The Dark Issue 61 by Jack Westlake

Author:Jack Westlake [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2020-05-28T21:26:25+00:00

Michael Wehunt lives in the lost city of Atlanta, where he wishes he had more time to read. His fiction has appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Cemetery Dance, and multiple best-of-the-year anthologies. His debut collection, Greener Pastures, was shortlisted for the IAFA Crawford Award and nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award. You can find him online at www.michaelwehunt.com.

The Zoetrope

by Alison Littlewood

It was my mother who gave me the zoetrope. She presented it to me for my birthday and I loved it at once, not for its own sake or even for the magic it wrought, but because it was something we could share.

It was made of carved wood, with a floral design encircling the outside of the drum and a prepared set of images on strips of paper to fit the inside. She placed the drum on its stand, positioned one of the strips and spun the device. I frowned at its tick-ticking sound, not understanding, and she bent and looked through one of the slits in the circumference, showing me what to do.

I still remember, quite clearly, what I saw through the narrow gap—not a sequence of simple pictures as they had appeared a moment ago, but a line of galloping horses, throwing out their legs in a smooth motion, never catching one another but never ceasing in their running. She peeked at me over the top of the drum and made it spin more rapidly; the horses’ legs became a blur as they increased their pace.

“The invention was originally called a daedalum,” she said. “Now its name is taken from the Greek—zoe for life and tropos for turning. And so, Frances, the zoetrope is a wheel of life. It always goes back to the beginning—you see?”

I did see. The illusion of movement had its limit: the sequence was short and simple and repetitive and so were the others in the box, but still we laughed over the sight of a whale swimming in the sea, a ballerina performing her grand-jetés, a Jack-in-the-box springing forth, a ball endlessly passing through a hoop.

Then my mother slotted the next strip into the cylinder and we watched a man and a woman waltzing together. It did not matter what speed the wheel spun; they were always in time, always together, always close.

I shifted my gaze from the whirling image of the couple, whom it was easy to imagine being very much in love, and focused instead upon my mother’s eye, peering through the opposite slit; at the tear that was brimming there, motionless, not quite ready to fall.

After that, new images appeared; and there was yet more magic, for my mother began to paint them herself. It became a tradition for her to leave the papers in my room for me to discover, to fit them into the cylinder and view them without her saying a word.

The first time it happened, I recognised her hand in the neat pencil and watercolour pictures, but I tried not to look at them too closely as I placed the band of paper in the drum.

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