Nightmare Magazine 59: August 2017

NIGHTMARE is an online horror and dark fantasy magazine. In NIGHTMARE's pages, you will find all kinds of horror fiction, from zombie stories and haunted house tales, to visceral psychological horror.
This month, we have original fiction from James Rabb ("The Devil of Rue Moret") and Nick Mamatas (" The Spook School"), along with reprints by V.H. Leslie ("Senbazuru") and Nalo Hopkinson ("Shift"). We also have Gemma Files bringing us the latest installment of our column on horror, "The H Word," plus author spotlights with our authors, a showcase on our cover artist, and a fiction review from Terence Taylor.
"The boy grew up in the tangle of the bayou, in a township known as Rue Moret. His mother had married a farmhand, but his father wasn’t the same man. The boy told himself that these things happen when life loses its luster and we create complications to bear it. He wore a small woven hat wherever he went, and he went many places for a boy of his age. He walked to school most days, alone because his half-sister had been lost in childbirth. The boy still spoke to her, believing if she’d lived that they might have walked alone together, past the tupelos and the cypress groves, and she would greet him every day after class with a magnolia blossom from the tree outside the second grade annex, and only she would know he was failing math because of Virgine Beuze, who sat in front of him and was far more interesting. She would’ve worn a hat like his—his grandmother had stitched it for him when she was alive, and surely she would have made his sister one to match. But his sister was still dead, and he was still walking alone, past the tupelos and the cypress groves. It was preferable to the closet, where the mildew crept into his clothes and he could see through the slats, see his mother and his father, who wasn’t the man she’d married. She never took off the ring, and he never asked her to, and since the boy was not scolded for being late, only for being present, he always took his time returning home."