The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Forever Grave
by A.F. Stewart

What is this existence of mine?
Am I human? Monster? Something hovering between life and death?
Is humanity more than flesh, more than the meat that strips from our bones as we decay beneath the ground?
I have no answers, yet the questions linger.
I fall to my knees at the start of a new day, as the sunrise returns, as it always will. The light is witness to my pain and my torment. Its rays warm my bare bones, taunt my spirit denied the peace of death. The cycle of the sun is the one constant in this eternal curse of rising from a cold grave.
My body shudders. Flesh will reform soon, over my mouldy skeleton. A stranger’s skin, a prison of compulsion and hunger. I will kill and feed until the rays of the sun give way to darkness and I return to being buried bones.
Then, for a few hours, I will have peace.
This is the life of a vampire, this pattern of death and rebirth. An eternal punishment for unknown sins.

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.”

Available on Amazon!