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    The Dark Issue 11: The Dark, #11
    The Dark Issue 11: The Dark, #11
    The Dark Issue 11: The Dark, #11
    Ebook71 pages1 hour

    The Dark Issue 11: The Dark, #11

    By Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace

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    About this ebook

    The Dark is a quarterly magazine co-edited by Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace, with the eleventh issue featuring all-original short fiction by Michael Wehunt, Amber van Dyk, Gregory Norman Bossert, and Kristi DeMeester.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTDM Press
    Release dateFeb 3, 2016
    ISBN9781524213862
    The Dark Issue 11: The Dark, #11

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      Book preview

      The Dark Issue 11 - Jack Fisher

      THE DARK

      Issue 11 February 2016

      Birds of Lancaster, Lairamore, Lovejoy by Michael Wehunt

      And the Woods Are Silent by Amber van Dyk

      Between Dry Ribs by Gregory Norman Bossert

      All The World When It Is Thin by Kristi DeMeester

      Cover Art: The Island of the Dead by Daniel Bérard

      ISSN 2332-4392.

      Edited by Jack Fisher & Sean Wallace.

      Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

      Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

      Copyright © 2016 by TDM Press.

      www.thedarkmagazine.com

      Birds of Lancaster, Lairamore, Lovejoy

      by Michael Wehunt

      The first bird was made of glass. It stood waiting atop a scuffed dresser in the yard on Lancaster Street, and at once Kay hefted it in her hand. It felt good there, heavier than she’d expected. The owl’s wings were tucked away and its head gazed into some autumnal wisdom that she couldn’t see. It did have the color of fall, if nothing else, the glass a translucent burnt orange that felt like the seventies. She collected things that were beginning to be old. Like herself. Things she imagined her mother might have bought when they were new.

      She had made her way to the far end of the yard sale, picking through a life, half-glancing, fingers brushing across clothes that would swallow her up, exercise equipment that still looked new, paperbacks with oily crumbs in the cracks between pages. A hand-lettered sign out on the main road had led her to the drowsy street. The only thing she knew she wanted, until the owl, was time, a few extra minutes before she went to watch her father die.

      The smell of burning leaves caught in her nose, almost like cinnamon. Three great oaks huddled together in a green canopy overhead, cutting the sunlight into wedges scattered across the grass. Kay stood in one, spotlighted. In less than four minutes she would meet the child with the bloody nose, but for now she turned the owl in the sun, making its head glow, making its head go dark. She felt some inscrutable admiration for the way it held the light inside itself for a moment before spilling it into her hand like honey.

      It was a fitting little sanctuary. Kay spent a lot of calm Saturday mornings trolling yard sales full of things she didn’t need. Her apartment tended to look as though a dozen grandmothers had spent their last years in her living room. Figurines and brass bells and pointlessly small clocks lined the mantelpiece, cluttered end tables and bookshelves. She couldn’t define the charm of the whole, but it was there, unremarkable and hers.

      The glass owl had no price sticker. She would have paid ten dollars for it, more, but a teenaged boy in a denim jacket changed her twenty and gave nearly all of it back. A purse-sized dog sat in the boy’s lap, its eyes obscured behind a curtain of fur. It bared its lower teeth in an underbite.

      She slipped the owl into a jacket pocket. On her way to the street, she paused by a milk crate full of worn record sleeves. A few Leonard Cohen albums leaned toward her. She took a deep breath and that faint cinnamon tickled her throat. Years later, at odd little moments, she would still catch that sharp scent of moldering leaves in her nose, see as if from some elastic distance the name of her father’s favorite musician (a damned poet, what’s more, she’d hear his slurred voice say) repeated on those frayed, skinny spines. The yellowed row of blunt teeth in the dog’s mouth and the amber dapples delivered onto her skin through the glass owl. She would wonder if she had ever before known her senses—the prismatic, almost eloquent convergence of them—as she did here on this unknown lawn, the oaks reaching for one another far above her.

      Maybe, she would think then. But here, she could not buy any of these records. Their dust might break her heart.

      She’d driven six hundred reluctant miles to be close to her father, but he was never far. His records always played in the corner of her mind that resembled his den. She remembered listening through the hollow door to the pop and hiss of the needle skimming the vinyl. Cohen’s smoke-cracked voice would escape through the wood-paneled speakers that stood on the carpet. But her father had possessed nothing of poetry. Just tired war in his clenched hands and disjointed stories. The distance that pulled him back into them after her mother died.

      He had only said it once—three brooding years after the cargo van crushed her mother’s little Datsun—but the words never stopped echoing in his eyes, his hands, and the spaces between him and the daughter. Kay asked about her mother’s death, still struggling at eight years old to understand it. She warned you not to eat too much Halloween candy, he said, bloodshot eyes gazing somewhere over her shoulder, and sure enough, she had to go pick you up from school because you made yourself sick. And just like that, she was gone.

      After, so were they. Those words had finished the breaking of the family. He’d already burned what would have been left, leaving a devoted silence and her Aunt Linda to fill in, coming from three counties away to take Kay to doctor’s appointments, back-to-school shopping, and just give her niece the chance to talk if she wanted.

      On the phone with the hospital yesterday, as the doctor stressed the unlikelihood that her father would last the weekend, Kay had stepped over to the tall narrow mirror that hung on her closet door and watched to see what her face

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