The Dark Issue 40 by The Dark Magazine

Author:The Dark Magazine [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2018-08-28T13:09:22+00:00

David Martin is a writer, musician and journalist from York, UK. His short fiction has appeared in Black Static, Litro, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, and Unthology, among others. His story collection Only Shadows Move can be downloaded for free here: www.smashwords.com/books/view/586326. Find him on Twitter @lordsludge.

Maria’s Children

by Tobi Ogundiran

There wasn’t much for us boys of that little fishing village to do but fish. Wake, fish, eat, fish, sleep, fish, rinse and repeat. It was one endless cycle of sea-worn canoes and heavy nets and stinking fish. But it was the life we were used to, and we were content with it; we knew no better—there wasn’t much to imagine about the world outside of Badagry. For us, the world began somewhere just after the horizon of the Atlantic and ended on the bridge connecting Badagry to Lagos. Only the elders ventured over that bridge, and for the sole purpose of selling fish, nothing more. The boys remained on the gulf, playing at being fishermen, venturing far out onto the sea against all admonitions of our fathers. They were away, after all. They would never find out.

And so we took to venturing out onto the sea every weekend when our fathers left for Lagos with truckloads of a weeks’ worth of fish to be sold, daring each other to see how far we could go, to see who was so “chickenshit” and “pissy-panted” as to sail back for the familiarity of shore and solid ground at the first sign of a rogue wave (and thus endure a week of relentless ribbing until the next week’s chickenshit was crowned and inducted into the cramped halls of Chickentoilets). Only my older brother Muktar, and his two closest friends Soji and Yakubu hadn’t been inducted into this Hall of Shame. They were the boldest, the wildest, and the oldest—they were all fifteen; the rest of us chickenshits ranged from between ten to thirteen. They were our heroes, these three. They represented everything we aspired to be, and we wanted to please them in any way possible.

The jaunts out onto the unknown waters began as something of a test of masculinity amongst us boys, and my brother, who always went the farthest, was soon recognized as the leader our group. One day he went so far out that he vanished into the thickness of that early morning mist which had settled on to the Atlantic like a blanket of depression and we were reduced to mere silhouettes of ourselves, panic-stricken and wondering what had happened to Muktar. We stood there, shivering in the canoes, dancing precariously on the waves, all thinking the same thing but never daring to voice it: Muktar was dead; something out there had gotten him. But then Muktar appeared out from the mist, the grinning hero, clutching a decayed box to his chest.

“Treasure!” he bellowed, his grin wide. “I found treasure, boys!”

We hurried back to our house, this party of eight boys, and locked ourselves in the little room Muktar and I shared.

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