The Dark Issue 95 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: 2023-03-31T16:24:10+00:00

Ash Caballero can be found online at ashcaballero.com or on Twitter @halfdeadz. Her flash fiction has appeared in the Tales to Terrify podcast.

Hand-Me-Down

by Seán Padraic Birnie

The monitor only allowed one-way communication, so although Danni could listen to her child if she needed to, she could not respond, like a one-way mirror, she thought, in a police interrogation room, but then the baby couldn’t respond anyway, not yet, and her brother had given her the device. It was the first, she imagined, of many hand-me-downs, and she was glad of the savings. She didn’t need all the bells and whistles, and they weren’t cheap, and she wasn’t rich.

At first the little image had proved a source of fascination: Sophie’s cot, even when empty—the little view into the back bedroom, into her baby daughter’s world, which on the monitor always looked a little different, a different cot, in a different room, and a different baby under the blankets. She hadn’t been sure she really needed it, because even in those first few weeks, with all the disruption, Sophie had slept like an angel, as Danni’s mother had informed her several times, whilst cooing, and had asked Sophie herself, just like a little angel, aren’t you dear? but her brother Jack had really recommended it—he was the sort of person who always liked some new device to fiddle with, and seemed keen to pass it on, get some more use out of it, he said, having purchased an unnecessary upgrade, slow its momentum towards it final destination as landfill—and, well, free was free. You couldn’t argue. And she found she liked it. Or at least that it interested her in an idle kind of way. Just looking at it sometimes. The different cot in the different room, a different baby under the blankets. Through its poor resolution it was like seeing through a gauze. In those days, as she felt herself going slowly mad, it provided some measure of distraction from the torpor that had claimed her since the birth.

Sometimes it was like looking through the screen as through a window into the baby’s room; other times, as if the monitor, hoarding secret depth, contained its own room, its own world, beneath the plastic of the screen. She wondered why she found it so peculiar. Her mother, to whom such things were deeply alien (we never had anything like this when you were a child!), and who hated phones, had never owned one, immediately took to it. It’s better than telly! she said, on several occasions, as she spied on her granddaughter in the back bedroom.

Those first two months of her life, Sophie was the calmest child. Danni’s mother was shocked: neither of her two children, she pointed out repeatedly, had let her get much rest. She made it sound like an injustice. But it was an injustice that would soon receive some small redress, because it was around that time, when Danni would find herself staring idly at the little low-res image of the different cot in that different room, that Sophie’s angelic period came to an end.

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