The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Birth
by Angela Yuriko Smith

I stand at the Gate of Destruction.

Beyond, the veil is tattered. Demons play

among razored tropes that slice hope to ribbon

and rag, bone and flesh, scattered crumbs to litter

the ground beyond, leaving a path to follow. I question:

if I should walk that path, does it lead me home? Is this 

the way that lost children have wandered, dropping pieces 

of themselves, of myself, to leave a mark, a proof? I was here. 

I have existed. I have mattered. But scattered, the bits of butchery

alone are nameless, unidentifiable. We were fodder. Still, something 

calls to me from this abyss. Shadows beckon, a whispered invite on the 

wind trails like gaseous mist from beyond this portal and I feel seen, wanted.

.

I inhale deep the scent of decay that wafts from beyond and it smells familiar. 

A pungent odor of weeping and fear blended in blood repels and compels me.

This scent is reminiscent of longing, of belonging, of home and I smell trickery

.

and false friends among the whirling dervishes that invite me to play. Gathered

they display the toothsome morsels caught in their trap jaws, bones snapped

and shattered, now become the dust of what was living ground down to an

essence, a memory, a no-longer-am. Have I been here before? I feel fear

but deeper than that, I feel called. I step toward the gate, logic screams

to go back, to run. There is pain here. There is terror. The inferno 

still invites. Beyond I see the stone towers, each a prison, a

suffering. Here is concocted the bitterest of brews, the

anti-ambrosia. The beverage of doom, the grapes

of wrath and havoc squeezed until the life has

drained into the cups offered me. Drink, the

beasts call, and thirst no more.The roar

is silence. I am deafened by Nothing.

blinded with the sense of family.

Here, my lost siblings call out.

I step forward to enter into

the Gate of Madness.

.

Fiction © Copyright Angela Yuriko Smith
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

More from Angela Yuriko Smith:

Angela Yuriko Smith is an American poet, author and co-publisher of Space and Time magazine, a publication that has been printing speculative fiction, art and poetry since 1966. Together we build a poem as a community each month. Visit “Exquisite Corpse” at SpaceandTime.net to submit.

Catch up with Angela here!