The Dark Issue 93 by James Bennett

Author:James Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2023-02-01T15:34:38+00:00

Phoenix Alexander is a queer, Greek-Cypriot writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror. His stories have appeared in F&SF, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Black Static, among others. Links to all of his work may be found at www.phoenixalexanderauthor.com, and you can follow him on Twitter @dracopoullos.

The Memory Eater

by H. Pueyo

Every day he digs the same grave, and every day he leaves it untouched, a grave as deep as himself. And he digs. He digs. He digs. He will keep digging until his work is done, and it might take years—too many years. The dead call him memory-eater, thief of warmth, consumer of the past, and he is all of that, he won’t deny. He wakes at dawn, and eats. He works, and eats. And, whenever a memory of his own resurfaces, he keeps eating until nothing else remains.

Once, the memory-eater was alive. Not a breathing in-between, with his entourage of ghosts; a man, a boy, a child. Once, before his many deaths, the deaths of his entrails and his soul. Once, before the mortal injuries his body refused to succumb to. But once is no more, and he roams the graveyard, followed but alone.

The memory-eater always has visitors. Solitude is a gift he must earn. His spectral companions, the nightly observers of his efforts, grant him offerings of the lives they already lost: a girl gone too soon, a ruptured marriage, a fever dream. One, most of all, watches, behind a tree, leaning against a tomb, humming as he digs.

“Still hiding?” The memory-eater glances over his shoulder. Central to the graveyard is a tree, an ibirá-pitá, vast, prodigious, ever blooming. Its golden flowers never wither, suspended in eternal beauty, the object of affection of a courtship of loyal bees. Its compound leaves undulate, mocking him. Its thin, sturdy trunk resists the wind. “I can see you.”

A short face appears behind the tree.

The memory-eater beckons him. Sweat runs from his brow to his neck, soaking his battered shirt; the new grave is not as deep as his own; the soil under his nails is black and brown.

The dead boy hides again. Boy, he says, because anyone feels too young for him now. Even a ghost, even the old—he has lived many lives, and this child has died in the beginning of one. The phantoms of his play-doll cemetery complain loudly when he says he has children to care for, but he has been them. He was the old woman who lost her son at the Battle of Boquerón and mourns him to this day, a girl eaten away by syphilis, a wealthy father of ten.

He is older than anybody else.

“I told you I won’t hurt you.” The memory-eater buries the shovel’s blade into gravel and earth. “What happened the first time was a mistake.”

The dead boy looks at him from behind the lower branches, face hidden by yellow flowers and emerald leaves. He can see the striped chiripá the boy still wears tied around his waist, the battered white shirt, his bare feet.

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