Black Sheep: Unique Tales of Terror and Wonder No. 7 | January 2024: Black Sheep Magazine, #7

By Wayne Kyle Spitzer

Welcome to Black Sheep: Unique Tales of Terror and Wonder, an extraordinary anthology magazine that transcends the boundaries of science-fiction, fantasy, and horror. Prepare to embark on a thrilling journey through the darkest corners of the human imagination, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the mundane transforms into a realm of unspeakable terror and awe-inspiring wonder.

Within these pages, you'll discover a collection of captivating stories carefully curated to transport you to realms beyond the mundane. Each issue presents an array of unique tales crafted by talented visionaries, both established and emerging, who dare to defy conventions and push the boundaries of speculative fiction.

Whether you're a seasoned lover of the fantastic or just curious to explore new frontiers, Black Sheep: Unique Tales of Terror and Wonder will be your guide through the realms of the extraordinary. Prepare to be enthralled, enchanted, haunted. So put on your dark sunglasses … and unleash your inner Black Sheep.

In this issue:

THE BATHTUB
Olivia Wolfe

ARACHNE
Jason Huls

ASHMEDAI AND THE HAIRDRESSER
Allister Nelson

BURKE'S REBOOT
Alyssa Willeford

GET IT OUT OF ME
Wayne Kyle Spitzer

PERSUATION
Mary Jo Rabe

SWIMMING HOLE
Kathy Lanzarotti

THE STRANGE CASE OF BARTHOLOMEW HEMBREE
Paul Cesarini

MONSTERS
Fred Cheney

HELLION
Jason Frederick Myers

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hobb's End Press
• Release date: Dec 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223838418

Wayne Kyle Spitzer

Wayne Kyle Spitzer (born July 15, 1966) is an American author and low-budget horror filmmaker from Spokane, Washington. He is the writer/director of the short horror film, Shadows in the Garden, as well as the author of Flashback, an SF/horror novel published in 1993. Spitzer's non-genre writing has appeared in subTerrain Magazine: Strong Words for a Polite Nation and Columbia: The Magazine of Northwest History. His recent fiction includes The Ferryman Pentalogy, consisting of Comes a Ferryman, The Tempter and the Taker, The Pierced Veil, Black Hole, White Fountain, and To the End of Ursathrax, as well as The X-Ray Rider Trilogy and a screen adaptation of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows.

Book preview

THE BATHTUB

Olivia Wolfe

––––––––

It's life's failure and its deficiencies that make someone a daydreamer. —Shokoofeh Azar, The Enlightenment of the Greengage tree

––––––––

It was when we got the new bath installed. That was when we decided to escape.

The reason for the new bath was the size of the old one. Whenever I used the old one, my arms and legs would splay out the sides of the thing. It was an awkward exercise, and it isn’t right for a grown man to sprawl. Write that down. 

My feelings were in line with the atmosphere of Prague at the time. My legs, and the legs of all the good Czechs; the artists and the poets, hung out the end of it terribly.

––––––––

We were occupied by the Soviets. They brought their tanks and troops on the 20th of August 1968, but the far-left had been poisoning us for some time, this was just how the disease broke through the skin. In 1981, the city was gothic architecture, long lines of people waiting on cobbled streets outside the greengrocer and walks by the Vltava for young people who were still, miraculously, in love. 

––––––––

The second reason for the bath was that, after my promotion, I could afford it. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t rummaging through my pockets for spare crowns. 

When I started at the theatre, my pay was minimal. I had an in through Honza, a military friend of my father’s who’d become a theatre technician after his service. I would finish my shift at the theatre and head home on the city’s packed trams. We would shuffle aside to let on the usual patrons; Tomáš, the son of the green grocer with puckered skin, Mrs Madl, always wrapped in layers of cloth and bent at a forty-five degree angle over her cane and Petra, the woman who worked at the theatre with me and wore perfectly ironed pencil skirts. Though many of us knew each other, it was best to keep your eyes on the ground or the view outside. Golden hour laid a film over the hundreds of spires, red roofs, but darkened the colourful suit jackets that made their way home in the streets.

We lived in a tiny fourth-floor apartment a decent ride out of Prague’s centre. It is east of Prašná brána and west of Invalidovna, in case you ever go.

