The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
Thor’s Daughter
by Marge Simon
Once I was young and beautiful.
My looks a god-magnet, I had no shame.
I even knew the lust of Thor when he had need.
It was a thunderous copulation
in a grand display of brilliant lights
Within the year, I bore his child,
half godling and half human.
As she grew, her powers multiplied.
Her father was displeased;
as I slumbered, he stole her away,
to a lonely, barren world,
& left her there to die alone,
little knowing as she grew
she’d make it all her own.
There were orchards bent in homage
to the memories of storms,
& rivers beyond measure,
a surf of voices in their tides,
a valley lake, rain dappling its mirror surface
into a lacey carpet.
A Sauternes wind at sunset, rich and sweet,
the molting of a moon, when it sheds
its skin in the thick bayou mists.
In time, rumors of her world
reached the ear of Thor himself —
How dare a child, but half a god,
create a paradise full-blown
to rival his own Asgard!
When he sent two lightning shafts
into her soft brown eyes, she screamed.
Satisfied, he unleashed his firestorms,
turned timberlands to twisted skeletons,
made uplifts to flatten, seas to overflow
upon the surface of her lands, and finally
from Hell, a populous of wailing ghosts.
Our child’s wonders raped & turned to ash,
I mourn her, buried now with them,
deep beneath a frozen shell; my hope remains
she never saw her dreams in ruin.
Fiction © Copyright Marge Simon
Image courtesy of Christina Sng
More from Marge Simon:
The Demeter Diaries
by
‘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.
Spreading the Writer's Word 
A powerful poem.
Loved this poem – richly descriptive storytelling and such a sad ending.