The Dark Issue 21: The Dark, #21

By Emily B. Cataneo, Michael Wehunt, Suyi Davies Okungbowa and Michael Harris Cohen

Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Edited by award winning editors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Sean Wallace and brought to you by Prime Books, this issue includes two all-new stories and two reprints:

“The Lily Rose” by Emily B. Cataneo
“A Discreet Music” by Michael Wehunt (reprint)
“Can Anything Good Come” by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
“We is We” by Michael Harris Cohen (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Jan 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386343684

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 21 • February 2017

The Lily Rose by Emily B. Cataneo

A Discreet Music by Michael Wehunt

Can Anything Good Come by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

We is We by Michael Harris Cohen

Cover Art: Prison for the Soul by captblack76

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2017 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

The Lily Rose

by Emily B. Cataneo

Wolf Street Orphanage was a house exploding with girls. The skinny tall brownstone stood crooked on a street of other brownstones, its striped curtains concealing rooms full of long hair and exuberant voices. When Headmistress Lily Rose made her thrice-daily rounds to check on her girls’ progress with their reading of Upton Sinclair and their Latin translations, she often found Nunsi, the oldest girl, pacing between beds and washstands, her fingers fluttering with nervous energy. Nunsi loved the theater, and that spring, she was usually shouting about the work of Betram Stein at the Orpheum, or about the heartbreaking life of a perennial understudy at the theater. Catherine, obsessed with current events, alternately studied that day’s newspaper and rolled her eyes at Nunsi, while Molly, who had recently decided she wanted to become a scientist, tweezed at the filament of a broken lightbulb.

Girls, you’re supposed to be translating Virgil, Lily Rose would say, as she smoothed a rumpled bedspread, set her hand upon Nunsi’s coal-colored hair, bit back a smile.

That April, Lily Rose applied for and received a small donation for the orphanage from a prominent philanthropist. She debated using the money to purchase a new encyclopedia set, sturdier boots for next winter, or even something as frivolous as a new phonograph. But perhaps, she thought, the girls would benefit from travel. None of them had ever even left Boston. As soon as she mentioned this possibility to Nunsi, the rumor spread through the orphanage—we’re going on a trip, Lily Rose got some kind of grant, we’re going on a boat!—and then a host of brochures, pamphlets and guidebooks materialized and before she knew it this journey became the girls’ prime topic of conversation.

The trip was a month off, and Lily Rose was two days away from booking them passage on a respectable older vessel. But that darkling spring evening, as she walked home with Nunsi and Molly from a matinee viewing of a Betram Stein-directed musical production in the Theater District, Molly jabbed her finger at a headline in a newspaper box: Lily Rose Christened at Boston Harbor. Below it, a picture of a sleek ship, three smokestacks, porthole after porthole lined along the stalwart sides.

It’s named after you. Molly smiled up at Lily Rose, her dark eyes crinkling.

Can we take it when we go on holiday next month? Please? Please? Nunsi always spoke too loud; Lily Rose often shushed her when the younger girls were asleep later at night.

"Her. You call a ship her," Molly said.

We’ll see about the expense. The next day, Lily Rose called the Metropolitan Steamship Company to ask about tickets and found that passage on the ship would cost $600 more than the philanthropist’s grant. Lily Rose did a quick mental calculation of the money she’d tucked away that year, then pulled out a personal check.

The trunks were packed. The tickets had arrived. Nunsi had draped ribbons on her last year’s spring hat. And then the day before departure, Lily Rose stepped on a marble on the stairs, fell hard down three steps, and twisted her back. And so she stood on the docks, leaning on a wooden crutch, waving to the ship as it pulled out of port.

The day after the ship departed, a Saturday, Lily Rose was sorting through a stack of novels when the doorbell rang and a boy in a Western Union uniform stood there holding out a telegram that told her that Wolf Street Orphanage would never again explode with girls, ever.

The morning after she received the telegram, Lily Rose placed eleven eggs in a pot of water. The eggs were half-boiled, the insides marigold-colored mush, before Lily Rose remembered.

She climbed the stairs to the rooms empty like theaters gone bust, where three strands of Nunsi’s long hair stuck to her bedspread, where Catherine’s newspapers sprawled all over the floor and desk. How many times had Lily Rose told Catherine that strewing newspapers around like that was a fire hazard? She picked the newspapers up. She folded them and placed them on Catherine’s desk. She limped down the stairs and flipped through her navy blue Oxford English Dictionary until she found the entry for the word shipwreck, but she slammed the book shut before she read it. She smoothed sheets and alphabetized her books. She spent an hour scrubbing one greenish smudge on the brass candlestick that stood on the mantle in the parlor. Come evening, she bent to empty the garbage pail containing the half-cooked eggs. Her hands wrapped around the sides of the pail, but she hesitated, then dropped it and folded backwards against the wood counter. The eggs smelled odd and her stomach leapt up in little bunches and acid rose in the back of her throat.

Two mornings after Lily Rose received the telegram, she woke from a half sleep with the hair on the back of her neck crawling with the suspicion that Lily Rose the person and Lily Rose the ship were one and the same. That instead of a respectable orphanage headmistress with a sore back, she was a proud, bright ocean liner. Her