The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Three Candles
by Christina Sng

I light three candles
To tell them
Not to come back,

That our city is overrun
And there is no hope
For us left behind.

We huddle on the rooftop
In the abyssal darkness
Waiting for death, hoping

The cold will take us
Gently into the eternal sleep
Before our enemies breach

The steel access door
And tear us from limb to limb,
Eating us alive.

The fires they set
Create a thick haze
Across the sky,

Pressing the winter frost
Down onto us. The deep
And debilitating chill

Permeates all
Of our hiding places,
Driving us to the warmth

Of the buildings,
Straight into their bloody arms
Where we will be devoured

Or worse,
Turned into one of them
And sent out into the world

To eat the people we love
Gladly—
And without remorse

Because
We will no longer be
Capable of love.

They will come if we ask;
They, who got out
During the evacuation.

They, who now watch
The street cams for our signal:
The lit candles.

They will come for us
Because they love us
And they will gladly die trying.

With our enemy’s tentacles
All over this city,
They will not make it.

Three candles means
There is no saving us.
It means:

There is no hope.
Do not come—
It is over for us.

We hold each other
And wait for the sunrise,
For the bombs to arrive.

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!