The Ladies of Horror
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The Old Bones
by Christina Sng

Humans have been here before, we conclude, after the discovery of their skulls and bones beside an ancient tree on the forest moon of Everso.

The land is lush like it is on Earth, its foliage sweet and rich and full of nourishment. We’ve yet to encounter any fauna but if the ecosystem is similar to Earth’s, it is simply a matter of time.

Sudden high-pitched shrieks confirm our theory. We draw our weapons, bracing for what comes next.

Humans on an enormous mantis-like winged creature descend from the sky. They leap off the monster and race back into the depths of the forest. We follow. One by one, we take them down with fire till we reach their community.

There, we burn everything to the ground.

One dying half-scorched human grabs my pincer as I pass, eyes full of sorrow as it asks, “Why?”

I slash it in half, tired of their typical death bed remorse. Goodness knows, they did not spare our families when they invaded our moon and slaughtered us, calling us “bugs”.

It took us weeks to grow another sustainable community from my eggs hidden in the Vault, and another century before we found their home planet and annihilated them all. A handful escaped to Everso and we followed.

As we leave this moon in flames, we celebrate on our spaceship en route home with a cocoon full of its foliage.

“They ate each other, you know,” I tell the crew. “Those bones had human teeth marks on them.”

“Monsters!” the hive mind chimes.

Fiction © Copyright Christina Sng
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Christina Sng:

A Collection of Nightmares

Hold your screams and enter a world of seasonal creatures, dreams of bones, and confessions modeled from open eyes and endless insomnia. Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares is a poetic feast of sleeplessness and shadows, an exquisite exhibition of fear and things better left unsaid. Here are ramblings at the end of the world and a path that leads to a thousand paper cuts at the hands of a skin carver. There are crawlspace whispers, and fresh sheets gently washed with sacrifice and poison, and if you’re careful in this ghost month, these poems will call upon the succubus to tend to your flesh wounds and scars.
These nightmares are sweeping fantasies that electrocute the senses as much as they dull the ache of loneliness by showing you what’s hiding under your bed, in the back of your closet, and inside your head. Sng’s poems dissect and flower, her autopsies are delicate blooms dressed with blood and syntax. Her words are charcoal and cotton, safe yet dressed in an executioner’s garb.
Dream carefully.
You’ve already made your bed.
The nightmares you have now will not be kind.
And you have no one to blame but yourself.

Available on Amazon!