Nightmare Magazine 64: January 2018

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 Lori Selke ("A Head in a Box, or, Implications of Consciousness after Decapitation") and Vincent Michael Zito ("The Owner's Guide to Home Repair, Page 238: What to Do About Water Odor"), along with reprints by Halli Villegas ("The Family") and Lynda E. Rucker ("Different Angels"). We also have Gwendolyn Kiste bringing us the latest installment of our column on horror, "The H Word," plus author spotlights with our authors, and a feature interview with up-and-comer S.P. Miskowski.
"This is not about the movie.The movie that launched her career, where she played the pretty wife of a headstrong cop. Pretty, blonde, smart, convincing. Unhappy. The dutiful wife, killed, dismembered, beheaded. Just like the only other woman in the film, the fatal object of sin manifest. How ironic was it that The Actress first made such a strong cinematic impression with her portrayal of a character whose severed head does indeed end up in a packing crate in the middle of a field so that The Actor her boyfriend at the time can have a crisis of conscience? The Actress had the rest of her life to contemplate the irony. After all, she didn’t have anything else to do but think and speak. And blink. And occasionally wet her lips with the tip of her tongue.
And smile. She was already a practiced smiler. An expert. A professional. But this story is not about that box. There is no serial killer, no neat if bloody moral. It is just the ugly coincidence of fate that The Actress’s career was launched by a movie in which her head ends up in a box. Her first career, that is. Her second career was as a head in a box."