The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Apocalyptic Designs
by Amanda Worthington

The sky is old violence

The varicose cloudbank speaks of trapped blood

And ugly futility.

And giving up.

Still, she expects the thunder to come

Beat the world into submission

Like it isn’t already on its knees

Fear in its eyes and a prayer on its lips

(One to a better God)

Pleading

Making promises it can’t keep

.

She gets the silence instead

So loud it could wake the dead

(The praying has all but stopped.)

.

Her roots reach deep into the creeping poison

Extracting holy salt from the demon sea

It hurts. Burns like pitch. Leaves every atom twitching

As she consecrates the ground on which he works

.

The last of his kind.

Planter of trees

He whose grove will shield the dead he raises

Until they are ready to find their way to her sacred dunes

And the sea beyond.

.

The Seekers of Salt are his last design

The final iteration

The last defense

.

Crafting them among the cries of their failed predecessors

Is the hardest part

But he knows everything depends on it

On the Making

And the Guarding by the strange Were-tree

That Father put by the water’s edge

To keep the Wretched out

Or the Blessed in.

.

When he returns, surely Father will be proud of his progress

He only hopes it will be enough to secure his love.

He will be rewarded or hit

Lauded or acquit

Absolved from his sin or forced

To begin again

With some heartier crop

Something capable of stopping the onslaught

.

It does not strike him that his father

Might be the sea

Architect

Of his misery

Bored maker who ultimately came

To favor a better design

.

So he goes on refining

As somewhere closeby an exhausted tree succumbs to the waves

Welcoming with open limbs

Her unavoidable fate

.

.

Fiction © Copyright Amanda Worthington.
Image courtesy of Pixabay