Nightmare Magazine 62: November 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 Will Ludwigsen ("The Zodiac Walks on the Moon") and Karin Lowachee ("The Summer Mask"), along with reprints by Molly Tanzer ("Mysterium Tremendum") and Jayaprakash Satyamurthy ("My Saints Are Down"). In the latest installment of our column on horror, "The H Word," author Emily Suvada chews on the nature of cannibalism. We've also got author spotlights with our authors and our quarterly book review column from Terence Taylor.
"I hadn’t planned to write my first letter until I’d developed the proper voice and taken at least twelve or thirteen victims, but I saw something extraordinary tonight and it has me thinking big things.
A man just—walked—on the Moon. I saw it right here on my mother’s awful television, as cloudy and grey as her left eye. A little man in a heavy white suit went down a ladder and he said that he was taking a small step for a man but a giant one for mankind. The news people helpfully put LIVE FROM THE MOON on the screen. I think they should have put GODDAM MOON there for good measure. Like the rest of my neighborhood, I went outside afterward. Some kids down the street set off firecrackers and there’s a little boy marching around in long slow strides with a bucket on his head. Their parents are sitting out in lawn chairs with beer bottles heaped at their feet, staring up into space like there’s any hope of seeing the glint of that tiny lander. I understand the impulse to look up, though. To wonder. I wonder if there will be women on the Moon someday. They’ll have to be thin and pretty of course with all of that training, the kind who don’t look twice at the wrong men. What will they wear under their suits? Will their boots have heels? Will you see their flowing hair in their helmets or the curves of their breasts under the silver fabric like in all the movies? I wonder who will be the first to kill one. Will it be the timid geologist who only wanted her soft warmth on his narrow metal bunk? Will it be the strapping Mission Commander whose heroic seed cannot be wasted lest it blast a hole in the Lunar Module? Or maybe it will be the man no one ever sees with the wrench in his hand and the grease under his nails."