The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
The Execution
by Christina Sng
The many-faced woman lies face down, her three heads on the execution block, ready to be decapitated for her crimes.
In the crowd, the men she stole stand together to watch, pleased to close this chapter, before leaving to win back their families who have moved themselves to the next town.
The scythe severs the many-faced woman’s heads from their stem. Each man clutches his neck, falling to the ground when she does.
How quickly they forget the tenets of the gods, for when two people bind themselves together, they become one in life and one in death till another claims them.
The men’s heads detach and roll, leaving streaks of blood on unplanned paths, their carcasses devoured by wolves by day’s end.
The many-faced woman reattaches her heads, smiles at the carnage, pats her belly, and makes her way to the next town.
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.
Cool story.