The Dark Issue 81: The Dark, #81

By Kristi DeMeester, Ai Jiang, L Chan and Tony Richards

Each month The Dark brings you the best in dark fantasy and horror! Selected by award-winning editor Sean Wallace and published by Prime Books, this issue includes four all-new stories:

 

"Suffer, the Children" by Kristi DeMeester
"Tooth, Teeth, Tongue" by Ai Jiang
"The Pennyfeathers Ride Again" by L Chan
"The Snickersnacks" by Tony Richards

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sean Wallace
• Release date: Jan 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201726997

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 81 • February 2022

Suffer, the Children by Kristi DeMeester

Tooth, Teeth, Tongue by Ai Jiang

The Pennyfeathers Ride Again by L Chan

The Snickersnacks by Tony Richards

Cover Art: The Swamp Witch by Vladimir Manyukhin

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2022 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

Suffer, the Children

by Kristi DeMeester

They’d just passed the Alabama state line when Winnie saw the billboard. Winnie’s dad sat in the front seat, his bloated face wrenched into a squint to keep the sun out of his eyes, and her mother beside him, tearing her split ends into smaller and smaller pieces that Winnie imagined floated into the air and then into her lungs where they would take root and grow and grow until they sprouted from her throat, leaving her gurgling as the blood and spit flowered over the frilled, white dress her mother had forced her to wear.

On a black background, a transparent cocoon floated, the creature inside curled into itself, the pink, wriggling tube stretching away into nothingness, and a single black dot, like an all-seeing eye stared back at Winnie.

I loved you before you were in the womb. Winnie pressed her fingers against the window, and whispered the words again and again until they were nonsensical sounds—an incantation only she would understand, something to be buried in the dark earth and left to sleep for a thousand years.

Her father darted a glance at her in the rearview mirror, frowned, and turned up the radio until bland Christian contemporary drowned out the susurrus of her voice. Her mother kept her red-webbed eyes trained straight ahead, her fingers jerking like spiders through her hair.

This trip was supposed to fix them. Five days of sunscreen-scented, burnt skin, itching sand, and salt water boiled into some miraculous tincture that would undo her father’s clenched fists since Jesus hadn’t been able to save what had fallen apart.

Two weeks after the night in the Eckerd parking lot, Winnie had not been able to keep herself from saying that word. Whore. She’d been sent home with a note from Mrs. Mushro, that if Winnie could not control herself in the classroom the principal would be told, and the school would be forced to re-evaluate Winnie’s placement. After that, Winnie had taken to writing it over and over again in her special notebook, and then tearing the pages into tiny bits before swallowing them one by one where they swam in her stomach, her hand laid against the flatness there as if she carried something alive rather than that word written in purple ink.

Ahead, another billboard loomed, this one advertising fast food, and Winnie let the words tumble out of her faster and faster, like the time she’d been sick on the carpet of her bedroom, her father cursing as he stood behind her mother who knelt, the towel in her hand stained a shade of orange that had no name.

Stop it, her father said, but Winnie squeezed her eyes shut, unable to keep her tongue from forming the sounds.

Goddammit, I said stop! He slammed the palm of his hand against the steering wheel, and the car swerved into the next lane, a horn blaring as the car streaked past in a gray blur.

Trent, her mother said, but her voice was filled with a silence that meant nothing.

Winnie swallowed, her throat clicking as she held that floating, pink creature in her mind, wondering what it would be like to swallow it down where it would wriggle in her belly like a worm.

In the front seat, her father made sounds that were something like I’ve had it with this shit, and psychiatrist, and medication, but Winnie let them fall away like dead things and focused instead on the fullness of her stomach. How it seemed to swell with love, with all those feelings Pastor Chris said were what made them holy. His lambs the chosen few among a black, sin-teeming world, and Winnie felt, even as the pew itched under her bottom, how she could let those feelings fill her up, let them drown out all the awful, sharp thoughts dug into her brain.

"Whore, whore, whorewhorewhore," she whispered, and her mother twisted her fingers together as if she could squeeze