The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Fly Eye 
by Elaine Pascale 

.“I need…,” Mona pulled the ancient parchment closer and squinted, “the eye of a fly.”

“Just the eye?” Her sister asked.

“That’s what it says.”

Morgyn snatched the parchment from her sister’s hands. “You are blind as a bat. Let me see.” She followed the antiquated writing with one arthritic finger. “It does say that.”

The sisters routinely competed, and through the course of their lives, Mona had lost most of the contests.

Morgyn smiled. “With this eye, my magic will match yours.”

Mona was not sure how she felt about that; witchcraft was the one area where she excelled.

When their familiar brought them a fly, their hopes sank.

“It is so small.” Mona frowned.

“For you, but my eyes are really good.”

Mona waited but Morgyn did not make any attempt to secure the eye.

“Go ahead.”

“It needs to be bigger.”

Mona pointed at the eye. “Explodere oculus.”

“That’s not right,” Morgyn criticized, yet the eye grew larger. Mona used her ritual knife to lift the eye.

“You are going to puncture it. You never do anything right.”

Mona ignored her sister and gently carried the eye to the cauldron.

“Don’t make a splash when you drop it in, we can’t lose any potion,” Morgyn instructed.

Mona, tired of nearly a century of her sister’s antagonism had an idea. “If it’s bigger, I bet it will be even more powerful.”

“Don’t be stupid, it’s big enough.”

Mona ignored her and repeated the chant; the eye grew so big that it no longer fit on her knife.

“Idiot!” Morgyn spat. “Now you have to pick it up with your hands and it’s dirty from the floor.”

Mona smiled and repeated the chant. Now the eye was as big as the table it had been sitting upon.

“Numbskull!  You mess everything up! If it weren’t for me, you would be stumbling around blind. If it weren’t for me—”

“If it weren’t for me and my magic, you would simply be someone with good eyesight, and now you won’t even be that.” Mona said the chant several more times until the eye became nearly as big as the room they were in.

Morgyn could see well enough to see the large eye rolling on top of her, trapping her until everything went black. 

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Fiction © Copyright Elaine Pascale
Image courtesy of Pixaby.com

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