The Dark Issue 101: The Dark, #101

By Tim Waggoner, Eric Schaller, Ana Hurtado and Kirsty Logan

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 two all-new stories and two reprints:

 

"The Destroyer of Small Things" by Tim Waggoner
"Wildflowers" by Eric Schaller (reprint)
"Zoraída la Zorra" by Ana Hurtado
"Things My Wife And I Found Hidden in Our House" by Kirsty Logan (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Sep 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223180227

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 101 • October 2023

The Destroyer of Small Things by Tim Waggoner

Wildflowers by Eric Schaller

Zoraída la Zorra by Ana Hurtado

Domestic Magic (Or Things My Wife and I Found Hidden In Our House) by Kirsty Logan

Cover Art: Halloween Pumpkin in Creepy Forest at Night by Joelee Creative

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2023 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

The Destroyer of Small Things

by Tim Waggoner

Karl is twelve years old, and he runs across the grass, body weightless, energy boundless, alive in a way that only a boy on the cusp of adolescence can be. It’s night in July, the country air cool but still humid, and his skin is coated with sweat. He’s in the front yard of his grandmother’s house—grass in need of mowing, two oak trees near the road, a cornfield on the other side. Grandma sits in a rocking chair on the porch, watching from the shadows. The yard is lit by fireflies, hundreds of them, drifting lazily on the air, most not going any higher than Karl can reach. He holds a stick, part of a branch snapped off one of the oaks, and he wields it like a club, swatting fireflies out of the air as he runs. Whatever kind of substance it is that makes the insects glow is smeared all over the stick, making it glow too. Not as brightly as the bugs themselves, thought, as if their luminescence can only outlive them for a short time, but that’s okay. There’s a lot more bugs where those came from.

Karl exults in the feeling of strength, of power, imagines himself a giant swatting fighter jets out of the sky, like a behemoth in the badly-dubbed Japanese monster movies he loves so much. When he first started killing fireflies, he’d counted them, but he lost track after seventy-three. He’s killed a lot more since then.

Eventually he grows tired and bored, and he joins his grandmother, sitting on the one step that leads down from the porch to the front walkway, his glowing murder-stick resting on the concrete next to him. He’s come here to spend a week with Grandma while his parents go on a second honeymoon, whatever that is. Karl thinks it’s another way of saying last ditch effort to save our marriage. He figures their odds of success aren’t great. He used to like coming here, but that was when Grandpa was still alive. Grandpa was fun. He told corny jokes and liked to throw a baseball or football back and forth with Karl. Grandma mostly sits and is quiet. She’s not quiet now, though.

When I was a little girl, my daddy told me that lightning bugs are really angels.

The rocking chair creaks as she gets up. She opens the screen door, steps into the house, and Karl hears the sound of the spring contracting as the door shuts behind her. He turns to look at his stick, sees its glow is almost gone, and he feels ill. He thinks this is a moment he will never forget.

He’s wrong.

Fucking doctor’s full of shit.

A considerably older Karl stands in front of the shed at the back of his property. It’s dusk on a hot July night and the shed’s doors are open. Karl has rolled a push mower out of the shed, and now he’s bent over the machine, pouring gas into the tank. Off to his left, a lone firefly glows once. He doesn’t see it, and if he did, it