The Ladies of Horror
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Incantation
by Christina Sng

It was simple.

Say the incantation
And sacrifice the girl,

Please the gods
So they’d have food

Enough for the winter
And babies for the summer.

He carefully read
From the sacred tome

When the girl’s cat leaped
Out from the shadows

And swiped at his hand,
Causing him to fumble

And mispronounce a word,
Hopefully not critical.

The heavens opened
To claim the girl,

Tabby cat by her side,
Glaring at the light.

The long blinding beam
Shone over him instead,

Slurping him up
Like a hungry beast.

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!