Tag Archives: supernatural

Issue #18: Nightlife

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When night falls, new worlds open up. The time after sunset is typically the domain of romance: dinner dates, cocktail flirtations, dancing as a prelude to going home together. Bad things, also, happen more easily under cover of darkness. Criminals prowl and monsters lurk. For Shooter’s Nightlife issue, many writers were drawn to tales of the latter, and so this edition ended up developing a pulsing vein of supernatural horror.

It also turned out to be a particularly strong edition for poetry. Featuring the work of ten poets (including the 2024 Shooter Poetry Competition winner, Maryah Converse, for her political “Web of Resistance”), the issue opens with two poems that capture something of the essence of the night: “as you light up” by Dilys Wyndham Thomas and “Shivering Out” by Paul atten Ash. (The latter takes the form of a “golden shovel”, plucking lines from Sylvia Plath’s “Full Fathom Five” and using each word at the end of each line in his poem: “You float near / As keeled ice-mountains / Of the north, to be steered clear / Of, not fathomed.”)

Partygoing – raves, gigs, midnight celebrations – feature in Miguel Cullen’s “Deep Mourning Dream”, Laurie Eaves’ “Ode to My Favourite Security Guard at Kentish Town Forum” and Warren Woessner’s “New Year’s Eve – Tribeca – 1984”, yet the euphoric antics are frequently laced with sadness, loneliness, or nostalgia. Casey Lawrence’s short story “The Hunt” also stalks this terrain, though with a delicious supernatural twist.

Sleep, of course, forms another obvious element of the nocturnal realm, along with one of slumber’s mortal enemies: offspring. In her poem “nightly rodeo”, Michelle Penn crafts a delightful lyric metaphor for this sort of challenge to sleep. Two prose pieces – the fictional “Acetaminophen” by Charles Cline and non-fiction “Sleepless Nights” by Laura Healy – arrive at the intersection of sleep and children, and take off in very different directions. “Zones”, a poem by Jeff Skinner, plays with the idea of counting sheep in different time zones around the world. In “Little Slices of Death”, another personal memoir, Lisa Simone Kingstone charts the impact of drug-induced insomnia upon her life during cancer treatment.

Two fiction writers, Ross Anderson and Harley Carnell, explore the devastating emotional and physical impacts of night-time shift work in “The Sleep of Reason Begets Monsters” and “Long Night” respectively, about suicide hotline workers and food delivery drivers. Jenny Danes, in “Case History”, and Gillian Fielder in “Standing on the Bridge” evoke similarly resonant, poignant scenes of confusion and distress in their poems.

For the most part, the writing in the Nightlife issue conjures states of fear and menace, loneliness and struggle, but two prose pieces also inject joy and humour. Craig Aitchison shares his fascination with bats in “Small Packages of Delight”, while J D Strunk’s “Clean Kill” depicts a midlife-crisis camping trip gone wrong with comic suspense.

And yet, even there, fear still plays a part – so if you tend to be spooked by the shadowy forces of darkness, perhaps best to enjoy Shooter’s Nightlife issue as part of your sunlit breakfast reading.

To order a copy of the Nightlife issue, or any other edition, please visit the Subscriptions page.

Submissions open for “Nightlife” issue

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General submissions are now open for Shooter’s Spring/Summer 2024 issue, themed “Nightlife”.

Writers should send short stories and non-fiction of 2,000-6,000 words and/or up to three poems by the deadline of May 12th. Stories, essays, memoir and poetry should relate to nocturnal happenings: dating, working the night shift, crime, clubbing, dinner, sex, partying, witchcraft, ghosts, childbirth, insomnia, even nocturnal wildlife.

The theme is open to wide interpretation, but writers should adhere to the submission guidelines. Other opportunities currently open to writers include the 2024 Shooter Poetry Competition and Shooter Flash, which accepts entries on a rolling basis.

Shooter Flash: “Haunted” by Lucy Brighton

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I didn’t think I would be the kind of ghost that haunts people, but here I am. I still go to school every day like I did before. What else is there to do? I keep hoping I will meet some other ghosts to show me the ropes. No luck so far.