The apartment complex was originally owned by my father and was maintained by him. He wasn’t an agreeable man. If there was a pipe problem or if electricity got switched off for maintenance, he never alerted anyone or apologised when they came to him with an issue. He didn’t like sweeping and mopping, particularly on muddy or icy days, so he made residents take off their shoes at the door and walk in their socks and stockings across the tiled lobby—which was particularly cold in the wintertime. The tenants avoided him in the stairwell. 

My Babushka would come over and poke at my father about why he didn’t sit and read the newspaper well into the afternoon like a normal bachelor. Raději bych zemřel, he would say as he left with his toolbelt slouched lazily about his hips. It was the only lazy thing about him.

When the party took over, most properties became party-owned. The whole apartment block was sliced down further and further until one tiny apartment on the fourth floor was left to my father. In some ways, I think the tenants might have felt some relief. They could wear their shoes in the lobby. The old man frowned unfailingly every time he crossed the communal spaces. Páchnoucí hovno, he would grumble. The apartment was his one job and he never found another.

––––––––

Zofie was in a love affair with Debussy. Suite bergamasque, L.75:3 might be playing on our record player when I walked through the door, or Rêverie, L. 68: Rêverie, or Symphony in B Minor. The air would be full of music and the aroma of whatever meal she was preparing.

When she got pregnant the first time, she declared, I guess I must learn now for the sake of us. And she did. She would shake copious amounts of paprika into the goulash, salt cabbage, boil potatoes and stir it all with a small Frantisek on her hip. Never confuse diligence with happiness. Write that down. 

Before dinner I would sit down at the dining room table and check the measurements or get to work creating the newest miniature set design for one of our productions. František would find me straight away from wherever he was playing, he was about four then, and I would slip him a clay figurine, tiny chair, table or couch I housed in my bag and he would run off and play. Every time Zofie turned to look at me from the stove, I’d note how beautifully rounded she was. 

––––––––

We decided to name you after your mother, like we named your brother after me. Zofie gave birth to you in the foyer of the building. We were rushing back for the car keys on a Sunday morning after shopping for groceries. It was a wet day and you slid out into a world streaked with filth.

Gratulujeme! Our neighbours cheered as they stepped over your poor mum’s feet with groceries under their arms. The foyer was a communal space that no one liked to take responsibility for. An expectation that the good spirits and honest values of the people would ignite a desire in the hearts of the countrymen to work above and beyond their means. It did not. I sunk down to hold her hand. The chequered grey and white floor tiles were a russet colour from all the dirt. I noticed tracks of muddied footprints grazed the bottom of my trousers and they were dampening them. Your brother, who had always loved puddles, was sliding back and forth on the tiles like he did on cobbled stones. His small black leather boots getting close to slipping out from under him with each skid. Your mother held on to me tightly.

For the next few nights, I experienced vivid dreams. I dreamt that your feet would dangle loose in big leather shoes and a pretty red Pioneers scarf would be secured by adult hands around your neck. My tiny red skaut with yellow eyes. I dreamt that our malá Zofie would grow up in a small room with a big red flag mounted on the wall.

––––––––

Czechoslovakia seemed to be the only place in the world where a job in the arts was more stable than property ownership. Positions were scarce and I became well-acquainted with adapting. I worked as a makeshift lighting producer, sound producer and then moved to the design department when I showed promise sketching during my breaks. 

Though it was a romantic notion to be part of the liberal arts, theatres were hothouses for treason and many directors and playwrights were imprisoned, sentenced and blacklisted. Insubordinate ideas could not be expressed directly, so theatres established their own languages and semiotic systems to speak to informed theatregoers. Audiences would snigger after shows and party members who attended to audit how many times double entendres were delivered left scratching their heads.

It’s all we can do to stop the boredom, Honza said, as I smoked with him on the sidewalk one afternoon. It’s that or we’d kill ourselves. Then he coughed, extinguishing the butt under the tip of his leather loafer. 

I began working under the senior stage designer and started making models in the dingy basement office, I missed the bustle of the theatre—the fake blood being tested on the floor, staging, directors yelling commands—but downstairs under a layer of concrete and steel, it was a sort of reprieve. I was left to my own devices, planning measurements and categorising requests from other departments in a musty, dank room. The perfect place for thoughts to burgeon. 

––––––––

I first met Zofie across the street from the theatre in the café that sucked in spectators who were keen for a cosy place to sit and debate the cultural significance of whatever show or opera they had just attended. She wore a black skirt and the sweater her mother knitted for her. I saw her seated inside when I entered. She gazed out onto the street. It was a Friday and so there were streams of people, young and old, heading home or to the nearest hospoda ready to shake off the week like a sodden coat. 

