The Dark Issue 9 by Jack Fisher

Author:Jack Fisher [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2015-08-03T19:01:13+00:00

JY Yang is a lapsed scientist, recovering journalist and short story writer. Her fiction has appeared in several venues, including Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Apex, and Lightspeed. Queer and Chinese Singaporean, she can be found on Twitter at @halleluyang grumbling about Scandinavian languages and sometimes at misshallelujah.net talking about short SFF. When she grows up she wants to be a dragon.

The Old Man in the Kitchen

by Patricia Russo

My sister Nika and I never liked going to Grannie Luvan’s place. She kept an old man in her kitchen who was said to be some relation of sorts to her husband. The old man would sit in a spot near the stove, and though he had no use of his legs at all, he kept a stick with him always, and sometimes he’d be twisting the stick in his hands with a look on his face like that of somebody struggling through a storm. And often he’d be muttering to himself, or shouting, and more than once we saw him bite his own lip hard enough to make the blood spurt.

He terrified us.

There were some in the settlement said that he’d stolen that stick from the six-fingered people that lived in the forest, and others said it had been given to him by the Queen of the Rat Folk, for he’d snatched her youngest son away from a mob of our own folk who were set on murder and returned the ratling safe to their warren kingdom in the broken lands, and still others said the old man had made the stick himself, all alone at the top of Candle Hill, in the space of the darkest hour of the darkest night of the darkest year—that time when the clouds got so thick that noon was called the pale midnight—but whichever story was told, everybody agreed that the old man in the kitchen did things with that stick, the sort of things that were only talked about in whispers.

Our mother was a third cousin to Grannie Luvan, and she used to pay her a visit once a month or so. Whenever she told us to get ourselves presentable, for we were off to see her cousin, Nika and I would beg and plead with her not to make us go. Then Mother would say Grannie Luvan was lonely often, with her husband being dead and her having no children of her own, and though the other grannies of the settlement visited her occasionally, Grannie Luvan liked it best when we came, for children in the house lifted her heart. And it was true enough that Grannie Luvan would smile when she saw Nika and me, and give us honey bread and sometimes a toy she’d got off a traveling trader. All the same, we always wound up in the kitchen, Mother and Grannie Luvan chatting over tea, and Nika and me eating our honey bread in silence and staring at the old man by the stove, even when he had his chin down on his chest, snoring away the afternoon.

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