The Dark Magazine

House does not want you here. Does not want your laughter in its halls. Does not want your gentle breathing at night. Your cheerful demeanor. Your smiling brood. It does not want your hopeful words to echo off its walls. Your quiet murmurs. Your awkward silence. Your profanities, inanities, the slickness of your sex. Your […] The post House appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

She was drowning, gasping brine down her raw and waterlogged throat, so I took her. And why not? This is all you know me for. I take children. I bring them to my cave beneath the sea, I tuck them inside, and I eat them. You know why I do it. My own children stolen. […] The post Love Sharp Enough to Rend appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

He was sitting in one of the booths at the Conqueror, tending a pint, something golden and silty, alone, his phone facedown on the sticky table, his gaze fixed on some invisible object in the middle distance. The door swung to behind me, shutting out an afternoon of implacably overcast sky, of unrelenting drizzle: I […] The post Nothing is Wasted appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

OBITUARY. At special behest, we mark this October 9th, 1832, the passing of one Abraham Farley, eighteen years of age, of late a hired hand in The Prospect of Pye, Smithfield. Farley was laid to rest in Blackshaw Cemetery and will be mourned by his mother and sister in York. “Come to me, all ye […] The post In Hades, He Lifted Up His Eyes appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

Dorothy is thin, predominantly. Like most rich people in a certain age bracket, she wears fussy, preppy neutrals, and her hair is expensively coloured, though threadbare. Her pink scalp edges out from the corners of her up-do. When she smiles the soft tissue of her face shifts into unnatural shapes; I am able to trace […] The post Mal de Caribou appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

There came a day, six years into my marriage, when my husband was hit by a van. It skidded on black ice in a car park, and crushed him against a post. He did not suffer, they told me later, in the hospital. Sure, I said. He wasn’t really the type. My son Aaron and […] The post Knotlings appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

At first, she thinks it’s yet another accident, here on this straight stretch of back road treacherous only for the speed it provokes in the young and the impatient. Another accident, right where that Nelson girl was killed last summer in fact, and Lynn lifts her foot from the accelerator, squints her eyes against the […] The post Shrine appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

TOOTH “Isn’t this exciting!” said my mother as she plucked my tooth from the flesh of minced pork encased within the half-bitten fish ball. Nestled in the center of my mother’s palm was the small canine. Blood from my gums found a home in the creases and lines of her hand, overfilling them before dripping […] The post Tooth, Teeth, Tongue appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

It started with him taking forever in the bathroom—thirty-minute showers, an hour in the tub, a shower in the morning and every evening. On weekends, he started having a bath at midday as well. I assumed the obvious thing, in terms of what he was probably up to. But then I added it up one […] The post Thermophile appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

They found the first coffin in North America, in Vancouver, BC, at a graveyard. The slender mahogany box was no larger than the forearm of a child of ten. The workers were digging up a slot for an upcoming burial of an important political figure that I were hired to document. This was meant to […] The post Missing Dolls Around the World appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

Nothing lasts forever. Not Christmas, with its bright lights and spangled promises of good things that never quite come to pass. Not the dreams of magic that it conjures for children everywhere. Not even Krampus, with his sack of coal and his cold heart. Even villains grow old and achy, age softening their sharp edges, […] The post And A Piece of Coal Where Her Heart Once Beat appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

I kept my right eye closed because I saw ghosts through it. My parents thought they were imaginary friends I would soon outgrow—they weren’t. But what did they know anyway? “One—or two?” my optometrist asked, switching lenses. “Two,” I said. He repeated the process until I recited the words on the eye exam chart a […] The post The Catcher in the Eye appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

Mandy finds the jar of baby teeth in her mother’s sock drawer, the week after she turns eleven. Daydreams about a frothy fairy with butter-blonde curls leaving coins under her pillow have long since evaporated; this is the first of many horse girl summers. The jar, white china with hand-painted blue flowers, is nestled between […] The post Hundreds of Little Absences appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

This is a work of the author’s imagination, an alchemy of memory and soul’s longing. Beth joined the turn-lefters, pulled off the highway, and found a park beneath a giant fig tree before the twins even registered. Then heads turned like open-mouthed clowns. Confusion; at last, the dawning. They’d been restless, constrained by seatbelts and […] The post Send in the Clowns appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

There was nothing here but swirling grey fog, and me. The laces around my waist were cinched so tight I could hardly breathe. A comb threaded through my hair, and in my hands I held an apple. For the longest time I sat in the haze, listening to silence. Then, footsteps. Your face swam into […] The post Lace, Comb, Apple appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

Every evening we tie Mama down. It’s my job to fold a clean rag for her to bite on, so she won’t hurt her tongue. Three folds, hot dog style. Now that I’m thirteen Baba even lets me place it between her teeth. Ray, four years younger, is too little to do anything except watch, […] The post Eating Bitterness appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

In time, the dedicated Spelunker will grow to instinctively recognize unreal architecture, senses picking up the minutiae that others miss. Wind coming from impossible directions; shadows cast at awkward angles; a dearth of wildlife; a strange doppler effect to sound, as though distance between source and listener stretched like taffy. Details and nothing more, but […] The post The Spelunker’s Guide To Unreal Architecture appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

I dusted the window panes and rolled up the curtains because Akwaugo was visiting. I first met her at the Lagos book festival. Someone in the crowd had stood up and asked a question on race in Africa, especially in black Africa. Did it exist? If we were all cleped ‘dark skinned’, was racism existent […] The post The Urn appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

I always said I got to get out of here, but that was just talk. Now I for sure mean it. Anyway, I’m almost sixteen, so I have to go. Ma and Pa say sixteen is the limit for boys staying in the house. My two older brothers took off when they hit sixteen, one […] The post Crooked House appeared first on The Dark Magazine.

Time means less when you’re dead, and you’ve been dead a long while. Someone always brings you back, though. This go-around, it’s two little girls with a Ouija board, playing at your grave. Victoria Waite, Victoria Waite, kill my parents so I can stay up late! The rhyme has changed again, it seems. It doesn’t […] The post Forward, Victoria appeared first on The Dark Magazine.