The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Carnival
by Christina Sng

The carnival was closed
But the monsters remained—

Sitting in the shadows
Waiting for the stragglers,

The lost, the homeless.
They waited for Yelena

Who stayed out
To avoid her father

Even when her friends
Reluctantly left her

As the sun slowly sank
Into shadows.

She felt safer at the carnival
Than at home,

Even with the monsters,
Even with the shadows.

She stayed quietly
Until she melded

Into the metal plates
That made up the rides,

The fairy floss machines
Rich with rainbow color,

Sugar speckles splattered
Around the enclosure,

Giant stuffed animals
Lined up as prizes,

Smiling, happy,
Exuding sheer joy.

The tarot cards
And the crystal balls

Telling a version
Of her future that shone—

These were the pulsing
Heart of the carnival

While the monsters
Folded between shadows

Were its teeth, its maw,
Its flesh, and its stomach.

Yelena seeped
Into the shadows,

Becoming one of them.
Now, no one could touch her.

No more beatings,
No more screaming.

Here, she was safe.
And here, she was powerful.

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!