The Dread Machine, Issue 3.2

By Alin Walker

IN THIS ISSUE OF THE DREAD MACHINE...

Go west and weird, join the Goth Girls' Gun Gang, explore the bottom of the Mariana Trench, learn what cicadas taste like, hide from the corporate warlords, and sew your fractured self together.

Climb to the top of the pyramid scheme, find the joy in devouring, and save your stup

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Dread Machine
• Release date: Jul 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781957849140

Book preview

The Dread Machine

Issue 3.2

Alin Walker, Monica Louzon, Timothy Burkhardt

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The Dread Machine

Copyright © 2023 by The Dread Machine

All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Authors retain the rights to their contributions.

ISSN APPL100002727

ISBN 978-1-957849-13-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-957849-14-0 (Epub)

Characters and events in this magazine are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Edited by Alin Walker, Monica Louzon, and Timothy Burkhardt.

Cover by Yorgos Cotronis.

Published by The Dread Machine

https://www.thedreadmachine.com

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Acknowledgments

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Contents

1.Go West and Weird, Young Woman

1. Gretchen Tessmer

2.Grocery Story

2. Chelsea Sutton

3.#BloodBossBabes

3. Rachel Kolar

4.The Innocent Jar

4. Nathaniel Lee

5.Old Mother Gnome

5. Avra Margariti

6.Brimstone and Marmalade

6. Aaron Corwin

7.Gemini

7. Sophie Greenwood

8.Where is Daniel DeSoto?

8. Andrew Kozma

9.To Dust

9. Cassie E. Brown

10.Grams

10. Nicholas Jay

11.Insectivore

11. Andrew Kozma

12.Merlot

12. Jordan Hirsch

13.Pick a Door

13. B. Garden

14.DreamBlastic™ Stimulating White Noise Boost Your Productivity Lucid Dreams Night Light Rotating Lamp - ★★★★★

14. Hazelle Lerum

15.Under Pressure

15. R. L. Meza

16.Sitting the Month

16. Wang Cai-Ying & L. Acadia

17.What We Hold On To

17. Hannah Greer

18.They Are the Martians

18. John Philip Johnson

19.Grease Spatter

19. Jason P. Burnham

20.The Goth Girls' Gun Gang

20. Marisca Pichette

21.Summaries and Content Warnings

22.About Us

Go West and Weird, Young Woman

Gretchen Tessmer

Shackle-Heart, the intrepid explorer

took a young wife

(at the time, she was willing)

she thought she’d see the sights

in a vast country of vaulted sky

and shimmering starlight

but soon, the air turned noxious

and someone plucked a cello string

so ominously

echoing off red mesas

resonating in salt flats

the horses were spooked

by prairie grass

sparse as it was

s

t

o e

i o u o n

t d p n d

but Shackle-Heart was stubborn

and said, "no,

let’s keep going"

while his wife cursed the very hour he was born

until they were both weathered out

beyond speaking, trudging

in cirrus clouds of desert dust

they lost the trail and the horses

hitching the wagon

to a thirsty landscape, pockmarked by comets

and worlds colliding

death happened, as these things do

Shackle-Heart was buried with little ceremony

in the Year of Our Lord 1872

(she dug that hole with kitchen forks and a butter knife)

and all this was followed by

an unlikely, untimely

alien landing—

a glittering band of colored lights

a violin screeeeeeeech of sound

sure, she’d wanted to see the sights

but this was all just…

too much, too soon

rising up from that grave

Shackle-Heart’s wife was wild-eyed

chasing those spacemen off with a spoon—

"Red Devil take my husband

and Red Devil take you!"

About Gretchen Tessmer

Gretchen Tessmer is a writer/attorney based in the U.S.-Canadian borderlands. She writes both short fiction and poetry (so much poetry), with work appearing in over fifty publications, including Nature, Strange Horizons, Bourbon Penn, F&SF and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart, Rhysling and Dwarf Stars awards.

Grocery Story

Chelsea Sutton

So, I’m trying to arrange the entirely fucking lackluster produce situation at New Day Foods while Lee mops the floor around me, though he seems to be pushing the dirt back and forth more than anything, rearranging the black gunk that used to be lint or hair or flecks of vegetable skin from one crack in the tile to another.

The bosses gave me crates of just-shy-of-mushy tomatoes and bananas and lettuce to arrange in some artful manner. Artful is the word they used. They told me to arrange the produce in such a way that any customer might be compelled to pick up tomatoes, bananas, and lettuce. Make them decide, shit, I need all three of those, this is what I’d been looking for my whole life.

