The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Tourist Trappers
by Marge Simon

Me and my old man like living way up here on Polar Ridge. Business has been mighty good. Yankee tourists, some come all the way from Los Angeles for something different than their visits to the pyramids and Eiffel tower and such.  They come back from the usual, and all’s they got is a bunch of photos and a bad cold. They get mighty tired of the usual. That’s when they might find our ad in Travel magazine about our “rustic Arctic outpost”.

As soon as they arrive, we make them welcome. I serve up sandwiches and my own special hooch. Puts them out every time. While they’re snoring away, my old man slits their throats. We clean the carcasses, burn the guts so’s they don’t attract no wolves. Old man’s an expert skinner, treats them with some kind of oily stuff. It’s his own, made from scratch, mind you. We take pride in following Nature’s way with our pro-cedures. Next step, we get them on the stretching racks. Later, I chew the dried hides until they’re soft as a baby’s patootie, the way the old Inuit women did. We get top dollar for them at the local trading post.

Last month, a New York reporter name of Jones came poking around. Well, we didn’t think too much of it. Hated to see him skinned like that, though. He was real polite and had the nicest smile. But business is business, like my old  man says. He chides me if I fret, but I think we’ll have to close down pretty soon. Like the old Inuit women, I’m starting to lose my teeth, and besides, another reporter has just arrived. Wants to find out what happened to Mr. Jones.

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!