Litro157 Teaser by Litro Magazine

ISSUE 157

Nightmares

featuring Raquel Castro E.G. Cunningham Rhiannon Dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Averc Rosalind Goldsmith Francine Cunningham David Simpson

Cover art | Nigel Cooke

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#157 Nightmares / 2016 November table of contents 05

Contributors

Editor's letter

fiction

Last Night I Didn't Dream At All by Raquel Castro

Invisible Architecture by E.G.Cunningham

The Blackened Spell by Rhiannon D’averc

Sweet Marrow by Bethany Pope

Yellow Cake by Rosalind Goldsmith

Secrets Like Lead by Francine Cunningham

Summer by David Simpson

Cover Art

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CONTRIBUTORS Bethany Pope, is an award-winning writer. She

received her PhD from Aberystwyth University’s Creative Writing program, and her MA from the University of Wales Trinity St David. She has published five collections of poetry, including her latest, The Rag and Boneyard, which was published this month by Indigo Dreams. Her chapbook, Among The White Roots, will be released by Three Drops Press next autumn. Her first novel, Masque, was published by Seren this June. Rhiannon D’Averc, is based in the UK as a freelance non-fiction writer and photographer by day. By night, she writes speculative, dark, and dystopian fiction. She currently writes monthly pieces for Patreon supporters, along with video readings and other snippets. Two of her short stories have recently been released by Write Out Publishing. Francine Cunningham , is an Indigenous writer, Cree and Metis, originally from Calgary, Alberta. A recent graduate from The University of British Columbia’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. She also participated in the 2014 Indigenous Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada and in 2015 took part in a five-week writing residency as part of the Indigenous Arts program. Her fiction and poetry have previously been published in The Puritan, The Maynard, Echolocation Magazine, Hamilton Arts and Letters, The Quilliad, The Active Fiction Project and Nanoism. She came in second in the 2014 Our Story: Aboriginal Arts and Writing challenge. Rosalind Goldsmith is British-Canadian and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. She has written radio dramas and a documentary for CBC and a play for the Blyth Theatre Festival. She has also done translation/ adaptations of short stories by Felisberto Hernandez for CBC radio. She began writing short stories several years ago and has recently begun to submit her work. Her stories have appeared in the Danforth Review and the Quilliad.

6 E.G Cunningham, is the author of the chapbook

Apologetics (Finishing Line Press 2016) and the fulllength poetry collection Ex Domestica (C&R Press 2017). Her poetry, reviews, and creative nonfiction have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from The Nation, The Poetry Review, 3:AM Magazine, LUMINA, 111O, Poetry London, and other publications. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia in Athens. She is currently working on a novel about the suburban gothic. Raquel Castro, (Mexico City, 1976) is a writer, scriptwriter, professor and cultural promotor. She won the Gran Angular Young Adult Literature Prize, and has twice won the National Journalism Award as part of the team of the program Diálogos en confianza from OnceTV. She is the author of the novels Ojos llenos de sombra (SM/CONACULTA, 2012), Lejos de casa (El Arca Editorial, 2013), Exiliados (El Arca Editorial, 2014) & Dark Doll (Ediciones B, 2014). She writes about children's books in La Jornada Aguascalientes, the magazine Lee+ and at her own blog www.raxxie.com. (Photo credit Fabien Castro) David Simpson, studied Literature in Edinburgh and Manchester before spending two years teaching English in Athens. He is interested in European fiction and is currently working on a novel. Nigel Cooke is known for his unique and complex paintings which thematically explore the meeting point between creative labour, individual consciousness, art history, consumer culture and the natural world. Cooke's paintings are held in major international collections, including Tate, London; British Council, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Editor's letter Dear Reader, It’s that time of the year the leaves are turning brown and the nights are drawing in. It’s cold and it’s raining, it’s nearly Halloween. Celebrated the world over, Halloween has long moved on from the childhood holiday of begging for candy to include adult celebration of costume role-playing. There are now theme parks, festivals all dedicated to it’s celebration—it’s even become its own travel season with our cousins across the pond. The perfect time then to turn our pages to all things Nightmares! Nightmares are vividly realistic, disturbing dreams that rattle you awake from a deep sleep. They often set your heart pounding from fear. Nightmares come from fears, fear bights in your stomach and grips your heart. An emotion we tend to do our best to sidestep.

