The Dark Issue 98 by Sam J. Miller

Author:Sam J. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2023-06-27T19:45:58+00:00

Steve Rasnic Tem is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. He has published over five hundred short stories in his forty-plus year career. Some of his best are collected in Thanatrauma and Figures Unseen from Valancourt Books, and in The Night Doctor & Other Tales from Macabre Ink.

A Ritual for Pleasure and Atonement

by Kristi DeMeester

I stopped eating on a Sunday.

It felt right. That most holy of days; the purging of fleshly desire laid bare on an altar of my own making. If there was any God lingering in the holy dust I carried in my lungs, I could taste nothing other than the emptiness I would craft for myself.

So I balanced the final bit on the edge of my knife and pressed it against my tongue, wishing I could pass the serrated blade into my throat again and again and just be done with it. But my fingers were disobedient, clumsy things, and instead I smiled at Michael and chewed like a good boy, all white straight teeth and perfectly combed hair, and made a small sound that was something like appreciation.

Michael drained the last bit of his Bloody Mary and smiled back. Later, he would taste of tomato and pepper, and I would hold my breath when he kissed me because I could never abide either of the flavors coating his tongue. In my mind, I would repeat the prayers I’d learned as an altar boy; the names of the flaming angels who stood watch over the earth tumbling forth as a litany to hold up as our bodies carried on in the act of memorization of the other. Every curve. Every muscle. Every bone. All of it parceled out in the dark, our breath coming heavy and fast, and still there were the angels because Michael was named after one, and he’d started to keep his eyes screwed shut tight when he came. I told myself it wasn’t because he couldn’t bear to look at me anymore. I told myself it wasn’t because of the extra thirty pounds I’d gained over the past six months.

There had been a time before when I’d done the same. In college, halfway through my junior year, I spent the winter learning to hate myself, and the solution was so easy. So simple. I’d spent my life denying my body all of the things it wanted. The good Catholic son. The finality of that last bit of food was not so different as the clandestine sweat of my carnal desire for muscled, sinful, unholy bodies.

Michael and I left whatever new, trendy restaurant it was and walked back to our house with the backs of our hands touching. It was something Michael liked. This barest form of intimacy. Our cells dying off and commingling at this most surface level. Once, I’d teased him that his form of romance was nothing more than an obsession with the macabre, and he’d bared his teeth at me, a ghoul’s moan

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