When I first rose from the spot where I’d fallen, I looked at the scene. A noose swung from a bare tree branch. I imagined people gathered around professing a love for me in death that they never showed in life. I imagined my mother, dressed in black of course, wailing at the senseless loss of it all. And I was sure there’d be a memorial Facebook page; there’d been one a few years ago when April, three years older than me, had died in a car crash. 

I waited three hours before I realised that nobody was coming. So, I went home. I walked past my mum, sitting on the sofa with her coffee cup full of whisky and fooling nobody. She said nothing. Obviously. 

When I woke the next morning, I logged onto Facebook, eager to see if my memorial page was up. It wasn’t. They probably haven’t found me yet, I thought. 

That was three days ago. I walk the quiet corridors of my school, almost empty now that everyone else is in lessons. Sometimes I go to class; sometimes I don’t. There doesn’t seem much point in learning anything. I can’t imagine ghosts have to take GCSEs. I think again how much I wish there was someone else like me I could talk to, who I could ask about these changes, maybe someone to hug me.

Nobody hugged me before the rope on the tree. Nobody raced to my rescue to talk me down, like they do on TV. It was a quiet affair; the only sound was the rustle of autumn leaves in the wind. 

“Watch out,” I shout as someone ploughs into me, almost knocking me over. Then I remember my situation and feel ridiculous. They can’t see or hear me, so what’s to stop them even walking straight through me? 

I don’t stay in school long today; it’s too hard watching the others at break time. Their laughter and togetherness wrenches at whatever constitutes a heart for a ghost. 

I don’t go home either. The last two nights have been insufferable. I sat on the same chair as always; Mum, saying nothing, drank her whisky and watched the soaps. She never even cries. Maybe it’s her way of coping, I tell myself. 

I head to the graveyard. I mean, seems apt for a ghost, right? I count the rows: twelve rows down, fifth grave along. I sit beside the grave and touch the headstone, surprised that it feels cold to my touch. 

“It’s me, Dad,” I say, then look around to see if he’s there. He would make the perfect ghost guide. We could be together again at last.

“It’s Sophie, Dad. I’m dead now too so you can show yourself.”

Nothing. 

I think it will probably take time for him to get to me from wherever he is. I didn’t notice any passage of time, personally: one minute I was climbing the tree with the noose around my neck and the next I was a ghost. Maybe Dad goes to work, like I go to school, out of habit, for something to do. I wouldn’t even know how to get there – which bus would I catch? No, I better wait here. 

I sit for a long time. There’s a brief flurry of activity around sunset when people seem to walk their dogs. Then silence. I shuffle around on the cold grass. 

I feel certain he will return here when it gets really late. I let the excitement fizz inside me like popping candy. I picture his strong arms and his curly rust hair. And mostly, I think of his smile. It’s been almost a year and the picture of him in my mind is fading a little but the smile is burned into my mind’s eye. I know he will look the same, not like some ghoul from a horror film, because I still do. I haven’t changed a bit.

There’s a rustle. I listen, desperate for the tread of his heavy boots. The sound grows, definitely movement. Panic seizes me for a second. Maybe it’s a bear or a fox. So what if it is, I think, what harm can it do me now. I puff out my chest. 

Human steps. I could burst with anticipation, like a thousand Christmas mornings. I’m finally going to see Dad again.

Instead, in the moonlight, the person reveals itself as Mum. 

“Sophie,” she says, her voice heavy with tears.

Maybe she comes here to talk to us both.

“Sophie,” she says again, moving closer.

She can’t actually see me, so I stay put. 

“I’ve been worried, Sophie,” she says and crouches down beside me.

I look around the empty graveyard. 

“It’s time to come home, sweetheart,” she says and puts her arm around me. I can feel it – the weight of her arm and the warmth of her breath. 

“It’s time to come home, Sophie,” she says again, standing and pulling me up with her.

“I just wanted to see him again, Mum,” I say, following her toward the gate. 

“I know,” she says. “I know.”