Yet across the globe and through history people have been drawn to stories designed to do just that, give us nightmares. So why the appeal to scare ourselves through stories especially fiction? A suggestion is that like when we play, it allows us to prepare for possible threatening situations from a relatively safe position. I’m sure many of you have thought about encounters with a zombie—No? Well next you're watching that zombie movie pay attention you may just learn ways of coping with a zombie attack! Clearly chances of said encounter is as realistic as me donning a tutu outfit for Halloween. But despite all it’s fantastical aspects— successful horror fiction is usually realistic in its portrayals of human psychology and

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relationships. And I guess that’s where horror matters. When we can learn something. Our cover artist this month is Nigel Cooke, his paintings carry a sense of mystery, with an implied menace. There’s a feeling of an impending apocalypse on the painting’s edges. We open the issue with a piece of flash Last Night I Didn’t Dream at All, by Mexican writer Raquel Castro translated by Lawrence Schimel, in this story dreams become part of a young girls reality. In E. G Cunningham’s Invisible Architecture, life is just one long Nightmare. Rhiannon D’Averc, gives us a piece of nightmarish magic, with her story The Blackened Spell.

ed by a Succubus—I hope this is what Donald Trump’s dreams are made of—then again he might enjoy it too much! Secrets Like Lead, by Francine Cunningham is told in the second person will put you in a nightmare like haze. We close the issue with David Simpson’s Summer, a surreal tale told in the Bruno Schulz vein—his opening line’s drew me straight into his tale: “Though most of us loved our parents, we could not help but doubt them and suspect their motives and methods. “ Happy Halloween!

Bethany Pope’s erotically charged Sweet Marrow, is a piece of prose poem narrat-

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Editor-in-Chief

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FICTION

Last Night I Didn't Dream at All

Raquel Castro, translated into English from Mexican by Lawrence Schimel

Dreams become part of a young girls reality.

Every morning, Papa wakes Anameli with a kiss and asks her what she dreamed. "I dreamed that a ship sailed through the window of my bedroom and hid beneath my bed..." "I was in a field and some wolves dressed as Little Red Riding Hood danced the Hokey Pokey with me..." "There was an enchanted castle inside the closet and a ghost lived there but he was afraid of a sweater which was really a witch..." "An alien appeared with the face of a lion and took me to the planet of the giant cats..." "Aunt Lola gave me a bicycle that turned into a giant grasshopper and instead of rolling, took off in leaps up into the sky, but I wasn't afraid at all..." When Anameli recounts her dreams, no matter how strange they are, Papa only smiles and is calm. But other times Papa is very worried! That's when Anameli answers him, "Nothing, Papi. Last night I didn't dream at all." It's not that it is bad not to dream, or rather, to not remember what we dream (because whenever we sleep, we dream). Instead, whenever Anameli doesn't remember her dreams, chaos ensues. For example, one day Anameli says: "Nothing, Papi. I didn't dream even a little bit." She gets out of bed, looks around her and... "And Chirino? Where is Chirino?" she asks, on the verge of tears. Nobody knows who Chirino is. "Why, he's my little dog, the one I've had since I was born, who knows how to shake hands and to sing in English!" And Papa has to explain to her that she has never had any other pet aside from Tatito Timoteo, the cat. And that dogs don't sing in English, or in any other language either.

***

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FICTION

Invisible Architecture

E.G. Cunningham

Life is just one long Nightmare.

