The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
The Long Days Before Winter
by Christina Sng
Down to the flailing hands
He falls—a wilting flower
To the autumn ground.
The ravenous cover him
With their puckered flesh,
Hands searching,
Reaching for his warm insides,
His body, a gift—so they may live
Another day, another season.
The light blinds us, high up
On the platform where we hide,
Momma, Christa, Eva, and I.
The rest didn’t make it.
We were betrayed by our own kind,
Abandoned and left to die.
The flames hungrily lick the edges,
Searing flesh below, dead and alive.
The scent is overwhelming.
I peer down at the bloody carnage,
The innards of the corpse flower,
Still, unmoving under the lamplight.
The explosives tied to the traitor
Saved us this time—one monster
To eliminate all monsters.
We climb down cautiously,
Eyes ever watchful of any
Movement from the ravenous.
I meet the traitor’s eye,
Bright now after turning—
Somehow his head survived.
Momma stomps it to pulp
With her steel-toed boot
Till there is nothing dead alive.
We leave this cursed place
And walk into the sunlight,
Spears aloft, ready to fight.
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.
Spreading the Writer's Word 
Wonderfully chilling, a fantastic poem.
This poem has such good pace and rhythm – really drew me into the story – great use of the prompt and the poetic form.