The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Bath 
by Elaine Pascale 

I can hear the thunder, but I cannot see the storm. I see nothing in my sealed chamber. Even when they slip my food through the loose brick they remove and replace in my wall, there is only darkness. I imagine the guards and remaining servants moving freely through the castle, their paths lit by candles.

I try to remember what it was like to have sunlight so bright that it hurt my eyes. To walk in tall grass that tickled my calves. To feel the raindrops that were only a fraction as satisfying as the drops that were manifested to fall into my bath.

I have always hated the dark but worse than the darkness is the smell. My smell. Gone is the brassy zest that flavored my skin. The servants would blanch, and some would faint, when I took to my bath, but I wore the scent with pride. Now, I smell like this room, like the dust from the bricks, like the grime that leaks from me as I evaporate.

I miss the smell of the girls, too. Though they numbered in the hundreds, each had a distinct scent. One would smell like lilies while another like the morning dew. Some had smells so tantalizing that I had to lick their bodies before having them prepared for my bath.

If only I had drowned in them, in their essence, instead of drowning in this soiled isolation.

Without the girls, I am afraid I will dry out until I am nothing but ash.

Worse than the darkness, worse than the smell, is how rapidly I am decomposing without the blood of virgins to fill my bath..

Fiction © Copyright Elaine Pascale
Image courtesy of Pixaby.com

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