The Dark Magazine - Issue 20 (January 2017) by Prime Books

Author:Prime Books [Books, Prime]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2017-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

More than halfway through spring, the ground’s still almost hard as it was in mid-January. The last shaded knolls of snow finally sank about a week ago, leaving patches of grit on winter-squashed grass in the backyard. Filth gathers like crumbled shadows under the boundary’s split timber fences. Weathered barriers divide dirt for the living from that for the dead, keeping ever-fallow acres separate from budding maples and crabapple trees, and from planting-fields in the back forty beyond.

In the distance, a range of low mountains gently curves across the horizon. Each greystone peak is bare and blunt as a molar. Six or seven of the things are pressed close together, so’s the ridge as a whole looks to Bets like a broken set of dentures. Closer to home, between the rusted swing-set she used to ride for hours—failing to muster enough courage to leap off the seat at its highest point, to wind up and let go, to fly —and the ploughed rows waiting for the new season’s crop, three soft hillocks push their swollen bellies out of the earth.

Until last autumn there’d only been the two big ones on the left, bulging side by side, reminding Bets of that joke about Dolly Parton lying in the bathtub. Islands in the Stream . Now that the third’s been added, a much smaller mound they barely got covered in burlap before the blizzards set in, she thinks the trio looks more like a giant snowman got drunk and toppled over, his soft noggin slumped to the right. It was a hasty job, building that grave, but Mamma only became more pig-headed when upset, less inclined to listen to—much less heed—anyone else’s advice. She’d wanted that soil piled high while the body was still warm, understand? It wasn’t skimping if it meant getting her own way. Hell no it wasn’t. Just get the burial over and done.

Don’t cut no spirit ditch round the site , she’d said to the teamsters Daddy had booked for the job ages ago. Waste of time. Any soul what can scrape its way free from all this ain’t going to trip up on a little ol’ channel in the ground. Don’t be too precious with the backhoe; the hole ain’t got to be perfect, just deep. Y’all know the drill. Speaking of which: don’t fetch no auger for this dig, no concrete, none of them posts neither, nor them two-by-fours, nor them planks. Why fuss with tombs or chambers when already we’re sinking a case of good steel down there? How many coffins does one corpse need, anyways? This ain’t ancient Egypt and sure as hell ain’t no pharaohs round here. Waste of good money, that’s all this burial business is, a waste of good goddamn cash. Go’on and bulldoze the dirt back where it were scooped from; we’ll tamp it ourselves later on. Nope, nope. Don’t bother stacking no cairn over the whole shebang. Our goats can’t graze on no goddamn heap of stones.

When it came

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