The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

One Dark Night
by Christina Sng

Our bags are packed,
Waiting like sentinels
By the front door

Where twins stand,
Hand in hand, half asleep,
Half a foot in dreams.

He has passed out
Drunk yet again
With bloody fists.

I’ve long given up
On him ever changing,
My face battered

Black and blue
Enough times
To never forget it.

I can only start anew
With my crone powers
Slowly awakening.

My fingertips tingle
With a lightning crackle.
I touch the door,

Watching it blaze
With azure fire
As it tears open a portal

Into an emerald-green planet,
Full of cotton candy clouds
And crystal clear ponds

Floating beside them
On languid leafy pads,
Magic carpets in the air.

The twins do not hesitate.
Their eyes light up
And each picks up a suitcase.

“Let’s go, Momma,”
They plead with eager eyes.
“It must be better

On the other side.”
I nod,
Clasping their hands.

We take a deep breath
And step into the portal.
It is as magical as I imagined.

I turn back to close
The barrier between
Our worlds forever

But first, I send through
A sprinkling of silver stardust,
Imploding the house

As the portal seals shut.

Fiction © Copyright Christina Sng
Image courtesy of Nina D’Arcangela

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!