We are not where we are buried. We are where they kept us. We float now, and see the low building in the woods from above, the long plates of rusted metal, the desiccated grass bundling against the sides like a pyre, the orb spider poised over

Grottmata

4 days ago 58m 24s

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

Penis Secrets of the Anunnaki

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

MAMMOTH

Jun 5th, 2024 24m 36s

The Southern Bells

May 29th, 2024 7m 13s

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 a

like blood on the mouths of death

May 22nd, 2024 23m 46s

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/

Solve This One, Mrs. Miller

May 15th, 2024 15m 7s

An Offering from the Void

May 9th, 2024 39m 37s

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 go

Ensabled Night

Apr 24th, 2024 5m 40s

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

Backseat Kiss

Apr 17th, 2024 37m 34s

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 Rudnic

There are three children jumping over a can outside a bodega

Apr 10th, 2024 16m 15s

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 Que

My Containment

Apr 3rd, 2024 41m 26s

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 Sha

The Let Go

Mar 27th, 2024 5m 26s

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

Our Very Best Selves!

Mar 22nd, 2024 29m 32s

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

A Guide to Camping in the Forest

Mar 13th, 2024 10m 34s

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. |

Second Deaths

Mar 6th, 2024 46m 50s

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

The Most Strongest Obeah Woman of the World

Mar 1st, 2024 1h 7m

John Joseph Adams here, publisher of NIGHTMARE. I recently had the honor and great pleasure of collaborating with Jordan Peele to edit the anthology OUT THERE SCREAMING: An Anthology of New Black Horror, and I'm pleased to present this story fr

The Mourning of Sam Lillow, the Gardener

Feb 28th, 2024 6m 35s

curses take root from root to root / is what they said / when they came for the tree /the tree that had shaded her since she was a baby | © 2024 by Adriana C. Grigore. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap

Preamble to the Death of a Small God

Feb 21st, 2024 36m 44s

Her fingers, then, had folded around the clay, her mind entranced. Her fingers traced the soft wetness, pressed gently, pressed firmly, bent, rolled, pulled, pushed. The clay yielded to her rough-skinned hands like a willing lover. She had bent

First Girls

Feb 14th, 2024 10m 22s

I wouldn't survive a slasher film. When the killer comes to town and starts popping off fresh-faced coeds, I’d eat it before we hit Act II. I have a great affection for those initial victims who seem to linger hauntingly over the narrative. | ©

The Cut Cares Not for the Flesh

Feb 7th, 2024 49m 14s

As Annie slips into the club, she grins at Robert, all trepidation and excitement. She hardly disturbs the velvet curtains with her passing, so their weight surprises him. He pushes at the fabric to force his way in. The atmosphere is muggy and

In Our Bodies, There is Heat

Jan 31st, 2024 7m 7s

I was inspired by my body, and bodies in general. What it means for a body to exist in spaces that find it unworthy, unholy. And how sometimes, we also have to carry our ancestry, our birthplace, in these very bodies. So we have bodies weighted

The Forgetter

Jan 17th, 2024 28m 33s

I work in a tall brick room with peaked cathedral ceilings. At one end of the room there is a brick-lined chute, chimneylike, that opens up out of the ceiling seventy-five or a hundred feet above a yawning pit in the floor. Every so often, with