The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Into the Tall Grass
by Christina Sng

Vermillion plumes rise
From the black towers.
Who are they burning today?

I clutch the children tight,
Relieved we ran when we did,
Safe for now in the wilderness.

In the tower pyres,
The Overlords are culling again,
Our elders rounded up

And incinerated
To fuel the engines and run the city,
And to make room for the young.

Father grasps my hand,
Thinking of his friends left behind,
All of them on the culling list.

Are they in the plumes tonight?
Or are they still safe and alive
In their concrete homes?

We will never know.
It is time to move.
We have stayed here too long.

Soon,
Someone will notice
We are missing

And the Overlords
Will send Hunters after us.
They are merciless.

Wasp-sized, their bites paralyze
And inject a tracker
For the retrieval team to collect us.

After all,
We are fuel for the furnace,
An energy source for the city.

Someone needs to feed the monster.
And the Overlords think,
Better them than us.

I beg everyone to walk a little faster
But they tire.
We rest.

But minutes later,
A familiar buzzing fills the air.
The Hunters have found us.

Father tells me
To take the children and go.
He will distract the Hunters

To allow us to escape, undetected.
“The children need their mother,”
He whispers, urgently.

I shake my head
And pull him back.
“They also need their grandfather!”

The Hunters are almost upon us.
Before us, a river looms.
We run.

“Get in the water!” Father cries.
We lie face up in the shallows,
Eyes closed, staying calm.

We have practiced this
For a long time.
And after a song,

Ten songs,
They pass us by
And go home.

Only now
Will they conclude
We have died.

I should know.
They were my design—
The Hunters I created were

For defense against the aliens,
Not our own people.
I protested.

So they sentenced me to die,
Along with everyone I love.
Not all of us made it out.

We surface in silence,
My eyes darting, scanning the sky.
There is no sign of them.

I hold Father and my children tight.
For the first time since we fled,
I let myself cry.

Freedom has never tasted sweeter.
Life, never more precious.
Finally, we are free from the Overlords.

We fill our bottles with water
And head south, along the river.
We will cross the forest

Into the desert,
Through the sand dunes
To an oasis where it is safe.

I tell them this
To give them hope.
But there is nothing out here.

Nothing I know of.
Only death.
But hopefully,

A death
That will be far away from now.
Somehow, we will live.

Somehow, we will thrive.
We take our first step
Into the tall grass.

Fiction © Copyright Christina Sng
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

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!