The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Blood Type
by Amanda Worthington

The attic is strewn with the remnants of Chemnitz

Its horrors buried beneath tinsel and wreaths and old coats

Articles of celebration and resistance to letting go

Of the past that’s worth keeping

.

Mom’s death hit me in unexpected ways

I’d finished clearing away the things

That belonged to her generation

And had moved on to the next

I knew Grandma had been in the war,

There were no documents. No correspondence.

The typewriter resurrects the unanswered questions

.

And what are unanswered questions but ghosts

Haunting the corridors of our modern minds

With their mysteries?

.

There is a whispering

I come nearer, stoop to hear

Soak my ribbon in your blood

And write your desires into being

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I start. Am I going crazy? Is it the grief? Why am I not screaming?

I should find a hammer and bash the thing’s keys

And get my head examined

But there is another part of me that thinks to investigate the dead

And if it is in the typewriter’s power to grant me peace…

I can spare a little blood for resolution, I reason

.

I should have used the hammer.

.

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Fiction © Copyright Amanda Worthington.
Image courtesy of Pixabay