The Dark Issue 73 by Frances Ogamba

Author:Frances Ogamba [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2021-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Sara Saab was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She now lives in North London, where she has perfected her resting London face. Her current interests are croissants and emojis thereof, amassing poetry collections, and coming up with a plausible reason to live on a sleeper train. Sara’s a 2015 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. You can find her on Twitter as @fortnightlysara and at fortnightlysara.com.

Lipopire

by Jack Klausner

It’s my lunch break and I’m standing outside Victoria’s Secret, looking at the models in the posters, looking at the mannequins, when it finds me for the first time.

It comes up behind me. Sneaks up. Whispers right into my ear.

It whispers, you don’t look like them.

It whispers, you can’t wear those things.

Breath, tickling my ear, like something delicate burrowing inside my head.

I stare at the posters and mannequins. The lace and the straps. The pale, perfect, toned lean bodies. I stare at them for a little longer, my reflection half-there in the glass, people passing behind me.

And I whisper back—or maybe it’s just inside my head—I whisper, “I know.”

That afternoon, in the office. I’m on my phone, scrolling semi-aimlessly, reading about diets, reading about exercise programmes.

Dinner that night and I don’t even remember what happened, not really. I’m chopping lettuce and my boyfriend’s in the shower. He just got home from work. I’m chopping lettuce. Chopping cherry tomatoes. There’s this not-right feeling, and I keep thinking about the posters, the mannequins in the window. I keep thinking about long thin arms and legs and slender torsos, slightly concave stomachs.

This faint, weak voice in my head, more breath than anything, maybe just the wind getting through the gap at the edge of the window, maybe just me, maybe nothing.

This not-right feeling.

I chop cucumber.

My boyfriend comes into the kitchen, a towel wrapped around his waist. He stands next to me, smelling of mint shower gel, and he says, “Salad?”

I chop mushrooms into thin slices.

He’s having chicken, I tell him, but I’m fine with the just the salad.

This not-right feeling.

I chop spring onions.

Certain dieting brands, they refer to calories as sins.

Saturday morning and I’m rummaging through the wardrobe in the drawn-curtain dimness of our bedroom. My boyfriend’s still in bed, this lumpy shape beneath the duvet.

After a while he mumbles, “What’re you doing?”

I tell him I’m looking for my joggers.

He says they’re in a pile on the floor my side of the bed, where I dumped them last night, and I tell him no, not those. I need my presentable ones, the ones I could go outside in. Not the around-the-house ones, with their old paint flecks and torn left ankle.

“What do you want the good ones for?” he asks.

I say I’m going for a run.

Pause. Outside, a bird is singing.

“Really?”

Yes.

“What for?”

I breathe in. There’s all this stuff I could say, but I can’t be bothered with the debate, so I just say it again: I’m going for a run.

Depending on your weight and how much effort you put in, the average person burns between three-hundred and five-hundred calories if they run for thirty minutes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.