Nightmare Magazine, January 2026
“The Tailors” is a dark horror story set in a war-torn village controlled by the warlord Jurgen Blanco. The narrative begins when Blanco’s enforcers raid the village and kidnap forty-nine children to force them into his operations, threatening to kill them all if the villagers refuse. The community is left devastated, having no power to resist.
The day after this tragedy, two mysterious blind missionaries arrive wearing red blindfolds and tattered evening wear. They set up a crimson canopy in the town square and begin reading aloud from strange books filled with cryptic passages about textiles, sewing, and “the hidden weave into which we are sewn.” They repeatedly invoke the phrase “onyx scissors within, onyx scissors without.” The villagers, vulnerable in their grief, are magnetically drawn to the missionaries’ otherworldly sermon, which continues through the night.
The next day, the villagers feel an irresistible pull back to the square. The missionaries begin speaking in an unrecognizable language, and their bodies start to phase in and out of existence. When they remove their blindfolds, gleaming black scissors protrude from their torn eye sockets. They demonstrate their power by making a bronze statue vanish completely, then ask if the villagers desire change and wish to learn their abilities.
Driven by rage and the desire for vengeance, the villagers accept the missionaries’ teachings. Nine months later, they’ve all become practitioners of this dark faith. Wearing red blindfolds, they manifest onyx scissors in place of their eyes, which allow them to perceive and cut the fabric of reality itself. They travel to Blanco’s compound and systematically dismantle it, removing guard towers, gates, and soldiers from existence by “cutting” them out of reality. They rescue their children and kill Blanco as he attempts to escape by helicopter.
However, the story takes a disturbing turn in its conclusion. Nearly a year after the rescue, the saved children are traumatized and withdrawn. They fear and are disgusted by their parents, who have become something monstrous. The villagers, now devoted “tailors” who can alter reality with their scissors, don’t understand their children’s horror. They continue using their powers to eliminate threats and reshape the world, removing entire mountains and forests.
The rescued children refuse to join the faith, while the younger children who witnessed the missionaries’ arrival eagerly await their sixteenth birthdays to gain the same powers. One daughter tells her father that the villagers are “all monsters” who are “always being monstrous for the ‘right’ reasons.”
The missionaries announce they must leave to spread their faith elsewhere, cryptically suggesting that “microalterations” might be necessary if the children don’t come around. The story ends ominously with the villagers determined to keep “cutting until we get the shape of happiness just right,” suggesting they may eventually alter their own children’s minds to achieve compliance and satisfaction, unable to see that they’ve become the very monsters they sought to destroy.
Kurt Fawver is a writer of horror, weird fiction, and literature that oozes through the cracks of genre. His short fiction has been previously published in venues such as Nightmare, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Vastarien, Best New Horror, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. A Shirley Jackson Award winner and Bram Stoker Award nominee, Kurt’s the author of three collections of short stories – We are Happy, We are Doomed, The Dissolution of Small Worlds, and Forever, in Pieces—as well as a novella and two chapbooks. He’s also had non-fiction published in various journals and holds a Ph.D. in Literature. His fourth collection, Everywhere is a Horror Story, is forthcoming in 2026. You can find Kurt online at kurtfawver.com or facebook.com/kfawver.