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

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 Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Queens. Places where honest people hang out and where he doesn’t make friends with anyone. | © 2024 by Mark Galarrita. Narrated by Annette Oliveira. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Shannon Scott. Narrated by Annette Oliveira. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Catherine Tobler. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 ear on the thickened tongue of regret. “Muniza,” my husband says, eyes on the road. “Your skin is slipping.” | © 2024 by Fatima Taqvi. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. | © 2024 by Oyedotun Damilola Muees. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 a pallet of Captain Chompberry cereal, or twenty cartons of stolen Lithuanian cigarettes. | © 2024 by Keith Rosson. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 from the anthology for NIGHTMARE's listeners. So please enjoy "The Most Strongest Obeah Woman of the World" by Nalo Hopkinson, read by Robin Miles. To learn more about the book, visit johnjosephadams.com/OTS. This audio has been provided courtesy of...

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 megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 closer to the orange-red clay and closed her eyes. | © 2024 by H.B. Menendez. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. | © 2024 by Jessica Luke Garcia. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 heavy. | © 2024 by George Sandison. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 with history and ancestry, but still found sacrilegious. How does one reconcile that? | © 2024 by Somto Ihezue. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, without much warning, a body will fall from the chute and tumble through the air. | © 2024 by Andrew Stover. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My little brother once chased me through the house with an ax. He was joking, mostly. But it certainly didn’t feel like a joke at the time. He plunged forward with a guttural battle cry at the start of the chase. His face sanguine, veins pulsing with rushing blood. Through his anger, he still had enough control to throw in creepy one-liners. I don’t have a clear memory of what he said. Some insult à la Freddy or Ghostface? A classic along the lines of “I’m going to get you little girl”?...

Pregnancy is an infestation. A hidden invasion. An invisible operative sneaks inside you, planting a package of foreign genetic material and forcing you to replicate it trillions of times. Soon, your hostage cell floats down your fallopian tube to the womb to feed on the blood-bed of your uterine lining like a vicious little tick. | © 2024 R.A. Busby. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Western texts date the discovery of vagina dentata to 1800 BCE, to the Kahun Gynaecological Papyrus, the oldest medical text in the world. Misalignment of the lower jaw is detailed, for which regular application of date oil is recommended. | © 2023 Ashlee Lhamon. Narrated by Tina Connolly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tuesday, June 7, 2022 14:02 GMT. There is movement on the pathway for the first time in 113 days, six hours, four minutes, and five seconds. My motion sensitive cameras flicker on. I see Maker. Maker is not alone. | © 2023 by Lynette S. Hoag. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even before my son was born, my village had made of me a black sheep. When I was young, I would slither between the grasp of the Elders and flitter into the jungle unabated. I would storm past the hills of fire ants to leap atop the trunks of fallen trees before catching ahold of a veritable vine like some kind of red-assed macaco. I did not see the forest for all its dangers then—the poison-skinned amphibians, the venomous vipers. | © 2023 by Woody Dismukes. Narrated by Roxanne...

Once upon a time, there was you and there was Jonah. “Jonah!” you would call out. “Jonah, it’s me! Let me in!” But he’d never let you in. Before you turned ten, the inside of Jonah’s room remained as opaque as the inside of his thoughts. And he would always, always make you wait. You’d stand there, bouncing on your toes. | © 2023 by Sharang Biswas. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki & Terence Taylor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dear Andy: The day I was arrested, someone bought the winning Powerball lottery ticket that was worth 1.2 billion dollars. I remember dreaming what I would have done if I had won. You might not believe me, but I’m being serious here. © 2023 by David Janisch | Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know the one about the Gun. The Gun goes where it wants to. On Thursday morning just after recess, the Gun will walk through the front doors of Thurman Elementary, and it won’t sign in at the front office or wear a visitor’s badge. © 2023 by Rachael K. Jones | Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It felt a little like f*****g. Reminded Magdalene of the first time she’d ever let a boy get a hand up her skirt, long before Ben but he didn’t know that, she wore white on her wedding day. Couldn’t even remember his name, that boy, just that he’d died in The War. | © 2023 by Donyae Coles. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices