The Dark Issue 6 (Dark Magazine 6)

Calamity, the Silent Trick by Sara Saab
The Three Familiars by Eric Schaller
Mourning Flags and Wildflowers by Patricia Russo
Home at Gloom’s End by Naim Kabir
Cover Art: Changing by Benita WincklerCalamity, the Silent Trick by Sara Saab
They come for me when one of mine is to be dealt the cups.
Where do they find me? I am in the gap between cresting waves. I am in the curl of a leaf. I drift where hearing muffles to a whine, soaked in darkness, riding the clogged shadows behind the beam of a streetlamp.
—Which one? I ask.
—Luccas Santo, they say. I have never heard the name. Until I do.
And then I know him instantly.
We are little but our cups.
Everything else about us is grey and limpid. We are not alive, nor dead; outside of space and unatomic, only bobbing in the surf of time and place as though on an absent-minded whim.
But our cups seem so vivid, so real. So tactile that they anchor us.
We each carry three. Each, no bigger than a thimble, is puissant as a collapsing star. They appear as if painted, in purples, reds, yellows. The delicate filigreed enamel coat is remarkable, decorated by no sentient hand, and a true solid: there are no gaps in its make up, to any magnification. For this reason, it would be impossible for our cups to exist as a human would mean it, in their physics. Just one cup of my triad would be larger in mass than the planet upon which Luccas Santo lives, and breathes.
Yes, he breathes.
For now.
—It is almost the moment to deal him his cups, says Xe.
In our indistinct continuum, we carry the names of our cup triads. It simplifies the nagging needs of sentience.
—Go to him now, Au, urges Rh.
I hoist my cups in their velvet-lined case, a fitting avatar of safekeeping. I do not have a body but I feel their weight everywhere, sinking into the core of me.
Rh and Xe are a buzzing, a greyness, full to brimming with anticipation for my trick.
I go to Luccas Santo.
To my kind, human existence is deafening…