The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Little Four
by Christina Sng

Just another step, I tell myself, dragging Teddy, my best friend since birth. The road is so rocky, it’s hard to walk.

But after escaping from that truck, there’s only one way home: through the brambly woods and the old rail road.

These are the bad men Momma warned me about. The ones who take little girls and hurt them a lot.

When the bad men stopped at a small truck stop, I unlocked the door and took off, unseen, as Momma taught.

Take the rocky path, she always says, it’s hard for them to walk. That’s where I’ll find you. That’s where you walk.

Wait. I hear a car behind me. They’ve caught up. Too fast, I think. I race into the woods to hide behind a mossy rock.

A cold hand covers my mouth before I can yelp. I turn anxiously to look. It’s Momma in a long red hood.

The truck slows and stops, and the evil men get out, each one armed with a gun and an angry look.

Momma signals for me to stay low as she shoots each one in the head with her crossbow. They fall like dominoes.

We walk home, holding hands, singing a song. She reminds me to always kill them or they will be back for more.

I nod, smiling, clutching Teddy to my heart. Tomorrow I’ll be 5. Momma says that’s when my training starts.

Fiction © Copyright Christina Sng
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!