The Dark Issue 100 by The Dark Magazine

Author:The Dark Magazine [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2023-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada is a professor, surf photographer, and writer of poetry and fiction based on traditional Hawaiian stories and understandings of the world.

Chop! Chop! Chop!

by Osahon Ize-Iyamu

He keeps pressing the button for the umbrella to fall after the rain and it does. It comes down with a mighty force, down on his head, enveloping him like a predatory jaw. It covers him, then smothers him, then it consumes him. The umbrella snaps down on his head, spikes through him clean, clamps on his neck bone with a mighty crunch. In less than five minutes it’s done. In less than five minutes it’s over.

The man’s hand falls limp from the handle. His head, trapped inside the spiky umbrella mouth, falls to the floor. Blood covers his shirt, his shoes, the floor, and his headless body collapses to the ground somewhere in Benin City.

The umbrella, however, with his head, disappears.

According to an unnamed search engine, results given in 0.12 secs, the average response time needed for a machine to kill a person is given as slowly, but with agitation. First it watches, then it lunges, then it kills.

Meet Nana. She’s a software engineer at a tech start-up in Lagos. She just moved from Benin City and doesn’t know this city. She deals with her feisty male colleagues all day in her cramped office and goes to buy food from one Instagram vendor or the other during lunchtime. They cheat her on prices because they know she’s not a local.

She’s been using the same broken computer charger for five weeks and a half now and it’s not looking better. It’s peeled and torn on the sides, barely hanging from its electrical tape, and slow to charge. She won’t buy a new one because money is tight. If she looks too closely, the charger can spark. It can smile. Still, she continues to use it, presses the charger down to her phone. Still she continues, every day.

He keeps hitting the corner table of his apartment on his way to work every day and one day the table hits back. The contractors that come to his house to work on the broken ceiling don’t clean up thereafter, so they leave their sawdust on the floor, their rusty nails and screw parts. The contractor did a bad job of fixing the ceiling because they wanted more money from his work, so the man got some patch patch materials from one electrical store in Ilesha market and stitched up the apartment. When he walks in after work, the house is flooded. He does not notice it immediately at first, until he looks down and he slips and his body slams into the ragged corner table. When he falls down on the floor, his stomach feels like a door that has just been rammed into, and then he feels something uncomfortable prick his side. There is a nail under his back, frighteningly sharp.

The Webster’s Journal of Liminal Research states that the earliest record of a machine that killed somebody dates back to the Stone Age.

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