Dusk snowed into evening. Outside, the neighbor’s bicycle churned the sidewalk. Corinne Fiske turned in bed and listened to its bric-a-brac chew. Dead dead was preferable to pretend living. The sun stumbled into her room, made blood of the walls and carpet. To forget the suburban ghost, needlemouse. If she’d had energy, she’d have stood by the window. To have pictured death doubled: the girl forgotten in the glass. Who was not solving equations. Who was searching for a better way to hide herself. She hoped she’d be dead before Frank or Louise came knocking. Premature or not soon enough. Barely a knock at all so why bother. Knuckles tapping, the hallway light pooling. And why always half in the doorway like that. She turned onto her back and felt among the bedcovers for the plastic cap. Want to keep this going, flower mouth. There it was, under the sheet. Pills spilled out. Corinne dropped them two by two and took a drink of water from the night table glass. What would it be like, she wondered. Cold light over a drive to some music. Streetlamps shuttering a vest of what could have been. No matter, she thought. Another four dropped in. Put on the autumn soundtrack. There was knocking, the hallway light pooled in. Her father shadowed the threshold. Evening fell altogether. She knew without looking how his arms were crossed. —What are you lying there for? Frank said. Get up. She answered in a strange voice. —No? he said. Like hell you’re not. The doorbell rang, setting off the dog. She listened as her mother’s heels tap-tapped the parquet floor. The sound of the lock turning, the creak of hinges, the voices at once. —My God, her mother said, don’t you all look wonderful. A draught made its way through the house. Corinne closed her eyes. —Corinne, Frank hissed. Get your ass up. Now. —I’m not getting up. She held out the bottle. —I took these. Her father’s face took offense at the plastic. She kept her arm outstretched. Perfume from the hallway, and the rattle of Aunt Sarah’s voice, already thick with its opiate coat. The room’s paint streaked around them. She watched as anger called the earthworm to surface on Frank’s forehead. The familiar vein, the familiar beetroot face. —You stay there, he said. I’m getting your mother. The air was the air again. When she was dead would there be walls, a ceiling? Does death lament its translocation? How they presented each other like sirens, warning: your mother, your father. Lighthouses in good weather: what use.

FICTION

The Blackened Spell

Rhiannon D’averc

A piece of nightmarish magic.

She was 16 years old. Her mother had named her February, and she bore the name with a kind of petulant grace. She was a winter child, cold white skin and black hair, and she wore it like any other teenager. Her friends called her Feb. She had friends, but since the big move, only a few of them. It was hard to set up life again in a new place, with hundreds of miles between you and happy families. Hard to start again at a high school where the rest of the kids had been together for years already. That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was Ray, or as she had come to think of him, I’m Not Trying To Replace Your Father. It was a Native American name. Her mother was She Who Sleeps Around. February almost wished her mother had not settled for Ray, had continued to sleep with as many men as she wanted to. Well, really, she wished her parents had never broken up in the first place, and that her Dad wasn’t hundreds of miles away back in their old town. But calling back the past was something that couldn’t be done. She liked to walk around the block in black boots with a black coat pulled tightly over her thin shoulder blades, not for any reason other than to be walking. There wasn’t much in the way of green life here, no fields to crunch under her boots, so she settled for pavement instead. The first time Ray came to her, her mother was out with friends from work. Had to stay in a hotel up in the centre of town, something about everyone else doing it and staying out late and not waking everyone up. It was some kind of function that she acted like she was forced to attend. February could read her mother well and knew she was looking forward to standing on some sticky dancefloor in a cocktail dress and five-inch heels, pretending she was still twenty years old and not a mother. Fine. February didn’t mind. She minded Ray. He was old and stank of stale cigarette smoke, yellow fingernails snatching at her. He was old in the kind of way that her mother could never be. Spreading out at the middle with age and greying at the temples. He wore stubble on his face all week long, even right after he had shaved. It was black and rough, eliciting a red mark from her face where it rubbed. Each hair was like a tiny needle, poking out of his skin to inject her with poison.

