she considered this, her mind swirled and crashed. It was through Harold that she first understood that love had had its own life before her, and would after her. For a few minutes she could not forgive him.

  Harold closed the book, leaned forward, elbows on his knees. To soften the blow, he told her that she would be his forever, that he would never let her go, that she better not even think about trying to leave. And wanting to hear him make more promises, because the more promises, the better, Margo said that she was determined to run away.

  “If you run,” said Harold, “I’ll find you.”

  “Then I’ll disappear.”

  “But if you disappear you’ll still be you,” he said. “And I’ll still be the one who finds you.” Sighing, Margo ran a hand over coarse bangs that smoothed out but came back in a wave. “Come close,” Harold said. He spread his arms to grasp both nostrils and licked the tip of her nose.

  Wanda appeared from the bedroom, her hair curled and quaking in irritation. She was carrying a bucket of ammonia that she splashed on Margo’s father, Gary, who was reclining on the sofa. Gary scrambled around, all squirming legs and arms, stood up, rushed after her, and shut the door with a precise slam. Margo heard the crash of picture frames and penny jars and a giant bottle of perfume through the bedroom and into the den.

  But she was hardly concerned, because she was thinking about Harold. She loved to think about Harold. She loved to remember the way he waddled to the edge of the cave and into her life. She loved that he wore tweed and wool exclusively and that before taking a seat, he pinched the fabric covering his knees. She loved who she became when she was with him—which was almost nothing, small, in its place, acknowledged. She wanted mostly to outlove him.

  Margo went into the library and waited. She waited and waited, and the suspense was delicious before it became painful. Then here came Harold and the Yorkie, who barked once at the sight of her. Harold set down the dog, removed his glasses, and took a long time to find a pocket in which to place them. Margo leaned forward, tempted to help him. He looked at her quickly, surprised and repulsed by her hunger.

  Don’t be, Margo didn’t say. She didn’t even want to say don’t. Don’t was negative and negative was bad like death was bad. She wanted to live.

  And as though reading her mind, Harold said, “It’s too bad you can’t come live with me. I’ve got a nice, cozy house. From the den window you can see the most beautiful trees in the world—sunsets that would bring a tear to your eye.” As evidence he dragged a finger down his cheek.

  “Do you have a library?” Margo heard her voice say.

  “Of course,” said Harold. “It’s made of bricks from some place that doesn’t even exist anymore. And I have bookcases filled with books from all over. I have children’s books, self-help books, rare books, cookbooks—”

  “Are any of the bricks missing?” Margo said, looking past him. “Is there a hole in the wall? Do you see anyone standing in the hole?”

  Harold leaned back, looking wary. “I can check,” he said. With that he stood and walked into the darkness. Alone, Margo and the Yorkie regarded each other with pity. Then contempt. Harold came back wiping his face with a satin handkerchief. He pinched the fabric above his knees before sitting down. Then he told her when she already seemed to know. “There sure is.”

  Like a doll inside another doll, by Harold’s account there was another brick wall, in which there was another cave, in which there was another tiny man, this time named Ahmed.

  Ahmed, she thought fearfully. Whoever he was, she feared she might want to love him, too. She feared she might want to love him more than she wanted to love Harold.

  This discovery incited something in Margo. Her head felt small and full of coins. She remembered the desert princess looking for her soul and not finding it. It was terrible not to find things, but it was terrible to find them too.

  Margo sent Harold back into the cave and he returned to report that in the next cave was the next man, a Devonté Washington-Myers.

  But Margo wanted to know, “Is there anybody else?” And in the next cave was the next man, this time named Ralph.

  “Is there someone else?” Margo wanted to know. She filled up with surprise after surprise. Harold started to speak but picked up the Yorkie and turned away. He walked deep into the cave on soundless male footsteps. Every so often he called out, “Yes . . . Yes . . . Yes . . .”

  Candy Boii

  SAM J. MILLER

  Gather any group of gay guys together and sooner or later we’ll get around to it: recent highlights from our own private Sex App Horror Story anthologies.

  You would not believe the body odor on this guy—I threw those sheets away, like even if the laundromat got the stink out of the linen they’d never get it out of my mind, you know?