So, I’m looking through the dining room window, right? says Lee. He’s been talking, I realize, and I should pay attention. I’m a great multitasker. I’m great at juggling fucking thoughts, man, the fucking tasks at hand.

Wait you’re doing what? I say.

I’m looking through the dining room window. I’m hiding pretty good. I’m good at hiding, says Lee.

His hair looks stringy today, more than usual, almost like he collected the floor gunk and plopped that shit on his head, then sprayed it with some of that sea salt hair stuff for the wind-swept look. Hell, maybe he stood on a cliff over the ocean as part of his morning routine, I don’t know what Lee does.

You are very good at hiding. I’m imagining Lee’s stringy head all silhouetted in some stranger’s living room window and I get the chills.

Thank you, says Lee.

Yeah, I say.

A banana enters the shopper’s life, the tomato complicates things, and lettuce wraps all that shit up in its calm and forgettable way. Everyone wants to be remembered, but not lettuce. No, that’s not how lettuce plays the game. We start with something sweet but generally disappointing—the banana. Yeah, the banana comes first and then you see the tomato and you realize that what you’re really missing is passion, man, passion that keeps life moving toward…the lettuce.

Shit, I don’t know what to do.

You don’t have to try so hard. This isn’t even your job, says Lee. Sandra does the displays.

Yeah, well, if Sandra wanted to keep this job, she shoundn’ta disappeared, I say.

Technically, Lee continues, it should be Billy’s job when Sandra is gone, but he also disappeared.

What’s your fucking point, Lee?

The bosses took me aside at the start of my shift and said Hey Sammy, you took Psych in high school, you should know how to manipulate these people, move our shit into people’s carts. So it’s my job now—moving this rotting shit out of here so the customers can deal with it. And customers are walking in so dead-eyed, so distracted these days, you gotta grab their attention.

My point is, I’m looking through the window, says Lee. And her kid, what’s his name, Kimbo? Clark? says Lee.

How the fuck should I know? I think I know the family Lee’s going on about. They almost always come through my lane at checkout. At least the woman does.

Kyle! It’s Kyle, says Lee. "Poor little Kyle. So, it’s dinnertime and they’re not even sitting at the table. And they got this beautiful table, like, gorgeous table. You know?"

I don’t pay much attention to tables. I swap the bananas and the lettuce and that feels better for a minute. Lee is mopping hard, like really pounding at the gunk near where we used to keep the peaches, when we got deliveries of peaches. Back when we got deliveries of fresh peaches on the regular. Back when we got deliveries of anything on the regular.

Well, it’s the most beautiful table you can imagine, Lee says. And it’s dinnertime and they’re not even sitting at it. Just little Kyle by himself, chomping away at some Coco Puffs, and what’s-her-name and her husband are wandering around, in and out of the room, arguing about something.

Not our business how they use their table.

It’s a waste, that’s all I’m saying.

I take a step back and look at the display. The tomato is so loud in all its red.

How does a tomato make you feel, Lee?

How does it make me feel?

Yeah, how does it make you feel?

Lee stares at the tomato. Nothing. Makes me feel nothing.

"If it had to make you feel something."

Makes me think of spaghetti, says Lee.

Okay.

And blood. Lots of blood, Lee says.

Fuck, I say.

Sorry Sammy. Lee starts mopping again.

The word blood is like a flash across my brain, and all of a sudden I’m thinking back to yesterday. I was getting gas on my way to work, and I go to use the bathroom. It was locked and had been locked for a while, so the clerk and I broke in to see what’s up, and there was a guy in there who’d died. I can’t say how, exactly. But there was blood everywhere, fucking—what’s the word?—tendrils of blood hanging off the walls. He’d been there most of the afternoon and no one noticed. And there was this smell in the room, I don’t even know how to describe it. But familiar. Like something from the back of the refrigerator.

And after I peed in the field behind the gas station, I sat in my car and just sorta stared into space. I mean, physically that’s what I was doing, but really my mind was on the body. On the blood. Anyway, I couldn’t sit there staring all damn day and wait for the cops. I couldn’t afford another late penalty.

So, I’m looking through the window, says Lee, and Kyle isn’t much of an eater. He’s as thin as a celery stick, so I just watch what’s-her-name and her husband—

Carol, I say.

What?

That’s her name, I think. Or Cathy. She wouldn’t be noteworthy except that she has a premium rewards card, and the bosses always require us to repeat the name of the premium rewards shopper that pops up on the screen. Thanks for being a New Day Foods loyal shopper, Carol. (Or Cathy.)

Connie? Lee is searching his brain.

Maybe. Maybe that. That sounds right.

You should know. You gotta pay attention, says Lee.

"I fucking