The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
The Price of Beauty
by Stacey Turner
Vera assessed the teenage girl who’d just waltzed into the parlor. She supposed the girl was pretty enough, at least under all the face paint. But her clothes! It seemed fashion consisted of less and less material every year. She smoothed her own skirts and ran a hand over her perfectly coiffed, honey hued tresses. This girl might be pretty, but Vera had been beautiful in her day. All her beaus had told her so, an original even. But the very pride she’d taken in her appearance had been her downfall.
She surveyed the bikini clad teenager as she rubbed coconut scented lotion over her already bronzed skin and wrinkled her nose in distaste. Imagine wanting to be brown as a berry. In her youth, she too had gone to extreme lengths to enhance her image. But then the paler the better was the goal of women of class. And though her almond scented lotion and powder had made her skin wondrous pale—porcelain they’d pronounced the shade—so much arsenic intake had proven deadly. Her death had been proclaimed tragic, and while she’d been infuriated at first, she’d gotten used to her afterlife. She could still catch a glimpse of herself in reflective surfaces now and then. She could appear occasionally, and she could be heard by a select few. She’d spent her time watching the passing parade of characters through her home as time drifted slowly by. Vera figured it was much like observing her own little “reality show” as they dubbed them on the viewing box.
But what Vera knew, and the living seemed not to know, was when Death hovered. The corporeal occupants of the house rarely sensed his looming appearance or their impending demise. She didn’t see, but rather sensed his presence, and what she liked to think of as “the black shroud of doom” which hovered around the soon to be dead. And the girl fairly reeked with the stench the aura left behind. Vera wasn’t sure how she understood, but she did, the coconut lotion somehow related to the teen’s forthcoming departure. She drifted off, in search of a mirror, as the girl rushed from the house, beach towel in hand. Vera gave a ghostly sigh as she theorized that some things never change. Beauty kills.
Fiction © Copyright Stacey Turner
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com
More from author Stacey Turner:
Morbid Metamorphosis: Terrifying Tales of Transformation
Metamorphosis occurs every day as caterpillars become sweet fluttering butterflies, tadpoles become gorgeous frog princes and chameleons become one with the beauty of nature – but you won’t find any of that here.
The transformations you’re about to witness are unnatural, sometimes gruesome and deeply psychological. They will make you question reality and take your mind places it was never meant to go.
Terrifying Tales of Transformation from Greg Chapman * Roy C. Booth & R. Thomas Riley * Terri DelCampo * Dave Gammon * Nancy Kilpatrick * Rod Marsden * Jo-Anne Russell * M.J. Preston * Stacey Turner * Tina Piney * Suzanne Robb * Franklin E. Wales * Donna Marie West * Suzie Lockhart * Cameron Trost * Daniel I. Russell * Simon Dewar * Amanda J. Spedding * Ken MacGregor * Erin Shaw * Gregory L. Norris * Nickolas Furr
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Women in Horror Month 9
Spreading the Writer's Word 
An excellent story.