The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

My Body is a Haunted House 
by Elaine Pascale 

My body is a haunted house with

wallpaper sagging in strips.

A Y-shaped incision begins at each of my shoulder blades and travels to my pubic bone.

The skin is peeled back to expose the structure that has been hidden for so long.

To expose me; naked in a way I have never been naked before.

.

My body is a haunted house.

The archway where lovers once strode and gazed from the window to the carpet

of flowers below, that archway lies trapped between my ribs.

As those bones are sawed apart, I wonder if it truly were lovers looking

at flowers

or

one in love and one lost in a devious plan.

.

My body is a haunted house.

The cobwebbed master bedroom is demolished as my still

heart is removed and weighed. And weighed again. The numbers on the scale

do not tell the story of how I ended up

on the autopsy table any more than the cold, heavy heart tells of a love lost.

.

My body is a haunted house where

the eerie echoes are silenced as my throat is cut to examine the trachea. The larynx is removed, silencing my witness. I can’t tell the judge and jury what happened; I have to rely on my organs, on the pieces of my fleshy residence, to speak for themselves.

.

My body is a haunted house decorated with creepy carpeting in the form of a spongy tongue. The pink shag a pathway for poison. Do they note that the pink is now black? Do they see how the furry top has now sunken in on itself, shameful with no reason for feeling shame?

.

My body is a haunted house.

The gothic sconces are extinguished as the thread is pulled through my eyelids. Open, dead

eyes are a crowd pleaser, an amusement for those wishing to be scared. They are not desired by the coroner who wants

only answers and no reminder of what was before.

.

My body is a haunted house.

The saw is taken to the door of my library where my memories line

long shelves. Some memories have worn covers and cracked bindings. Others

are locked, preserved, shielded.  The saw aggravates the strong security I have in place, it

tries to force me to confront…

.
Deep in the recesses of the attic is the showstopper. This is the final

jump scare, the fright that justifies the cost of admission.

This is where the ghost of a girl who once believed she had love is seen, wraithlike and ghoulish

and transparent as never before.

.

Fiction © Copyright Elaine Pascale
Image courtesy of Pexels.com

More from Elaine Pascale:

The Kitchen Witches

The women of Cape Cod have a story that is dying to be told. If only they could live long enough to tell it.

When Fiona Walker is contracted to write about a party attended by her social circle, her friends begin dying. She captures the competition and misery of the women around her through three different stories.

In Wishes, Melanie Voss discovers a Time Between Time where nothing that happens counts. Initially, Time Between Time is a welcome escape from a life spent watching the clock while doing chores for her family. But something sinister is in the Time Between Time and it is headed straight for Melanie.

Death and Taxes tells the story of Nashville DeCota, the Cape Capo. Nash swears that she is not the Island Impaler, nor the Tooth Snatcher, but she has just as many skeletons in her closet. When her husband, Derrick, is kidnapped, she has to come clean about her crimes if she ever wants to see him again.

Fiona tells her own story in Hazing, where she finds that the real source of evil behind the deaths of her friends is worse than she could have ever imagined.

Available on Amazon!