The Dark Issue 67 by Jessica Reisman

Author:Jessica Reisman [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2020-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Osahon Ize-Iyamu is a Nigerian writer of speculative fiction. He is a graduate of the Alpha Writers Workshop and has been published (or has work forthcoming) in Fantasy, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons. You can find him online @osahon4545.

My Wife

by Ernest O. Ògúnyẹm

“When you see the kob antelope on the way to the river—

Leave your arrow in its quiver,

And let the dead depart in peace.”—A Yoruba song.

My wife is tall and slender, and on her bones she wears a shiny brown skin. Her lotion is a brown oily substance that smells of nicotiana. On most nights when I visit, she is always seated at the edge of the big bed in her room applying the lotion on her thighs. With the index of her left hand she would scoop some unto the palm of her right hand. Then she would rub her palms together in the gentle way a pigeon would sit on a blade of grass; in that same way, she would run her hands over her thighs, down to her slender hairless legs: the left first, then the right.

When she finished doing this, she’d cover the lotion, which is always in a small calabash, and place it in one of the drawers of the cabinet next to the bed. Then she’d rise and walk up to me.

She just finished applying the lotion and she is walking up to me now. I am standing somewhere close to the door of the room, my back pressed to the green wall.

“My own,” she calls me. She is now standing before me, the fragrance of her lotion fills my nostrils like fresh air. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

My wife never wants to see me worried. She does everything she can to make me happy, because, she always says, your happiness is my happiness. When I have tests or exams, or both, my wife comes to assist me. Sometimes she shows me all the answers during my visit, before I wake for school the next day. When I need things, like money, she drops them by my bedside before I wake up.

She palms my face and arcs her neck to whisper something in my ears. “Is it Mommy?”

“No,” I say. My wife knows the only thing that makes me act this way is when I have issues with Mommy. But today, I had no issue with Mommy; it was with Sanjo, my elder brother, that I had an issue. I told her this.

“What happened? Do you want to share it?”

I don’t want to share it, because I don’t want to hurt her. She understands my silence.

She takes my hand in hers and we walk out of the house into the night, through bushes of flowers and shrubs. Fireflies color the night with light from their bodies, a few of them rest in her hair. She pauses, drops my hand, and plucks two flowers from a tree. The stems from which the flowers were plucked squeak. She arcs her neck, and a branch, the one with the stems from which the flowers were plucked, lengthens.

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