The Dark Issue 82 by The Dark Magazine

Author:The Dark Magazine [The Dark Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark fantasy, fantasy, horror, magazine
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2022-02-27T01:13:02+00:00

Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. She is the author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels for adults, teens, and children, as well as a number of short stories and essays. She lives in the Pacific Northwest. Find her newsletter at kaliwallace.substack.com.

Mother

by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Mother brushes my hair, one hundred strokes with the silver comb, each night before I go to bed. She does it while I’m sitting at my vanity, counting off strokes one at a time in that bored, flat voice of hers. Sometimes I like to watch us in the mirror as she does it, a mother and daughter engaged in this loving act of care, but tonight Mother’s face is pale and angry and when she hits a tangle at the base of my neck, instead of pinching off the hair with one hand and carefully working through the tangle with the comb in the other, she yanks the comb down, the corners of her mouth pinching upwards in a smile at my anguished shriek of surprise. After that I keep my eyes closed.

Sometimes, when Mother is obedient, I like to comb her hair out, pretend that I am the mother and she is the child. I am always careful to start at the base of her hair and work my way up, never letting the comb catch on a single snarl of mother’s rich thick hair. But tonight will not be one of those nights. When mother counts off the one-hundred stroke she does it with a sigh, pulling the teeth out of my hair before the stroke is well and truly done. When I open my eyes she pulls some strands of my hair from the comb and places them in the garbage bin like a real mother should.

But when I go to kiss her on the cheek and bid her good night she recoils from my lips. And when I say, Good night, Mother, as she is walking from my room, she turns around at the doorframe. Her eyes catch mine in the vanity mirror and as we stare at each other she says, I’m not your fucking mother.

Mother is a dreamer, her head in the clouds. This makes her an indifferent cook; sometimes the porridge will turn out fine, other times I will have to discreetly pick out flecks of black from the dried out slop and try to swallow down what remains. Anything more complicated than eggs often turns out bad, the eggs are often bad as well. Father pointedly doesn’t say anything when these things happen and I know it is my fault so I don’t say anything either. One time, early on, she did something to the food, I’m not sure what. It made Father sick for days and Mother cried and cried like nothing else, a hopeless sort of sobbing, when she realized it wouldn’t kill him.

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