FICTION

Sweet Marrow

Bethany Pope

An erotically charged piece of prose narrated by a Succubus.

Real things are often painful. Things with heft can bruise tender meat. I've tried so hard not to hurt him, covering my pitted steel core with soft peach flesh so that he can roll his weight onto me in the night and not be cut. I am careful, very, but even so I need a new lover every few years. Human men wear out so quickly; their gold tarnishes grey and their muscles slacken fast beneath their skins, which pucker into wattles spreading out from the scrotum. This is the fate of every mortal, but it speeds up with us. In stories, we are always voracious; sharp-toothed, hollow-spined succubi who fuck men to bones, bedding them down, fast and brutal, in a fat drift of leaves. This is only parttrue, and we aren't fuelled by malice. We don't do it on purpose. We can wear backless dresses, smile openly, and (if we're careful) we can ensure that our lovers linger for years. We can make them happy. We do make them happy. Their joy, reflected back at us, is the closest we can come to having what humankind thinks of as a soul. My current lover is so beautiful; all honeygold hair and hard biceps. I like to watch him as he sleeps. He says that we are married, and I let him believe it. How could he know that those vows he made could never apply to me? I take him into me, gently, every night and it is sweet; like sucking marrow from a well-roasted bone. He keeps me fed and alive; I treasure him for it. Sometimes, the knowledge of what is coming keeps me awake. I slide out of our bed and walk into the bathroom. I lock the door, stand before the long, wall-bound mirror and let my mask drop. He would not love me, if he saw me like this, and that is what I use the sight of my own naked talons, my blood-edged feathers, to remind myself of. The fact that he can never really know me acts as a balm to sooth my inevitable grief. Without this knowledge I could be mourning for years.

FICTION

Yellowcake

Rosalind Goldsmith

If the moment feels right he will beat the daylights and the nightlights out of his beloveds...

Green bile hypes him up until he would look lovingly on the deepest sin. And he would mince words with meat cleavers, and hack about in his Gobi mind for some meaning of any fury-buried thing, whether vegetable, mineral or damned animal, god or goddess; in his mind he lives, searching. If the moment feels right he will beat the daylights and the nightlights out of his beloveds, and then gallon up his noxious fuming in rusted tanks, and mint coins of slander and puke; the fuck-wadded yellowcake stashed deepaway, as he fears the petty purview of even the most casual visitors. Hide it, hide it, cool and clammy in the downsinging earth, so no blindy eyes can see the loathing fumes that seethe and flicker there. Only a spark fusing, no clear intention yet. Not yet. Driven, bile-minded, ploughing inward, ever inward where brooding sepsis and fear root. In the begin years, dadadada flailed the thwacker at this tiny-aged boy and put the dread of slasher-kills in him, even then, at the mewling age of a tiny wolloped babe in harmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s way. It started then. It grew after, down the year-to-year, in basement silence, hatching out Guy Fawkesish plots and scribbling Gothic incendiaries in the dark. And now, so, now, now in this no-jesting moment, what could turn ever so easy on a wing flutter, given a kind word or two, does not. Does not, as no kind words come forth. Now, the ancient terror and acid-eating fear singes the Gobi of his mind and turns, spiraldusting, into whipperwhorls and tornadoes of hate. And he feels it deep in his ancestor bones and he loves it to the oblivion of love and he turns the yellowcake of it over and over again in his fisties, feeling he is well worn to it, well used to it, and the spinning whorls call to him oh so lovingly in aching harmonies and even cheeky-pie whistles.

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FICTION

Secrets Like Lead

Francine Cunningham

Told in the second person this story will put you in a nightmare like haze.

