The Dark Issue 6: The Dark, #6

By Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace

The Dark is a quarterly magazine co-edited by Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace, with the sixth issue featuring all-original short fiction by Sara Saab, Eric Schaller, Patricia Russo, and Naim Kabir.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Oct 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781501462931

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 6, November 2014

Calamity, the Silent Trick by Sara Saab

The Three Familiars by Eric Schaller

Mourning Flags and Wildflowers by Patricia Russo

Home at Gloom’s End by Naim Kabir

Cover Art: Changing by Benita Winckler

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Jack Fisher & Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

Copyright © 2014 by TDM Press.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

Calamity, the Silent Trick

by Sara Saab

They come for me when one of mine is to be dealt the cups.

Where do they find me? I am in the gap between cresting waves. I am in the curl of a leaf. I drift where hearing muffles to a whine, soaked in darkness, riding the clogged shadows behind the beam of a streetlamp.

—Which one? I ask.

—Luccas Santo, they say. I have never heard the name. Until I do.

And then I know him instantly.

We are little but our cups.

Everything else about us is grey and limpid. We are not alive, nor dead; outside of space and unatomic, only bobbing in the surf of time and place as though on an absent-minded whim.

But our cups seem so vivid, so real. So tactile that they anchor us.

We each carry three. Each, no bigger than a thimble, is puissant as a collapsing star. They appear as if painted, in purples, reds, yellows. The delicate filigreed enamel coat is remarkable, decorated by no sentient hand, and a true solid: there are no gaps in its make up, to any magnification. For this reason, it would be impossible for our cups to exist as a human would mean it, in their physics. Just one cup of my triad would be larger in mass than the planet upon which Luccas Santo lives, and breathes.

Yes, he breathes.

For now.

—It is almost the moment to deal him his cups, says Xe.

In our indistinct continuum, we carry the names of our cup triads. It simplifies the nagging needs of sentience.

—Go to him now, Au, urges Rh.

I hoist my cups in their velvet-lined case, a fitting avatar of safekeeping. I do not have a body but I feel their weight everywhere, sinking into the core of me.

Rh and Xe are a buzzing, a greyness, full to brimming with anticipation for my trick.

I go to Luccas Santo.

To my kind, human existence is deafening, rowdy beyond tolerance. But the place I am called to for Luccas Santo makes all things I have experienced of humans seem placid, even dignified.

It is a grand hall in the manner of humans, who love to build containers around the fragile threads of their lives. Frescoed with angels and devils, the vaulting roof vibrates duskily beneath the roar of a maddened crowd.

Folding chairs are scattered, most open and unoccupied, across a sticky floor. Humans hop before their chairs in a great agitation, crushing cans in their fists, pumping arms into the air.

In the middle of it all is Luccas Santo. His attire blares louder than the crowd, wounding my thoughts. A pair of knee-length shorts, banded with stripes of glittering green and frilled along the seams, swallows his small hips. Slender boots are cinched tight at his shins; boxing gloves bob guardedly under his jaw.

When Luccas Santo hunches over to protect his kidneys from punches, an angel, etched in ink, spreads her wings over his shoulder blades and peers out with an unsettling, warped face. His brown skin is shiny with sweat.

I approach the ring. No human sees me. Not one of them feels the unfathomable gravity of the near-singularities I carry into their midst.

We think our cups were the first thing.

The universe was once an elemental batter, poured out of perfect enameled thimbles. This new universe clung jealously to itself, chemicals clutching like threatened lovers.

The periodic table has ninety native elements. At the start, each cup—truer than matter, deeper than mattering—held a single, pure one.

My name is Au for the heaviest atoms my cups poured into the newly minted world. My triad is three elements: gold, my namesake; and zirconium, sulfur.

We think the cups came first. We think this together, I, and Rh, and Xe, and our two-dozen-and-two grey and limpid siblings. Some thoughts are impossible to think apart. Our cups remember the togetherness of the beginning.

Their new purpose seems small by comparison: to play a trick of fate, to decide the unlucky deaths of humans.

But I do not think it a small purpose. Just as our cups brewed the universe, they deal the end of lives. And what else is death, if not the pitch black of nothing, the destruction of all things, both witnessed and indiscernible?

Luccas Santo’s fans call him Lightning Rod.

Lightning Rod Santo is