Black Static #63 (May-June 2018) by 2018 May-Jun (epub)

Author:2018 May-Jun (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: New Horror Fiction & Film
Publisher: TTA Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Matt Thompson is an experimental musician and writer of unsettling short stories whose work has been published at Aliterate, Kaleidotrope and many others. He has also released over fifteen albums of music on a plethora of formats. When not writing or playing in his London eyrie he likes to brood on which unpleasant surprises life might have in store for him. Find him online at matt-thompson.com, and on Twitter at @24wordLoop.

PYRALIDAE

KRISTI DeMEESTER

Josephine Burke’s father had been in the dirt for a little under two weeks when she came back to the orchard and pushed her fingers deep into fallow earth. The air lay heavy across her tongue. A damp, worming thing that she drew deep inside of her lungs and held there until everything around her seemed to go still and quiet in a way it hadn’t been in a long, long while.

He would have wanted it this way. For her to come back – even after all this time – and pick up the thing that had driven him into the grave. Ever since she’d left – eighteen years old and wanting to run – he’d been telling her she would come back. The trees were a part of her blood. No amount of pushing it away was going to change what she was.

And so she’d signed the documents the lawyer slid in front of her and then the land belonged to her. All of those acres still alive and beating with the old memories of the girl she used to be. Now, standing under open sky gone gray with the threat of an early spring storm, she didn’t think twice about the life she had shed to come back here. This was right. This was who she was supposed to be. Her father’s daughter and finally come home.

She stood in the middle of the rows of trees and breathed in the scent of orange blossoms and forgot the look on Alex’s face when she told him she was leaving. “An orange grove? Oh, Josie. I can’t come with you. I have too much here,” he’d said. She hadn’t told him she never wanted him to come with her. Even when he kissed her that last time and whispered into her hair that he loved her, that he would come out to visit as soon as he could, that they could make the long-distance thing work, she knew she would let him go, and the thought didn’t bother her.

It would take some time, some stumbling and re-learning everything she’d forgotten, but it would come, and the thing her father had built with his hands would live again.

And so she rose each morning and walked the trees, and she opened the mail, and she did all of the things she thought she was supposed to do.

The package came when the first round of blossoms dropped brown, rotted petals scattered in the dirt. The delivery person was nothing more than a boy. A blotchy face under a mop of hair the color of straw lit up by the blaze of a setting sun.

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