DAY 23 OF ANNOUNCING! Table of Contents for: +HORROR LIBRARY+ Volume 6

I’ll be unhurriedly posting all contributors here, one-a-day, to reveal the T.O.C. for this latest anthology volume that I edited for +HORROR LIBRARY+, to be published by Farolight Publishing (Cutting Block Books) in April, 2017.

DAY 23 of 27: Ahna Wayne Aposhian

1. JG Faherty presents “The H Train”
2. Edward M. Erdelac presents “Hear The Eagle Scream”
3. Rebecca J. Allred presents “Mother’s Mouth, Full of Dirt”
4. Jay Caselberg presents “The Ride”
5. John M. Floyd presents “The Red-Eye to Boston”
6. Tom Johnstone presents “Oldstone Gardens”
7. Bentley Little presents “The Plumber”
8. Darren O. Godfrey presents “D.U.I.”
9. Carole Johnstone presents “Better You Believe”
10. David Tallerman presents “Casualty of Peace”
11. Kathryn E. McGee presents “The Creek Keepers’ Lodge”
12. Jeffrey Ford presents “Five Pointed Spell”
13. Sean Eads presents “Predestination’s a Bitch”
14. Dean H. Wild presents “The Gaff”
15. Stephanie Bedwell-Grime presents “The Night Truck”
16. C. Michael Cook presents “The Night Crier”
17. Josh Rountree presents “Snowfather”
18. Jayani C. Senanayake presents “Kalu Kumaraya (My Dark Prince)”
19. Marc E. Fitch presents “The Starry Crown”
20. Connor de Bruler presents “Il Mostro”
21. Raymond Little presents “Elsa and I”
22. Lucas Pederson presents “We Were Monsters”
23. Ahna Wayne Aposhian presents “Old Hag”

EXCERPT:

She comes at night, when the street lamps are golden orbs in the gloom and the sky is the livid color of our insides.

Colossal, leviathan, she comes for me, loping through the streets on legs as tall as mountains. The shadows at her feet are black wolves with searing breath and eyes that eat light, fear made flesh. Hunters, trackers, they advance. They lead her to me. The wolves’ hot saliva drips onto my breasts.

She shrinks down to slink through my window, folding in upon herself a thousand times over. There is the crunch of glass, a creak of floorboards.

She sits on my bed and watches me. Though her face is an empty sucking hole, I know she watches me.

Old Hag, night terror, the pavor nocturnus. Paralysis in a suffocating black shroud. Night terrors are as old as dreams. In Newfoundland you are hag rid: ridden by the hag. In China it is pinyin, a ghost pressing on your body. Turkish folklore describes it as a dark assailant come to crush you in the night.

It wasn’t always like this; I didn’t live with the hag in my head, lying in wait for me at the end of the day… 

— Old Hag by Ahna Wayne Aposhian

ABOUT: Ahna Wayne Aposhian

Ahna Wayne Aposhian’s short fiction has appeared in journals and magazines such as The Cliffhanger, Add Verb, Subtext, and The First Line. A Boston native, she lives in Somerville and works as the print editor for Pangyrus, a Cambridge-based literary magazine. She is currently working on an absurdist hardboiled crime piece.