The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
Lady Rose
by A.F. Stewart
The camera shutter clicked softly, once, twice, three times as the image froze itself onto film. Fading sunlight, filtered by gauzy curtains, diffused across her body, warming her cold skin. Her carefully crafted pose suggested peaceful slumber, with tumbled hair and fingers clutching a thorny stem; the flawless sleeping beauty holding a red rose.
A beauty dead to the world.
Above her the man smiled, his portfolio complete. “You are immortalized now, my sweet. Your splendour captured forever, unblemished, frozen in time as my fairy tale perfection. My gift to you. What more could you ask for?”
He put his camera down next to her poisoned glass of champagne, before spreading the tarp on the floor and wrapping her corpse into the sheet. He sat there for a while, next to her, savouring champagne and the memories of her death.
As dusk settled, he stood, with the words, “Goodbye, my sweet.”
Then he dragged her body to her freshly dug grave and buried her beside the others.
Fiction © Copyright A.F. Stewart
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com
More from A.F. Stewart:
Hell’s Empire: Tales of the Incursion
A unique anthology of two thrones at war as the forces of Hell assault an unsuspecting Victorian Britain.The cry went out to theologians and engineers, to artificers and antiquarians, to every name which could be named. By telegraph where lines were still intact, and by volunteer riders where they were not; smuggled along the coast in fishing smacks, semaphored from hill-tops. It came without royal sanction, issued jointly by the Lords of the Admiralty and Marquess Lansdowne, the new Secretary of State for War:”In God’s name, help us. We are losing.”
Advertisements