  In the middle of me blowing him, this guy goes, Wow, is that an actual old-school Nintendo? And then we’re done and I just want him to get the fuck out, he turns the thing on and starts playing!

  Generally pretty tame, as horror stories go. The real stuff, the true trauma, we keep to ourselves. The guy who didn’t stop when we said no—the one who took the condom off halfway through without telling us—the one we kept sucking on even after we saw the sores—all real downers, plus none of us are in a hurry to let our friends see how we are weak, or how we are scared.

  Every time, I stay silent. Once in a while I’ll toss out something trivial, to throw them off the scent—Dude started crying, really blubbering, said he promised his wife he wouldn’t do this anymore—because if they ever heard my real story, they’d never believe it. And if they did believe it, it’d ruin their whole day. Possibly also the entire sacred enterprise of app-assisted promiscuity.

  This was two years back, now. Saturday: the night when you’re most hopeful of finding a fuck for the ages. Ten p.m.: the time when you’re most miserable, realizing once again that you won’t be getting lucky with a guy uphill from you on the Hotness Slope; you’ll have to settle for one of the downhill dudes. Or say fuck it and crawl into your own empty bed.

  Springtime. My open window brings in screams, laughter, sirens. I’m toggling between three separate apps—woofing or growling at strangers—responding to innumerable instances of sup or hey or u looking or want head? Wondering why that dude I had such a great conversation with last week, when I couldn’t have any fun because I had to get up early the next day, is ignoring me entirely tonight.

  And there he is, ~700 feet away—thick beard, thick spectacles—looking younger than the 33 he says he is: Candy Boii. Handsome, sure, but nothing superhuman. So I got no problem hitting him up.

  Hey, I say. What are you up to?

  Candy Boii: Watching horror movies. You?

  ColbyJack (which is me): Reading. I’m Colby, by the way

  Candy Boii: I figured. You a big cheese fan?

  ColbyJack: Who isn’t?

  Candy Boii: No one I want to know

  Here an eyebrow rises, at his failure to respond to my name with his own, but some guys are like that. Skittish about anything that points to their true self. As if the sex-thirsty self is something separate.

  ColbyJack: Looking for anything?

  Candy Boii: Trying to get this dick sucked

  ColbyJack: I may be able to help you out with that

  A photo follows. Candy Boii in a mirror, brandishing an admirable erection. Backlit, angled odd
ly, his face half lens-flare.

  My heart hammers, in the silence of my slowed breath. I’m secure and alone on my couch, but my body responds like I’m standing beside a stranger in a bar. Or like a prey animal alone on the winter plains.

  We think we’re safe, speaking through software. But we’re not. We’ve already let them in.

  ColbyJack: Yum

  Wind tugs a curtain, rough as a pair of hands on a boy’s hips. Waiting for a response, trying not to get too excited—plenty of conversations progress to this point only to fizzle out when one’s correspondent gets a better offer—I head for the bathroom.

  After peeing—an awkward affair, semi-erect—I stop at the window and breathe deeply. The city is so big. So many people are awake in it. So many monsters. So much harm can befall me.

  Not that this is specific to the city. It’d been the same back home, looking out to where farmland ran aground against pine forests. All of it just as crowded with monsters.

  Waiting for me when I get back to my phone, that happiest of messages: Album Unlocked.

  First photo: Candy Boii naked and hairy in a darkened hallway somewhere. Mouth slack with what looks like hunger.

  Second photo: a human male, extremely dead. Headless; impeccable pecs; three lovely star tattoos; a black cavity wide open below the rib cage. Arms folded in; fingers curled oddly gracefully. Grasping nothingness.

  Third photo: Candy Boii standing between two pine trees, pointing at three letters carved into one.

  Fourth photo: a selfie of Candy Boii fucking some fit thing—impeccable pecs; extremely alive; three star tattoos on his side.

  What the fuck dude, I want to type. You sick fucking fuck, I try to say.

  Candy Boii: You like

  My fingers freeze, unable to tap a single letter.

  Candy Boii: Come get some of this