The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
On Set
by Christina Sng
After the lights are off
And the crew is gone,
She emerges
From the rafters
Where she lives,
Where she hides
Safe from the monster
Who killed her with knives
After she filmed
Her final scene
As the sun shone overhead
Through the cloudless sky.
He never appears at night,
Only the day,
Wearing his mask,
Hiding his true face.
Until she sees her son
With him on set,
Scared as a bird,
Forced to play a part
Or his dog will be shot,
The monster jokes,
Arm around her boy
As he visibly cringes,
Head swiveling
From left to right,
Searching for anyone
Who can help.
She charges forth,
Fear dissipated.
Her only thought:
Save her child!
She no longer cares
She is found.
She plunges her hands
Into the monster’s heart
And crushes it,
Watching with relief
As blood gushes
From his wound
Onto the painted
Linoleum ground.
He clutches his chest,
Staring at the ghost
Struck,
Mouth agape
Until he crumbles to dust
As if he never existed.
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.
A powerful poem, loved it.
A mother to the rescue! Well done!
Don’t mess with moms and don’t threaten the dog – such a satisfying ending!