The Dark Issue 51 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: 2019-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

A. Katherine Black is an audiologist and a writer. She adores multicolored pens and stories featuring friendly spiders. She lives in Maryland, surrounded by tall and occasionally judgmental trees, with her family, their cats, and her overused coffee machines. Find her at flywithpigs.com or on twitter at @akatherineblack.

Tiger, Tiger Bright

by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

The first thing you learn as you climb out of the chasm is that there are fingers to pull you down. They are icy, taloned, the poltergeists of lives past and regrets buried. Your skin sloughed off long ago and your bones grind together, wearing down, but that’s fine because once you reach the light you’re promised new ones. Skin smooth with the prime of youth, bones gorgeous white and precious as fresh ivory.

When you’re not climbing out of that pit, you work at a temp agency. Each day you review client specs and send out resumes and send out people. It pleases you to make a successful placement: there is order to it, symmetry. Something is fulfilled and entropy is held back. You are the first to clock in, the last to clock out. This year you’ll be offered another raise—your bosses think you’re an addict for work, though really it is that the office gives you refuge from the long climb, the endless hum of ghosts. It is not as though you have friends or family with whom to socialize. Your salary allows you to eat out with middling luxury and you could move into a bigger apartment. Only you’ve tried that before. The chasm follows you.

Sometimes you believe the deep void is the reality and this—the temp agency, the skyscrapers and molasse traffic that make up Krungthep—is the dream. You have not witnessed evidence to the contrary. What you would like to think is that the chasm is one single nightmare, continuous, recurring. The problem is that you have no memory of anything else: you don’t recall waking up, brushing your teeth, showering. Once you step out your door, you’re the office worker, eyes lined and face powdered and lips modestly painted neutral pink. Prim outfit, as if someone else has chosen it for you, cream blouse and jacket and pencil skirt. The colors change, on occasion, but the form rarely varies.

What you fantasize is that you are a gecko or a spider, creatures that nature has made capable of scaling any surface, no matter how sheer or vertical.

Friday morning. You eat breakfast in the office—everyone does, as long as it’s something relatively tidy, panini or ice cream mochi, or fried fishcakes drizzled in sweet chili sauce—and begin the day’s workload. Most of it is routine: clients want maids, specialist consultants, live-in nurses. Your agency does all kinds, from the mundane to the esoteric.

So it is without surprise when you come to the listing that asks not for domestic help or seasonal baristas, but for a woman suffering from a curse. Of course there are believers, there are people who have sent in requests for supernatural

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