The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Tomorrow’s Femme 
by Marge Simon 

Cosmetically enhanced, she combs her furred shoulders with retractable claws. She thickens her pubic hair, adds tattoos between her thighs that glow infrared when she dims the lights with an imagined lover. Modulating rainbows wheel in her eyes to disconcert even the casual admirer.

She is a transitory captive to her mirror, when even this display is not enough. As an antidote to vanity, she has coitus with a cyborg, alternating the taste of ecstasy from pleasure to pain, an unnatural karma, a bright bouquet, that fades from memory when she shuts it off.

Most often she awakens to grapple with frustration. She frequents the clubs where the bored collect, posed, decorated, poised to find her imagined lover in the shadows, but handsome features deceive, and she finds no common syntax save that of self-indulgence.

She endures the ceremonial chatter ostentatious preludes promising romance. When conversations polarize, love seems a stillborn reverie of frayed fantasies and the tedium of extended life in this sad utopia.

.

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!