The Ladies of Horror
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How Our True Love Failed
by Angela Yuriko Smith

We felt safe watching the blizzard from our warm couch and our perfect life. Our house was a fortress of warmth. We had no thought for those left outside. We sipped our hot chocolate, spoke of gifts and then you proposed. We made love in front of the fire and then the lights went out. It was so lovely to see the darkness overtake our small town, plunging the streets to velvet black. The falling snow lit everything up like magic and moonlight drifting. We turned the heaters up in spite of the warnings to preserve the grid. Why ruin a perfect night…

… when that’s what morning is for? Selfish, I’d hogged the blankets. As always, you let me. I woke up pushing your cold feet away. I told you to turn up the heater and, for once, you ignored me. I finally rolled out of bed to see frost on my mirror, the blue tint of your skin and then, like you, my phone was dead and I went blind into the brightness, an over exposed morning of snow washing the pierce from my screams that failed to reach through my neighbor’s frozen dreams. No coat, no shoes, no service and too late I realized how tenuous a perfect life can be. 

The wedding was off

When you turned your cold shoulder…

Death by power out.

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Fiction © Copyright Angela Yuriko Smith
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

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Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Ryukyuan-American, award-winning poet, author, and publisher with 20+ years in newspapers. Publisher of Space and Time magazine (est. 1966), two-time Bram Stoker Awards® Winner, and HWA Mentor of the Year, she shares Authortunities, a free weekly calendar of author opportunities at authortunities.substack.com.