The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

As if 
by Alina Măciucă 

Spirits slide through the cracks in my pillars.

The void kisses the soles of their feet as they whip traces of iridescent silver in silly motifs that might seem like yet-to-be-born universes to the untrained eye, as if someone could tell order from chaos.

Some pierce through hectic tunnels, just like woodworms and thoughts. The slowest of them all always get stuck—they’re not very thorough, so they end up neither here nor there,

as if I dissolved them in the in-between to keep me company until the day none shall pass, crawl, slither, or fly.

Oddly shaped vessels of nothingness strut down the road from the mind to the sacred—from time to time, gods too drop dead, as if there were such a thing as death—while other cracked pots

bend their bodies before them seeking long lives, as if there were such a thing as life.

They too go back and forth, beneath, under, and around. Some stay for a while; others never sit down, as if there were reasons to linger or reasons to leave.

I yowl. Yet the sea never howls back. She just ferries bits and pieces of me to the shore and rubs grains of sand and shards of glass and shattered conches against my body. Can she hear? Does she see?

What will become of me when my crown tumbles down, carried by the waves like a coffin surfing a crowd? I hurl questions at the sky, as if there were an I.

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Fiction © Copyright Alina Măciucă
Image courtesy of  Pixabay.com

More about Alina Măciucă:

Alina Maciuca lives in Bucharest, which she loves to capture in highly imperfect photos. Sometimes, she posts those on her social media. She thrives in big cities and aeclectic communities, and her needs are often met during her travels. So far, her work has been published in Vastarien, Space and Time and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Zine.