*

Lucy Brighton is a Northern-based writer who has completed an MA in Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (Distinction). Her work has been published in Writers Forum, Journeys: A Space for Words, and Henshaw Press’s second anthology, as well as various websites and online magazines.

Shooter Flash: “The Silence” by A S Partridge

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The baby was crying. Again. Susan had just sunk into sleep ten minutes before – blessed, blackout unconsciousness – and was now wrenched back to the surface by those piercing, incessant cries.

“No,” she moaned, pressing the side of her face deeper into the grubby warmth of her pillow. Laundry, among other things, was overdue. “Shut up.”

I can’t take it any more, she thought, groggily, as the cries escalated. It was the four-month sleep regression. Apparently that was a thing: sleep regressions.

Something that had not been a thing, for Susan: The Golden Hour. Her son, instead, was whisked straight to NICU and intubated through a perspex box. Another thing, but not for her: The Letdown. In Susan’s case it applied purely in the emotional sense – no breastmilk, no oxytocin hit. After weeks of squeezing and pumping, she’d accepted defeat and resorted to formula, despite the exhortations of a parade of nurses, breastmilk advocates and healthcare visitors. One more thing, for the record: a Partner. No dad’s better than a bad dad, Susan frequently told herself. Plenty of women struggled with unhelpful mates, she knew; but in her alternate universe, in the dead of night, there was a pair of hands to lift the screaming baby from its cot and remove it, somewhere else, out of earshot.

The baby continued to cry, louder now, no doubt needing a nappy change, a feed, a cuddle. It was incessant, relentless. “Shut up!” Susan yelled, shoving back the bedclothes and propelling herself upright. One sleep cycle was all she needed, a straight ninety minutes, then she could cope. Just one. On top of four months of broken sleep, it had been several nights in a row of waking hourly. Hourly. Her brain felt scrambled, swollen, bulging within the confines of her overheated skull.

She stormed around the bed to reach the cot on the other side, her vision swimming in the dark. The lump of her child lay within, wailing mouth aglow in a shaft of moonlight slanting past the edge of the blind. Seized by fury, Susan gripped the wooden edge of the cot. “For the love of god,” she screamed, for the third time, “shut up!”

The silence fell so immediately that Susan took a moment to register it. Then she wondered if she was, in fact, dreaming, or if she’d had a stroke. Had she fallen instantly deaf? For there lay her child, mouth open, the image of a squalling infant – yet no sound emerged.

Shocked by an icy jolt, Susan reached in and picked up the boy. He remained frozen – not just mute, but stock-still, a stone statue in mid-scream.

“Jakey,” she said, clutching his swaddled body to her before holding him aloft in the moonlight. “Jakey! Wake up!”

She pressed her ear to his chest and there, fast and soft, fluttered his heart. Raising him to her face, she felt the whisper of his warm breath upon her cheek. She sank onto the bed, cradling his small form – her darling, her beloved. The room whirled, so quiet that Susan could hear a faint ringing, like tinnitus.

She drew back and placed the baby gently on the bed, unwinding the folds of his swaddling cloth. His fists lay tightly balled, bent legs stiff in the air. Mindlessly Susan changed his nappy and flashed onto the memory of changing a plastic doll in prenatal class, a class that purported to prepare you for everything yet only proved, in retrospect, to prepare you for nothing.

With the baby clean and wrapped up again, Susan gathered him to her chest and slid back into bed. His mouth remained open wide, soundless; body warm yet unmoving. Susan drew the covers over them both and leaned back into the pillows. Tucked up warm with the curled animal of her infant at her breast: this was the dream of motherhood, the very picture of parental bliss. The maternal fantasy, the ideal.

The silence was a gift, surely. It couldn’t last long; ideals never did. So Susan resigned herself to sleep, and sank numbly into blackness. Reality would return soon enough. It had to.

*

A. S. Partridge has published poetry, flash fiction, and short stories in numerous magazines including Aurora, Malahat Review, Popshot, Scribble, and others. She lives in Edinburgh, where she is working on a satirical novel about motherhood.