The Dark Issue 47 by The Dark Magazine

Author:The Dark Magazine [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2019-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Francisco Ortega is a Chilean journalist, writer and editor. He is the author of the novels Logia and Salisbury. “Seventy-seven” (“Setenta y siete”) has its basis in the real-life disappearances and murders committed by the military dictatorship in Chile for almost two decades.

My House Is Out Where the Lights End

by Kirsty Logan

Jay approaches the old farmhouse with her sunglasses and the radio off. She wants to see it and hear it clearly. In her memory it looms so huge, so loud and technicolor, that she’s sure she’ll be overwhelmed by it.

But it’s been abandoned for years now, and the bright painted boards are faded and rain-dragged, and the tin roof is rusted through in places, and the driveway is overgrown with weeds. She pulls the car to a jolting stop and sits there, watching the empty house as if waiting for someone to come out and greet her.

Everyone said that sunflowers couldn’t grow here and they were right, they couldn’t and wouldn’t until finally, one day, they did. Pop always said it was because of his Secret Method. He said it in capital letters like that to make it sound scientific and complicated, but Jay and Yara watched him in secret from Jay’s bedroom window and knew exactly what his method was, and it was this: he sang to the sunflowers. Big Pop, terror of the town, half the teeth smacked out of his head, body more scars than skin, faster with his fists than a kung-fu star. He sang to flowers.

Jay thinks now that she should have found that sweet. Her father, a surprise like a wrapped present, hard as nails but soft as trifle—it was sweet, right? But at the time she found it frightening: that Pop was so unpredictable, that he could be two opposite things at once, that there was no way to know whether he would respond with fists or song.

Jay gets out of the car and walks round to the back of the house, where in her memory miles of sunflowers gleam brighter than the sun. She finds a field of withered grey stalks, bent under the weight of their dead heads. The ground is heaving with black seeds, piled thick, gleaming like insect shells. She kicks at them and hears them sift and tumble, an uncomfortably sensual sound. For many seasons the field must have grown wild, alone all summer, then sank back on itself through autumn, only to repeat the whole thing again next year. A ghost harvest.

She shoulders aside a dead sunflower to go further into the field and jerks back with a shriek when a smatter of small black somethings land on her shoulder. She stands on open ground, shuddering, brushing off her bare shoulder long after she’s seen that it was just sunflower seeds, withered black carapaces now scattered in the dirt around her feet. She knows they just fell from the head when she knocked it, but she can’t stop thinking of the word spat, that the sunflower spat the seeds at her on purpose.

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