The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Little Natalie
by Marge Simon

Mr. Sweeney next door paid me a visit yesterday. It was the first day after the funeral, and I was celebrating quietly in the kitchen with a quart of Absolut. The doorbell rang several times before I decided to answer it.  I composed my face to an appropriate state of sadness and opened the door. There he stood, that nasty old man. He handed me this poem and a photo of me he must have taken eight years ago with my favorite stuffed toy, Leo. Sweeney tipped his hat and left without a word.

Little Natalie

She knows she is precious,

with her little girl face and arms

lugging her toy lion around,

she can’t jump and play

like a five-year-old should.

Oh, how they love her!

She begins to grow pubic hair,

and her periods come and go;

all of thirteen years she is,

but still she looks like a child.

Oh, how they love!

Just an innocent wee child,

who covers her mirror

with her pet rabbit’s blood,

pours Pine Sol into a flowered cup

and serves it to Mommy as tea.

Oh, how they …

Inside her head is a dreadful wish

for her brother, mommy and dad,

she says out loud she’ll kill them all

for the pleasure of watching them die.

Oh!

Might have known someone wasn’t fooled, even if family and friends were. Actually, it’s not a bad poem, even if it doesn’t rhyme like poems should.  Anyway, he’s harmless enough.  Knows I’m adopted, knows I don’t give an effing damn about these people.  He’s not, — can’t be, normal like they were — or he’d never have given me this poem.

I must confess I’m pretty proud of how I pulled the killings off, making it look like a robbery and multiple homicide, like Capote’s In Cold Blood. I said I hid in the clothes hamper when I heard shots fired. Of course, they never questioned my babyish innocence. Yet something tells me I better keep an eye on old Sweeney. He might be thinking to blackmail dear little Natalie, and she wouldn’t like that at all, no sir.

Fiction © Copyright Marge Simon
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Marge Simon:

The Demeter Diaries
by Marge Simon and‎ Bryan D. Dietrich

‘The Demeter Diaries’ is a record of love and longing and the inevitable horror that arises between the minds of Mina Harker and Vlad Dracula as they court one another in waking dreams. The dialogue, written in both poetry and prose, imagines a psychic connection that develops between the two even before Dracula arrives in England. As Dracula makes his way from Transylvania to Whitby on the doomed ship Demeter, the two would-be lovers transmit their thoughts across the waves and lands that separate them, alternately wooing and terrifying one another with the idea of love eternal and all the dark delicacies necessary to ensure it. Front cover art by Wendy Saber Core, interior illustrations by Luke Spooner.

Available on Amazon!