The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Give Me Shelter
by Leigh M. Lane

Do you hear what I hear? It’s the fading echo of a song. Wailing sirens. The silent screams of men and women and children. The percussion of bombs and beatings.

I’ve seen it all, this endless nightmare. Fear igniting hate. Empty eyes turning humans into insects, that they might crush their weaker brothers and sisters underfoot. The mass graves, the bodies piled like trash. The horrified and outraged protesting quietly behind the safety of closed doors.

I feel your pain. I am Auschwitz. I am Palestine. I am Syria. I’m the South American refugee. I am the caged child. I am you. We suffer together.

But I know what you do not. I’ve seen their ruins. I’ve heard their cries. They sound just like yours. They know not until they know for themselves, and they will.

There’s nothing you can do right now to stop them. Forces of chaos are forces of nature, impossible to fight with sheer will alone. But, you see, order is a force all its own, one that’s equally as powerful. Her dance heals the scars, heals the earth, heals the collective soul.

The greedy will know how it feels to go without. The devastators will know the anguish of a shattered life. The hateful will understand how it feels to be shunned. Balance will return the only way it can.

Your silence will be My most melancholy song.

Fiction © Copyright Leigh M. Lane
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Leigh M. Lane:

Finding Poe: Special Edition

Finding Poe is a riddle to be solved, and this edition caters to those who feel up to the task. If you’re a Poe fan, you’ll already know he was the father of the deductive detective story. Many scholars will argue that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series was inspired by Poe’s Detective Dupin stories.

This book asks the reader to assume the hat of the deductive detective. Throughout the text, there are numerous clues to direct the reader toward an alternate speculation about Poe’s untimely death. Before you set out to solve the riddle, however, you must first find the question….

About the story: When reality and fiction collide, there’s no telling what horrors might ensue.

In the wake of her husband’s haunted death, Karina must sift through the cryptic clues left behind in order to solve the mystery behind his suicide–all of which point back to the elusive author, Edgar Allan Poe.

Karina soon finds that reality, dream, and nightmare have become fused into one as she journeys from a haunted lighthouse in New England to Baltimore, where the only man who might know the answers to her many questions resides.

But will she find her answers before insanity rips her grip on reality for good? Might a man she’s never met hold the only key to a truth more shocking than even she could have imagined?

Finding Poe was a 2013 EPIC Awards finalist in Horror.

“Atmospheric, lush, and lyrical, Leigh M. Lane’s Finding Poe is a haunting Gothic novel which will delight anyone familiar with the works of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as anyone who enjoys an evocative and classic tale of terror.” –horror/mystery author Dana Fredsti.

Available on Amazon!