Even in communist times, a Friday afternoon was a Friday afternoon. The café was full. Across from this woman was the only seat left that still had a decent view of the bustle. I asked her if I could join her, and she said yes, but only if I bought her a malá káva.

Her eyes held a type of certainty I had never seen before. Like she knew what she was doing and why she was here and where she was going next. She spoke about her new job at the university, and I became less and less interested in the goings-on of the world beyond the booth. She wore her hair out then—it flowed beyond her shoulders and sat heaped and messy at her collarbones. I watched as she reached out to tuck loose strands behind her ear. We spoke of what we knew. We had both been eleven when the tank rolled through. We remembered trying to get somewhere, the smell of petrol bombs that the revolutionaries threw stagnant in the air. A young liberal stood on top of a Russian tank with his classmates and held a sign that read ‘trespassers will be prosecuted.’

And we remembered the moths. The wings that filled the sky; the hundreds of moths that were born and died, caking the cobblestone streets with grey. A phenomenon that marked the passing of Czechoslovakia as it was. 

––––––––

Things become linked with memories, good or bad. Write that down. Objects are far less valuable than humans. A cup is less important than the distraught person who has broken it, a garden can pale in comparison to the old master horticulturist who takes shelter amongst its shade and a bathroom is surely less indispensable than the family who makes a mess of its floors.

When we came to Australia the things we squirrelled away in the pockets and lining of our suitcases brought vivid memories with them. The photographs and jewellery, the doll you packed with its button eyes and tartan dress and the small fish figurine František smuggled with him from one of my designs. Scraps from the Motherland were now precious artifacts. It is like looking at your reflection in a spoon, sometimes things remind you of the different sides of yourself. The bizarre ones. And then some things you cling to keep you sane. Write that down.  

––––––––

The original bath was linked to strong memories for me. I had grown up in it and I also had some fond memories of Zofie tied up with it too. On the opening night of my first solo design the senior set designer encouraged me to take the night off. This was a year or so after I met Zofie, and I brought her back to the apartment. Father was staying at Babushka’s after she had a fall, which I should have been more concerned about, but I had a woman in my house, alone. 

She suggested we take a bath together and it was a tight squeeze. Even after she drew her legs to her stomach and I pulled mine to my chest in a cramped uncomfortable position, we were only centimetres from touching. She did this thing where she liked to sit in the bath before filling it. Feel how good it is to freeze and then let the warmth slowly kiss your skin. It’s heaven, she said with thousands of goosebumps starting to rise on her naked body. 

This was horrible on two fronts, sitting in the cold barely holding back my shivers and looking at this woman and feeling like I couldn’t reach out and touch her. The bath filled with painstaking slowness but soon we looked at each other over warm bubbles. She was right, the relief was almost spiritual. Zofie’s hair was loose and chaotic, in the way that I liked. A few tendrils clumped and stuck to her breasts—I realised I liked the look of that even more. 

I thought about the play that now must have been halfway through its first act. I was thinking about whether there were any stage faults I should be there to rectify or if any of the crew were desperately trying to get a hold of me. I tried to remember whether I had given everyone the number of the apartment. Her legs grazed mine as she unfurled.  I was back in the bath with a beautiful naked woman whose brown eyes were filled with certainty.

Look. She reached over to grab one of the glasses we’d filled with cheap pinot noir on the sink beside us. With the glass in her hand she twisted onto her side. Somehow she kept the wine level. Now watch, she said, lowering the glass onto her fleshy hip. She removed her fingers from the glass, I pictured it slipping and breaking in the bath. Her body was slick from the suds. 

It’s mum’s old crystal, I winced. 

Her smile was soft and certain, It’s okay, trust me. 

It wobbled and stayed upright. A perfect floating vessel. I captured the image of her disembodied thigh and her delightful creases between the leg and belly. A model for a renaissance painting, reclined and strong. 

That’s why they call me magic, she said. 

Zofie, the magically stable one. The one who wasn’t afraid to correct the store owner over mispriced pickles. The Zofie that insisted we go to art gallery exhibitions even if they were just communist propaganda lightly veiled as art. The woman who waited for me inside the café every afternoon. Even when I assumed, at least once, she would be late. She was not.

––––––––

The idea for the bathroom renovation came from the most recent play I was working on. When I officially became a senior designer,