Frightmares: A Fistful of Flash Fiction Horror Read Online Free PDF Page B

pouches, eight pieces of that cheap pink gum they stuff into piñatas and a nearly empty bottle of yellow mustard.
    It’s hard not to laugh at the situation I’m in, but at the same time it’s hard not to cry over the situations I’ve had to endure getting here. To say that I’ve been to hell and back, hanging on by the seat of my pants is an understatement. I’ve seen things no one should have to witness . . . been forced to do things that no man should ever have to experience. I’ve somehow managed to survive during a time when the odds against survival seemed practically insurmountable.
    I somehow managed to survive the onslaught . . . only to box myself into a cold, damp corner with no means of escape. Eighty square feet of hard reality slaps me in the face.
    The sound of the door creaking as it strains to hold up against a horde of determined creatures isn’t nearly as unsettling as the sound the creaking hinges make as they slowly give away. The eerie screech of the metal doorjamb twisting against the burgeoning mass on the opposite side makes me squeeze Rex tightly, but it’s the sound of the screws in the hinges grinding against the jamb as the door gives way that makes me whimper and shake.
    This is it.
    All I can think about is how I’m not ready to go.
    I’m just not ready. And in that final moment before the lights go out and I cease to be, it hits me:
    “Who’s going to take care of Rex?”
    Jason Burum is a fiction writer who loves giving his readers a thorough creeping with his stories. Since the age of eleven he’s spent his days writing stories of fear and terror for whomever he could convince to read them. He resides in Oakland with his wife and two children.

A JURY OF HIS PEERS
     
    ANDREW ALFORD
     
    The snap that fried him was not that of Exhibit A: the tracks he’d chained her to, smeared with the crimson path of her body.
    Nor was it B, that looked like a mannequin’s arm draped over an iron rail, as over a porcelain tub.
    Exhibit C was her bra, strapped to a torso half-blackened at impact.
    Exhibit D showed her head and face: sculpture out of not-enough clay.
    Neither of these did him in.
    It was not even the passengers’ accompanying testimony about the rumbling underfoot of someone becoming something, “like basketballs trapped beneath the rail-car floors.”
    The photograph that doomed him he’d taken himself. As it passed among the jurors hand to hand, a woman vomited, a man swooned. Twelve times his trophy photo brought the girl together again for them in her last moment alive. Her face still whole, her eyes still focused—looking right at them but recognizing only him.
    It made murderers of them all.
    Andrew Alford was born and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey. You can find more of his short fiction in Space and Time Magazine and Supernatural Tales , and hopefully digging their way up out of several other slush piles.

I LIVE IN YOUR CUPBOARD
     
    SANTIAGO EXIMENO
     
    I live in your cupboard, hidden among your clothes. I sleep during daytime, one of my heads leaning onto your old slippers, my body draped over a plastic hanger. At night I wake up and spy on you from the inside, through the crack of the door your mother leaves open. I know you know I live here, I know you’ve told your parents a lot of times.
    I hate you just for that.
    For you discovered me.
    I’d like to go out and tear you to pieces with my teeth, to make you pay what you owe me for your betrayal.
    But I won’t do it. I hide among your clothes and wait, as I always did, suffering my fear in silence.
    Because I’m not lurking; I’m skulking.
    I’m skulking from the monster that lives under your bed.
    Santiago Eximeno (Spain, 1973) has published (in Spanish) several horror/dark fantasy books like Bebés Jugando con Cuchillos (Grupo AJEC, 2008) or Capriccio (23 Escalones, 2010). He has received four Ignotus Award (a national sci-fi/horror/fantasy award in Spain) for Best Short Story and Best