The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Stone Hand
by Kim Richards

“Momma! Momma!” Angelie shouted as she darted inside through the back kitchen door. She skidded to a halt, holding her side as she caught her breath.

After a moment, she straightened and wiped a few stray hair strands out of her eyes. Then she stepped forward and tugged on her mother’s apron. “Momma.”

Her momma was a pale woman; thin as bones. Her height towered over the rest of her relatives, even the men, and forced her to hunch over as she did now while slicing apples on the kitchen counter.

“Don’t bother me, girl unless you want me to put you to work,” she said. “Go out and play.”

“I was playing when I saw a hand in the lake over near the old wooden bridge.”

The woman’s hand holding the paring knife, paused. “There’s no hand in the lake. Damn your imagination.”

“Is too,” Angelie put her hands on her small hips. “It’s grey and sticks up like it wants me to grab it.”

Her mother dropped the knife and spun around. She grabbed the girl by the shoulders, lifting her a few inches above the wooden floor.

“Stay out of that lake; you hear me? The water is poisonous. Say you did see a hand in the lake. Then it belongs to a dead man. You want to be dead too?”

Eyes wide, Angelie whispered, “No.”

“Good, now scoot. Go see if the hens left us any eggs.”

The woman watched her little girl shuffle out the kitchen door without a word. She knew about the hand in the lake and cursed the recent drought that revealed the thing.  She was there when the man was sentenced and watched as he turned to stone. She stood on the bridge over the murky lake as he was thrown in.

“Evil bastard,” she muttered and then returned to slicing her apples.

Fiction © Copyright Kim Richards
Image courtesy of Pixabay.