The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Red Current
by Melissa R. Mendelson 

When did I dream in black and white?  Maybe, it was after everything, everything that went wrong.  Every night, I would return to the intersection of East 40^th Street, staring up at the buildings.  Then, the screams began, drowning out the traffic.

I never saw a dead body before.  I only saw it on television, but there she was in a pale flowered dress, her eyes wide open.  Her face blank, and more shadows fell around her.  The bullets missed me.

Now, I see her every night.  She waited for me to look at the street signs and then up at the buildings.  She would never smile.  She never blinked.  She just stared, almost as if she were angry that I was the one that was still alive.

Tonight, in this dream, she held a shovel and grabbed me by the hand.  You would think that the dead were cold, but I felt nothing, not even a breeze.  Her stare was fixated to the ground, and I stared with her.  As we moved, the cement softened, turned green with some pale flowers rising up to greet me.  But she would not even let me touch one.

“Dig.”  Her voice was a click.  “Dig.”

“Dig what?  Where?”

She pointed at the mound of dirt nearby.  It was a strange sight because the city was metal and concrete.  Well, actually now, it was burnt and demolished.

“Dig,” she clicked.

Who am I to argue with the dead, and when would I wake up from this dream?  I dug, the shovel disappeared into a pile of dirt and mud.  I dug more, wondering if I was digging my own grave.  Could you die in your dream, and if you did, were you really dead?

Red water flowed from underneath the dirt and mud and came crashing around me.  It reminded me of a summer’s day, where my friends and I broke open a fire hydrant, and the water rushed out at us.  This was similar, but unlike that water, the red waves kept coming.

When I turned to look at her, red droplets poured from her head, down her skin, across her pale flowered dress and onto her shoes.  She opened her mouth but not to say anything.  She let the red water out, and it sprayed all over me.

I awoke, drenched with sweat.  I listened for their footsteps outside, but they haven’t found me yet.  What if I screamed?  I hoped not, but then I coughed.  My hand felt wet.  When I looked down at it, my skin was soaked in red.

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Fiction © Copyright Melissa R. Mendelson
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

About Author Melissa R. Mendelson:

Melissa R. Mendelson is the author of the Sci-Fi Novella, Waken.  She also has a prose poetry collection called, This Will Remain With Us published by Wild Ink Publishing.  Her short story collections, Better Off Here, Stories Written Along COVID Walls, and Name’s Keeper can be found on Amazon/Amazon Kindle.

If you’d like to learn more about Melissa, you can visit her accounts here: www.MelissaMendelson.com