The Dark Issue 21 by Emily B. Cataneo

Author:Emily B. Cataneo [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2017-01-09T15:36:41+00:00

Michael Wehunt’s short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Electric Literature, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, among others. His debut fiction collection, Greener Pastures, was published in 2016. He lives in Atlanta with his partner and their pup.

Can Anything Good Come

by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

My father used to say that whatever has night before its name can’t be trusted. I believe him. He has, after all, spent more days on earth than I. And it’s in living with this directive that I abstain from all things nocturnal: night classes, night parties, night vigils. No sir, thank you very much.

So, of course I’m immediately skeptical when my roomie, Mercy, asks that we visit the night market. She has her good reasons, sure. Six months into my national youth service in Benin City, and I soon understand the upside of living in a cheap town during service year: you get this golden chance to save large parts of your government allowance and end the service year with your bank account bulging—that’s, if you play your cards right. Saving loads off your daily upkeep is one of those cards, and shopping at the night market is the ace of the deck. Word is, everything there is awoof: around seventy-five percent less than the going rates. Just ask Wole, our corps liaison officer, who bought two sacks of avocados for only five-hundred naira from one Mallam who said he gets them at the night market.

The shrew in me comes out and asks the question no one’s asking, though: why doesn’t everybody shop there, then? Mercy gives me this look mothers give ten-year-olds who ask for iPads. This is her being a bargain hound, which is a snug fit into her avaricious self. Truth is, she doesn’t know, and neither does anyone who lives in our run-down corpers lodge. We could ask the Bini women who sell peeled oranges and roasted maize down the street, but we’re scared. They’ve already spit fire in our faces for speaking plenty oyinbo to them. Asking about this hush-hush stuff is inviting them to come claw our faces off.

Mercy posits, I reject, posit, reject. We continue this way until, somehow, it’s 7:45pm and I’m riding with her in a yellow-and-red public minibus down from the city centre to Uselu market with little memory of what convinced me. Mercy, dressed in jeans and a black top that contrasts her bleached skin but hides her long weave, sits by the window, engrossed in her phone’s WhatsApp. I’m squashed between her and a grimy mechanic, staring at my chiffon tunic and blue skirt and asking myself, one, why the hell I’m wearing a skirt, and two, if the spa-and-makeup training I plan to pay for after service year is worth this.

The bus spits us out at Mela Motel roundabout, and we hike down the road, seeking directions. From what we’ve heard, the night market takes place behind the stalls where the day market happens. That, in itself, triggers something else my father used to say.

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