The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

My Beautiful, Dark Skin 
by Melissa R. Mendelson 

I was led to the door, dressed in a Kimono.  My hair wrapped in buns on both sides with colorful ribbons.  My bare feet in leather sandals.  My hands placed, always placed in front of my stomach.  When I walked into the room, I faced the wall.

What would it be today?  The Cutter?  The Biter?  The Fucker?  The Screamer?  Some crazy, old man screaming and spitting in my face.  My toes touched a pile of soft, wet flesh.  That’s right, I thought.  The pale one came in first, and they finished her off.  Fuck, it’s a knife party, but twice in one day?

Something must be going on in the outside world.  The men left the knife party for the very last.  When they knew that she was all used up, they would cut the last pieces out.  I was not all used up, but they were the ones bent out of shape.

I heard their approach, their snickers, even the blood dripping off their knives.  They didn’t bother to wipe them off.  They were too hungry to cut, to tear, thinking that would fix everything, their lives could return back to how they dictated, but what about my life?

They didn’t waste any time.  The men cut and tore and ripped at my skin, and I thought about the pile of soft, wet, pale flesh left on the floor like garbage.  I gripped my hands together.  They had no idea that I stumbled across something, something now coursing through my veins, and I listened to them eating pieces of me.

Their disgusting slurps and burbs became gurgled.  One choked, his body hit the floor.  Another gasped, dropping his knife.  One man even ran for the door, but the damn idiot forgot that the door was locked from the outside.  They were supposed to finish before knocking twice, signaling to those outside that they were done.  Instead, their bodies did the knocking.

I sat on the floor, listening to them, crying to be saved.  Pathetic, I thought.  You men try to be powerful, but you’re really just a bunch of spoiled brats.

I knew there had to be some good men out in the world, but they were either hiding, or they were dead.

“Get help,” one man whimpered.  “We’ve been poisoned.”

Yes, you have, I thought.  You made the mistake of letting me out into the garden, and I found a plant, a plant that made me ill.  But it didn’t kill me.  It just filled me with venom.

I turned away from the wall, confronting him.  If I had eyes, he would have seen no sympathy.  If I had lips, he would have seen my wicked smile.  All he saw was my beautiful, dark skin.

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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 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