The Dark Issue 108: The Dark, #108

By Jorja Osha, Carlie St. George, Phoenix Alexander and H. Pueyo

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:

 

"Bread Water" by Jorja Osha
"You Can Have the Ground, My Love" by Carlie St. George (reprint)
"In Thin Air" by Phoenix Alexander
"Rabbit's Foot" by H. Pueyo (reprint)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Apr 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224143047

Book preview

THE DARK

Issue 108 • May 2024

Bread Water by Jorja Osha

You Can Have the Ground, My Love by Carlie St. George

In Thin Air by Phoenix Alexander

Rabbit’s Foot by H. Pueyo

Cover Art: The Girl in the Sea by Stefan Koidl

ISSN 2332-4392.

Edited by Clara Madrigano and Sean Wallace.

Cover design by Garry Nurrish.

Copyright © 2024 by Prime Books.

www.thedarkmagazine.com

Bread Water

by Jorja Osha

Onuna has blessed you.

Elijah’s mother had often told him that when he was a boy yet he had never shared the sentiment. His mother’s goddess had cursed him, making him a harbinger of bad news and death simply because he dared to leave his mother’s heaving body not as a daughter but as a son.

For as long as he could remember his dreams had been home to visions of women not yet dead heralding their impending doom like a bullhorn in the night. And out of all of his night visitors it was his mother’s appearance that haunted him the most. Even as an adult he could hear the words that had slipped forth from her lips the night before his sister had phoned him with the foul news of her passing.

She hungers for her bread water.

Words he was never supposed to understand due to his gender but his sister Anita had still taught him the tradition of their mother’s people when he was ten years old.

We don’t bury our dead, she said while working another plait down the side of his head. Not the women at least. We give them back to Mother Onuna in order to nurture her and prepare her body to birth her daughters once more.

And what about the men? Elijah asked.

The lack of men in the village often perturbed him. As far as he knew the ones he did see weren’t from there and appeared solely to find a wife. They’d stay only during the hot summers to do heavy labor fearing that another man with similar intentions would take their place. As for the boys, Elijah could recall perhaps two aside from himself. Sons were fed to Onuna at the time of their births while the lucky ones were secreted off to places where they could live away from The Mother’s resentful eye. Elijah’s mother had done neither.

Anita hadn’t answered right away as she busied herself with scooping her knuckle into the pot of hair grease he’d been tasked with holding. She’d made it herself, the hair grease, sold it too with exceptional success.

Why would you ask that? You plan on dying on me or something? Anita sniped. She rubbed her finger a little too hard across his scalp when spreading the grease that her nail scraped the sensitive flesh.

He knew she hadn’t done it on purpose but he’d spent a week picking at the itchy fibrous patch until she popped his hands and slathered his parts with a healing salve.

Looking back on it Elijah couldn’t help but wonder if things might’ve been different had he upped and died on his mother and sister. Perhaps it would’ve saved them, his death somehow working to appease Mother Onuna. The village midwife had been so sure he’d be a girl after all and she’d never been wrong in her thirty some odd years of bringing babies into the world. But then he was born and Onuna cursed him with all the spite only a woman could have. So when the opportunity to leave came Elijah didn’t hesitate to take it.

Unfortunately there was no distance the souls wouldn’t cross to hound him in his dreams. He saw the woman who had pulled him out of his mother’s womb kicking and screaming and the auntie who sent him on errands the minute he learned to walk without toppling over and could parrot back the things he was told. Even the girl who declared the first day she met him that he’d marry her had shown herself. All of them too had said the same thing, all of them screamed at him until Mother Onuna with her insatiable appetite finally devoured them.

The visits stopped after his mother’s death and like a right fool Elijah thought himself free. Years had passed without a single disturbance. He was thirty-one now, Anita just having turned forty in December. From where he stood he’d have another good forty years before anything happened, if at all. But that’s what positive thinking got you he supposed.

When his sister first materialized in one of his dreams, dancing around his flat laughing with her infectious glee he thought nothing of it. The second time she came to him he’d fallen asleep in the bath and saw her sitting on the edge, her hand swaying back and forth in the water slowly dissolving. Startling awake, Elijah scrambled out the tub and emptied his stomach onto the floor. Samuel, his