The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Legend 
by Marge Simon 

See that ancient piano by the door? Looks like it’s been left it out in the rain for a couple of centuries, right? There’s a story that goes with that old piece of junk. Back at the turn of the century, it was shiny new, imported from some European country. Only one person for miles around who could play it right. Her husband was a drunk, used to beat her, but she’d get away and come here to play. One night, he followed her here. He took a baseball bat to that piano, made sure it was broken beyond repair. After that, she kind of disappeared. Legend goes her ghost still hangs around. Some claim you can hear her playing in the darkest hours before dawn.

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The Woman in the Bar

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The door swings open. A slender woman stands there, framed against the sunset.   

The bartender knows her. He fixes her a glass of his best whiskey on the rocks.

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She walks over to the piano and plays a few chords.

Her face is as velvety smooth as the white of her hair.

She’s old enough to be your mother, but that doesn’t matter.

When she starts playing, everyone shuts up to listen,

even the guy in the booth coughing blood in his beer.

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She plays the blues and more. Like more than words and deep

and it goes straight inside all the places where you’ve tried to hide your fear,

digs them out and makes you feel all right about it.

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She plays as long as she feels like it and then she stops.

There is another drink waiting for her but she just leaves it there on the piano.

She glances at you on the way out, a tree of owls in her eyes.

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She’s brought you Jasmine candles and dandelion wine,

a first passionate kiss, country walking winter days.

Maybe it was just your imagination, but if you                

were hurting deep inside, or sorrowing over a lost love,

it doesn’t matter anymore, she’s fixed what was broken.

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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!