A man walks down the beach. The calm and perfect beach. Filled with calm and perfect people. Except they only look that way. Inside it’s different. Inside everyone is fucked. Messy and red. But these people, they’re laying out on bright coloured beach towels, smiling at each other, big gaped tooth smiles, and they’re all hiding the fucking red messy insides of who they are. Sunbathing instead their pale paunchy bodies. Bodies that have been hidden from the sun for seven months, now unleashed into the light. Into the minds and memories of all the other grinning, gaped toothed, pale, paunchy bodies. This man walking down the beach, he’s walking like someone with a secret. A secret like lead in his mind. His front pocket. Dragging down his body, each step further and further into the sand. Deeper and deeper until he can feel the oysters. With their small oyster bubbles tickling his toes. His secret pulling him along. Walking him along the shoreline. The surf thundering like whispers. The whispers driving him along. Just say this man with a secret, like lead in his front pocket, was someone you knew. A person from high school, maybe. From your shitty grey with the linoleum peeling high school. Where everything smelled like stale farts and ripe b.o. Where you sat in a class filled with people you loathed and who loathed you back. But having an urgent desire to fuck every single one of them anyhow, those loathsome people. That shitty school with the principle like melting butter. That man with the secret, he could be one of those loathsome kids you wanted to fuck. But soon, soon he’s going to be fucking everyone on this beach. He’s going to ram his cock inside everyone’s memories until they die. And even then, if memories are what we take with us, he’s going to continue fucking everyone. His cock deep inside the pink bloody mess of everyone’s mind. And think, people probably dreamed of this man back in high school, when he still had pimples and wore hand me down t-shirts. Of him taking them in the middle of the grey cracked linoleum in the center of the cafeteria. Him, all over them. And now, he’s going to be fucking everyone forever. Because this man, who no longer wears hand me down d.a.r.e t-shirts, but instead wears black button ups that choke his neck, he needs to share his secret. As soon he finds the perfect rock, the stillest tide pool, the happiest family to stand in front of, he’s going to pull out his secret and ram it into your brain, into everyone’s brain. And orgy for eternity.

FICTION

Summer

David Simpson

A surreal tale told in the Bruno Schulz vein.

Though most of us loved our parents, we could not help but doubt them and suspect their motives and methods. Undoubtedly we were ignorant, but we knew we were ignorant, we knew that there were truths to be learned and that our parents stood in the way, their eyes ever watchful for signs that we were close to uncovering hidden knowledge or learning the secrets of their laws. If we were not so young it might have looked like cultish behaviour, large groups of believers gathering in secret dens at appointed hours to discuss our liberation, but we could never agree on a plan of action, much less a creed or a manifesto. The adults were the problem, this much we agreed, and without any idea of what shape the truth took, where it was secreted, or what revelations it contained, the only solution anyone could conceive of was terminal; a world entirely our own, free of adults. Some of the more fervent acolytes proselytised for this permanent transition, such was their faith in the emancipatory capabilities of the world without adults, though the means for attaining such a world were too disturbing to allow their theories to flower into anything more than a marginal concern. Most of us hoped for a temporary metamorphosis, an early spring in which the new possibilities would briefly bloom before the intolerant winter of our parents fought back and we were forced to return to the comfort of their homes, the warmth of their fires, whilst the harsh cold outside murdered our hopes and visions with all their attendant responsibilities. This was, after all, what the agitators could never understand: much as we desired the truth, we were also fearful of the demands that truth would place upon us. I was certain that the answer lay in the night time. It was the dark hours that bewitched my imagination, the hours that were forbidden to me and over which my parents stood guard. Daylight held no mysteries, I knew it inside out, it was pure structure, the architecture of tedium. This was the time that had been designated me by the adults and I felt the limits of this space heavily, being able to navigate through it only in ways that had been predetermined. Though my knowledge of the night was meagre, I imagined it to be the time of chaos; any time in which I was forbidden was a time in which no plans had been made for me. There were two things that prevented my access to the night, the first being my parents who insisted I observed the strictest law of all, a law that was non-negotiable and to which my

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