The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

To Blessed Henna do we give thanks
by Amanda Worthington

These are the last eggs a chicken will ever lay

Because there are no more chickens now

The last of the blood has been scrubbed

From the floor of the coop

And my hips throb from being stooped over

For what feels like a lifetime, but was probably just hours

Time doesn’t flow the way it used to.

.

The kept animals have all been slaughtered

In hunger-induced rage

Some free-roaming, some in cages

All of them with that glassy, expectant look in their eyes

Like they’ve grown weary of being afraid

And have resigned themselves to waiting for the blade

That will end the nightmare of their days

.

I grow weary of being afraid

Feel myself recede

Regard the eggs sadly as I go

Ask her to do what I cannot.

.

She obliges

Rising from the depths of the subterranean sea

That ebbs and flows beneath the impassivity

Of a face whose stillness belies the anxiety

Of an unstoppable tide

.

The gaunt men begin to wake

Henna’s meat still on their lips

Her red-orange feathers sticking in their beards

And I am meditating on a beach

When the braver girl’s knife

Tears into the trespasser’s flesh

Cracks the eggs

Makes us breakfast

.

To Blessed Henna do we give thanks

.

Her words bring me back

Just in time to eat

.

“To Blessed Henna do we give thanks”

I repeat

For without her we’d not enjoy

Such tender meat.

..

Fiction © Copyright Amanda Worthington.
Image courtesy of Pixabay