If Living Is Seeing I'm Holding My Breath: A Short Horror Story

By Sunny Moraine

Riley has not seen a single human face in longer than she can reckon. No faces—no eyes. Not if you want to survive. But Riley wants to look.

"If Living is Seeing I'm Holding My Breath" by Sunny Moraine is one of 27 short horror stories in Nightfire's audio anthology.

Come Join Us by the Fire Season 2 is the second installment of Nightfire's audio-only horror anthology, featuring a wide collection of short stories from emerging voices in the horror genre as well as longtime fan favorites. The collection showcases the breadth of talent writing in the horror genre today, with contributions from a wide range of genre luminaries including Laird Barron, Indrapramit Das, Shaun Hamill, Daniel M. Lavery, Matthew Lyons, T. Kingfisher, Seanan McGuire, Nibedita Sen, and Nightfire’s own Cassandra Khaw and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Feb 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781250799692

Sunny Moraine

SUNNY MORAINE is a writer of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and generally weird stuff, with stories published in outlets like Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, and Uncanny Magazine. A refugee from academia and the possessor of a PhD in sociology, Sunny also writes, narrates, and produces a serial horror drama podcast called Gone, and served as a writer on the Realm fiction podcast series The Shadow Files of Morgan Knox. They live near Washington, D.C in a house that may or may not be haunted with their husband and two cats.

Book preview

The third blackout of the week is sudden and expected.

Riley thinks it’s the third. But she long ago stopped trying to gauge time in terms of weeks and months and even years, so this is only an estimate, and not one she especially cares about. She’s resigned to the blackouts, and the patterns of her days render them no more than a minor inconvenience.

Her grocery deliveries still happen with sufficient reliability. The spoilage of a few things now and then is also no big deal. At some point she threw her cell phone into a creek and, along with it, an app that would have notified her if she was within fifty feet of another person—if they also had a phone, if they also had the app enabled. An act of sociotechnical faith. She wasn’t altogether certain why she threw the phone away; it had been a kind of fit, a moment she only vaguely remembered later, as if she had been drunk, which she hadn’t been. She only remembers feeling, in the whipping motion of her arm and the gleaming arc of the thing through the twilight, something terribly like a species of defiant, nihilistic