The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Weather in Belize 
by Marge Simon 

Sometimes the soldier sees in perpetuity the memory of a lover. He returns to it again and again, something that can’t be soiled by words, even those in confidence a moment or so. For one hour of the waking afternoon, stretching the silence, the heartbeat music of heat and sweat. He knows she will not come to him today.

Downstairs in the foyer embraced by statues of dead generals with their hollow-eyes and dour mouths, a voice hangs in the gum thick air. “Hello, lover.” In a moment that lasts an eon, slips off her clothes and with warm hair and mouth folds in on Father Riley, touching him tenderly as if his skin were bloodied from a flogging, as if his mind were numb. He doesn’t see the blade of her silver knife, doesn’t feel it slit his throat.

In the cool shadows of her chambers, Commander Cassia, head of militia on New Earth, fondles her partner’s breasts, contemplating new war games to play with her soldiers, lest they grow indolent in the sleepy afternoons.

Fiction © Copyright Marge Simon
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Marge Simon:

Victims
by Marge Simon and‎ Mary Turzillo

The title of this collection sets you up for the surprise of lyrical stories of victimizations with unexpected endings for the villains. Be ready to have your heart opened and cheer for perceived victims, human (made and unmade) and other life forms, victorious in the hands of these two award-winning poets. —Linda D. Addison, award-winning author, HWA Lifetime Achievement Award recipient and SFPA Grand Master.

Across histories and cultures and from Auschwitz to Babylon this book leaves you questioning who are the victims, and regardless of your conclusion you’re likely to get throat-punched. This is horror where everyone has a knife, and is ready to deliver this message: “Remember, you are always guilty. —Herb Kauderer, author of Fragments from the Book of the After-Dead.

Simon and Turzillo have only gone and startled me again. What a collection! Brutal. Beautiful. This quiver of poems strikes with the unflinching truth of persecution and oppression as seen through the lens of feminism. Prepare to come away bruised and yet strangely bolstered by Victims, a symphony of sadness orchestrated by two masters of dark poetry. —Lee Murray, Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Award-winner.

This is one of the braver dark poetry collections I’ve seen in a while. Horror poets generally employ victims in their work, but the focus is generally on the Evil. Turning the camera the other way is unusual, unsettling, emotionally risky, and surprisingly effective. From their stark opening take on Pygmalion, to the ending poem about the wasted life of Stateira of Persia, this powerful collection teases apart an impressive number of the threads of victimhood. Some are the usual cases, but quite a few are surprises, or reversals, or cases with unexpected layers. There is nothing repetitive about this collection. —Timons Esaias, winner of the Asimov’s Readers’ Award and the Winter Anthology Contest

Available on Amazon!