The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Black Queen of Briar End
by Kathleen McCluskey

   Wonderland had two horizons.

   At the eastern edge where the sun burned itself into exhaustion, the Red Queen kept her garden in hysterical bloom. Roses split open too wide. Tulips arched like throats about to scream. The air was thick with honey and applause and nothing was permitted to wilt. Even the hedgehog trembled in bright, obedient terror.

   At the western edge, where the light thinned into violet and the trees grew thorns instead of leaves, the Black Queen kept her court.

   Her castle was grown, not built. Spires of briar twisted upward like ribs. The moat was a mirror of ink. No one painted her roses. They bled naturally.

   The Red Queen ruled what was seen in Wonderland.

   Her sister ruled what was avoided.

   Travelers who wandered too far from the croquet court found the laughter fading behind them. The path narrowed. The chessboard stones cracked and gave way to damp soil. There were bones there, small delicate things picked clean and polished by careful teeth.

   The Jabberwocky slept at the Black Queen’s gates, its vast body coiled around thorned pillars like a living drawbridge. Its eyes rolled under translucent lids, dreaming of necks and soft armor. When it breathed, the trees leaned away.

   He belonged to her.

   All the creatures that slithered out of nightmares belonged to her. Bandersnatches with wet fur and backward knees. Things that grinned too wide and hummed before they fed.

   The Red Queen and her Heart generals called them monsters.

   The Black Queen called them subjects.

   Once each year, when the roses are at their most vibrant, the sisters meet at the center of Wonderland where the light failed to choose a side. The ground there was part ash and part grass. 

   “You let your… subjects stray,” the Red Queen said. Her silk skirt snapped like banners in a relentless wind. “Three children missing from the tea fields.”

   “They crossed into my realm,” said the Black Queen. Her voice was as calm as the falling ash. Her gown moved like slow smoke, stitched with the shimmer of beetle wings. A crown of blackened gold sat upon her head, delicate skulls woven into its arches so finely they looked like lace. “You should fence your borders.”

   “You could send them back.”

   “Sometimes I do.”

   The Red Queen smiled, sharp and white. “In pieces.”

   The Black Queen regarded her sister with a quiet patience that had always unsettled the court at Briar End. The Red Queen burned with color and temper, she seemed carved from something colder, like the deep roots of the forest that bordered the land.

   “You mistake hunger for cruelty.” She finally said.

   Behind her the Jabberwocky stirred.

   The creature’s enormous body shifted against the briar towers, scales grinding together with a deep, rasping sound. One vast eyelid opened. Gold and ancient, focused on the Red Queen that was neither loyalty nor malice. Thorned barnacles snapped softly beneath its weight as it uncoiled another length of its body. The air filled with the sound of restless wings that were deciding to stretch.

   For the first time the Red Queen’s smile faltered.

   At that same moment, the soldiers along the Black Queen’s walls moved.

   They did not shuffle or look to one another for direction, The change came all at once, like a single thought passing through a hundred minds. Grey banners stitched with black spades and clubs snapped in the wind as the ranks straightened.

   Every helmet turned toward the border.

   Across the field of endless daylight lay the Red Queen’s Heart army. She watched the formation gather itself with mechanical precision.

   “You bring your pet to frighten me?”

   “They wake when the balance tilts, they always have.” The Jabberwocky, now fully awake, centered its eyes on the far, sun filled horizon.

   The Red Queen laughed, high and brittle. “You wouldn’t dare.”

   The Black Queen regarded her, the wind moving slowly between the folds of her gown while her banners stirred above the quiet ranks behind her. Then she stepped forward, crossing the unseen line between their domains.

   The grass beneath her boot instantly withered and turned to ash. It did not burn or smoke. The life in it simply ended, the green collapsing into a soft grey powder that lifted and floated in the breeze.

   Behind her the Jabberwocky rose higher, stretching its great span of wings, while along the walls the soldiers lowered their weapons in unison.

   “You forget yourself, sister.” The Red Queen said.

