The Dark Issue 69 by Suzan Palumbo

Author:Suzan Palumbo [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2021-01-27T22:51:12+00:00

Kay Chronister’s work has appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Black Static, Shimmer, and twice before in The Dark. Her first collection, Thin Places, was published by Undertow Publications this past spring. Find her online at kaychronister.com.

One Last Broken Thing

by Aimee Ogden

In elementary school, the other kids called Liv’s home that haunted house out on Barnhill Road. Liv herself has never seen a ghost there, but not for want of trying. They called her father lots of things: Freddy Krueger, Charles Manson, David S. Pumpkins. Now that she’s in high school, the other kids call her the spooky girl: to her face, on ugly pieces of paper smashed up small and pushed through the vents of her locker. Stay away from me, spooky girl. Don’t talk to me again in English, spooky girl. I saw you looking at me in the locker room, you spooky fuck.

The house itself is tiny but it huddles at the edge of a big sprawling lot three hours’ drive from the state capital. It’s a field, but not a farm: farms produce living things and sell them. Maybe there’s the ghost of soybeans somewhere deep in the soil but here, now, tractors and furniture and other dead things come to rest. Her father had always meant to fix these things up, salvage and sell the good parts for spare cash. But he never seemed to get around to it. Never stopped him from saying yes to anyone who dropped by with a stack of nail-toothed planks or an antique radiator in their truck bed, though. The field isn’t a junkyard, exactly; but not for want of trying.

When Liv sits in her bed, doing homework, she can see them in the field where they lay. The bones of houses, cars, machines. Sleeping giants.

Liv has never been allowed to play in the field, not even as a little girl. It sits idle, waiting. At night, the wind strokes the wounded edges of the neighbors’ cornfield and screams through old pipes and broken toilets. Liv barely sleeps in the summers, with no AC and the window thrown open to let the night on the backs of skunk-stink and grunting bullfrogs. On those nights, if she sits up against her pillows, she can sometimes see her father’s shadow sliding between the dark motionless hulks. His rifle is a long black bar against the man-shape.

When Liv was smaller, when she looked out of the window on a night the moon was small and shy, or when storm clouds muffled the starlight, she imagined other shapes out there too, bigger than a man, shaking the broken corn.

It’s been years since she’s heard the report of a rifle on a heavy starless night, and the deep keening of a living thing’s soul peeling away from its earthly vessel.

Lots of coyotes out this way. One killed Mrs. Berger’s German shepherd. Another got into the López family’s chickens. Mrs. Berger’s eldest son shot the coyote dead when it came back for her barn cats.

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