The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Flaming
by Angela Yuriko Smith

Last Sunday, she caught him wearing a dress.

It hadn’t seemed wrong at the time. He had been balancing the budgets at the kitchen table. She had just come home from a sticky day in church. As she walked through the living room, she pulled her navy and polka dot sundress over her head to drape over the couch. She leaned on the back of it so she could slip her stockings off and toss them over the dress.

“Christ, it’s hot,” she said. “You are lucky men don’t have to wear stockings.” And she left to take a shower.20

He stared at her discarded clothes on the back of a couch. She had walked away pasty and sweating, like a hermit crab without a home. He always had admired her powerful feminine aura. Walking away, flabby white ass trembling like gelatin, he realized all her allure and mystique came from her clothes. Without them, she was weak.

The moment of clarity hit
Pow! Bop! Kapow!
into his brain. Superheroes
had secrets in their pantyhose. Superheroes had secrets.

He donned his costume
Bam! Boof! Kablam!
formerly known as hers
and gave himself a mask
of ruby red lips and rouge.
Superheroes had secrets.

The screaming harpy found him
Zap! Karack! Kazaam!
stretching her stockings, getting
stubble in her compact
and exposed his secret identity.
Superheroes had secrets.

Pow! Kablam! Crack!

“I am not right,” he said. She wept, knowing this was the end. She closed her eyes to not see who he was and shivered.

“You are not right,” he said. He touched her cheek, soft and wet, and tasted her tears. He discarded the last of himself then. Her skin was fragrant and warm. She bled without reserve, helpless without her costume. He draped her across his strong shoulders—she was the mink, dangling and limp—and became her. The thought was hot and it burned through his scalp. He was a woman in flames. His new self stood in the bedroom door. Behind him, her naked pieces lay in disarray, powerless.

“To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. Two lives become one,” he said. And he left the house with hers.

Fiction © Copyright Angela Yuriko Smith
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Angela Yuriko Smith:

End of Mae

Mae was small town newspaper reporter with bigger dreams. Her life’s passion was to find the ultimate story. When the local homeless start vanishing, her community puts the blame on the Jersey Devil legend. Excited at the prospect of finally uncovering a big story, she spends the night in the woods with a homeless woman. Mae discovers that the whispers are true — there is something sinister wandering the Whitebog area at night. Little did she know that the ultimate story would be her own… and she’d by dying to tell it.

Available on Amazon!