   The Black Queen’s voice remained calm. “You have had your endless afternoon,” she said softly. “But every garden must know the evening.”

   And she took another step.

Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Borrowed Air
by Kathleen McCluskey

   They called me lucky for years after the fire, as if survival was a trophy handed out to the most deserving. Neighbors brought casseroles and hugged my shoulders with careful hands. Reporters used words like miracle and blessing while the house behind them unveiled its blackened ribcage to the winter sky. My sister’s name was spoken softly, reverently and mine was spoken with relief. I was the spared thing. The proof that tragedy has limits.

   I learned to carry that word like an heirloom. Lucky. I polished it. I repeated it until it was true.

   The first time I saw her was in a dim apartment hallway years later, when the building’s ancient radiator hissed and filled the air with a metallic vapor. The mist did not disperse. It thickened. It drew inward, folding over itself with deliberate grace, until it suggested the curve of a shoulder. The fall of something like hair. Pale ribbons drifted outward from her body as if she was woven from breath made visible. She was neither solid nor transparent.

   The sound reached me a moment later. It was breathing, but not the breathing of a single chest. It layered upon itself, dozens of soft inhalations overlapping , rising and fraying into shallow exhalations. Beneath it threaded a fragile rasp, the raw drag of air forced through heat and ash.

   I did not scream. I did not move.

   She did not approach. She simply occupied the space, as though the air had decided to remember a shape it once held.

   I moved cities. I changed apartments. I kept the lights on and the windows cracked, convinced that circulation would prevent her from forming. It did not matter. She gathered wherever the air lingered long enough to grow heavy. Hotel rooms. Office stairwells. The dark reflection of a mirror at night. Always at a distance. Always patient. When she lifted her arms, the drifting strands extended and recoiled, testing the space between us without crossing it.

   Therapists told me that trauma imprints itself onto the senses. They said my mind was recreating the conditions of the fire in order to process why I survived. They said the mind prefers ghosts instead of guilt because ghosts are easier to fight.

   They did not know about the door.

   When the smoke alarm split the night air, I was awake. I had smelled it first, that bitter sweetness that did not belong in a sleeping house. The hallway beyond my room churned with black heat, the ceiling groaned as if something large shifted above. My sister’s room was only three steps away. I remember the carpet scorching my bare feet as I crossed the distance. I remember wrapping my hand around her doorknob.

   It was hot enough to burn but not yet unbearable. There was still time. I could feel the house straining to breathe, a fragile pause.

   I called her name. I heard something inside. A cough? Or perhaps only the roar gathering beneath us. The sound from the first floor came then, a violent concussion of splintering beams and shattering glass. The heat surged up the stairwell in one single, monstrous exhale. In that moment I understood two futures with clarity that has never left me. In one, I opened the door and stepped into the furnace, in the other, I ran.

   The body is an honest creature. It chooses survival without consulting the soul.

   I chose the back stairs. I chose cold air. I chose lungs that would still work.

   The officials said that the fire spread too quickly for anyone to have saved her. They said the smoke would have taken her before any flame. They said I was a child and couldn’t have altered the inevitable. I let them hand me those conclusions like a blanket.

   She grows denser whenever I remember the heat of that brass knob. The breathing within her thickens. Her layered inhales sharpen into desperate pulls that never quite fill. Tonight she stands at the foot of my bed, vast enough to dim the lamp beside me. The air has become viscous, each breath a measured effort. The drifting strands extend from her and hover inches from my face, cool against my overheated skin.

   I understand now that she is not my sister’s spirit, nor is she a hallucination stitched together from grief. She is the accumulation of unfinished breaths, from hospital rooms, highways and burning houses. She forms wherever survival cleaves cleanly through love and leaves someone standing in the ashes with functioning lungs.

   The strands press softly against my mouth, waiting for invitation rather than forcing entry. The room thins around me as the first thread of borrowed smoke slips past my teeth. Now I finally understand that luck was never what spared me.

   It was vacancy.

Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!