The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Elizabeth
by Christina Sng

Once,
I could see in the dark.
Not any more.

Not my papers stacked
In neat piles like buildings
Along a city grid.

Not the shrunken heads
Of long-dead enemies
Piked on my wall.

Not the pitchers of blood
Lined up on the top shelf
Of my study fridge.

Not my catspaws
Disguised as family members
To keep my identity safe.

Even vampires grow old
Despite valiantly
Holding on.

And I realize now
It’s been too long since
I last bathed in blood.

All those centuries
Of being humane
Have truly dragged me down.

As I ponder this insight,
An ally arrives and says,
“We need you in this fight.”

I nod and grit my teeth,
Fill my heart with wrath,
And fly into the fray.

My teeth tear flesh from bone,
Bathing me inside and out
With our enemy’s blood.

When the war is done
And the soldiers sent home,
I retreat

To that dark, quiet place,
Eyes bright again.
I see everything now:

The shadows
I had long forgotten,
The secrets buried deep,

The true nature
Of what I am,
The reason I exist.

I remind myself
I am legend. I am Elizabeth.
Peaceful at last, I sleep.

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!