[Dark Magazine 15] • The Dark Issue 15 by Magazine The Dark

Author:Magazine, The Dark [Magazine, The Dark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2016-07-30T18:33:18+00:00

Rhonda Eikamp is orginally from Texas and lives in Germany. Stories of hers have appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Lackington’s, The Journal of Unlikely Cartography and Lightspeed’s “Women Destroy Science Fiction.” She loves exploring the dark side of fairy tales and has come to believe that they only have a dark side.

Hairwork

by Gemma Files

No plant can thrive without putting down roots, as nothing comes from nothing; what you feed your garden with matters, always, be it the mulched remains of other plants, or bone, or blood. The seed falls wherever it’s dropped and grows, impossible to track, let alone control. There’s no help for it.

These are all simple truths, one would think, and yet, they appear to bear infinite repetition. But then, history is re-written in the recording of it, always.

“Ici, c’est elle,” you tell Tully Ferris, the guide you’ve engaged, putting down a pale sepia photograph printed on pasteboard, its corners foxed with age. “Marceline Bedard, 1909—from before she and Denis de Russy met, when she was still dancing as Tanit-Isis. It’s a photographic reference, similar to what Alphonse Mucha developed his commercial art pieces from. I found it in a studio where Frank Marsh used to paint, hidden in the floor. Marsh was Cubist, so his paintings tend to look very deconstructed, barely human, but this is what he began with.”

Ferris looks at the carte, gives a low whistle. “Redbone,” he says. “She a fine gal, that’s for sure. Thick, sweet. And look at that hair.”

“ ‘Redbone?’ I don’t know this term.”

“Pale, ma’am, like cream, lightish-complected—you know, high yaller? Same as me.”

“Oh yes, une métisse, bien sur. She was cagey about her background, la belle Marceline, liked to preserve mystery. But the rumor was her mother came from New Orleans to Marseilles, then Paris, settling in the same area where Sarah Bernhardt’s parents once lived, a Jewish ghetto. When she switched to conducting séances, she took out advertisements claiming her powers came from Zimbabwe and Babylon, darkest Africa and the tribes of Israel, equally. Thus the name: Tanit, after the Berber moon-goddess, and Isis, from ancient Egypt, the mother of all magic.”

“She got something, all right. A mystery to me how she even hold her head up, that much weight of braids on top of it.”

“Mmm, there was an interesting story told about Marceline’s hair—that it wasn’t hers at all but a wig. A wig made from hair, maybe even some scalp, going back a long time, centuries . . . I mean, c’est folle to think so, but that was what they said. Perhaps even as far as Egypt. Her mother’s mother brought it with her, supposedly.”

“Mummies got hair like that, though, don’t they? Never rots. Good enough you can take DNA off it.”

You nod. “And then there’s the tradition of Orthodox Jewish women, Observants, Lubavitchers in particular—they cover their hair with a wig, too, a sheitel, so no one but their husband gets to see it. Now, Marceline was in no way Observant, but I

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