The Dark Issue 90 by The Dark Magazine

Author:The Dark Magazine [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2022-10-30T19:44:49+00:00

Seán Padraic Birnie is a writer and photographer from Brighton, England. His debut collection of short stories, I Would Haunt You if I Could, was published by Undertow Publications in 2021. His work has appeared in venues such as Black Static, Litro, BFS Horizons, Shadows & Tall Trees, and The Dark, and is upcoming in Interzone and Best British Short Stories 2022. More of his work can be seen at seanbirnie.com.

Sirena

by Lavie Tidhar

When I was eight years old and my brother Jamie was nine, our father took us with him on one of his business trips. My father was a salesman, often on the road, and my mother was away that time, visiting a dying aunt in another state. So my father had to take us with him.

For Jamie and me it was an adventure. We sat together in the backseat and sang song and made faces at the cars behind us. For my father it must have been a trial, but he never showed it. We accompanied him to meetings in dreary little offices in business parks where he would take his samples out—potato chips and off-brand soft drinks and mini chocolate bars. Everything you needed to supply the shelves of a vending machine.

Did you ever notice how vending machines are everywhere? My father would always point them out to us as we passed one in a shopping mall or a parking garage, at the doctors, in school. They were always in the background to people’s lives, humming to themselves in some strange, secretive language. Their very purpose was to lure you, and you never really noticed when one hooked you. You put your money in and reached inside the bowels of the beast, grasping for that chocolate bar. You never realised just how many of them there were.

They hid in plain sight.

That night we stayed in a little cheap motel off the highway. The room was musty and the window stuck half-way up. It rained outside and the air was humid. Black cars dotted the parking lot like dead flies.

My father took one bed and me and Jamie shared the other.

There was a vending machine, of course. It crouched in the reception hallway, an old model, dusty on top. I could not see where it was plugged in to the wall. It loomed, humming to itself, flashing red. Candy seemed to swirl inside it in a luring pattern. I had since learned it was called a planogram, the way the products are arranged inside.

Jamie stared at the chocolate bars with hunger.

“No, Jamie,” I said. “Don’t.”

He didn’t take his eyes of them. He was hooked, caught in the machine’s siren song.

“Come on, Jamie,” I said, pulling him by the hand. Our father, oblivious, went to the machine and fed it quarters. When we got to our room he assembled our dinner on the bed. Potato chips and pop tarts and cheese crackers and trail mix, and a can of soda to share.

“All of God’s bounty,” my father said, and spread his arms wide like a proud hunter.

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