The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Ghosts that Make This Dying City Run
by Amanda Worthington

Ghosts are just women who have mastered the art

Of taking up no space at all

You can feel their energies most profoundly in back alleys

And night-empty streets and resonating from grafittied walls

And sometimes there’s even enough of them left

To create a smudge of shadow

.

I think it looks a bit like mascara running

And becoming the vague shape of

A woman running

Rorschach-wretched and determined,

A slow insurrection.

.

Sometimes I imagine there are two spilling out at once

Trying to merge into a single pool

I imagine them all finding each other

Rising like the sea

Lapping gently at the shores of man

Finding the soft places

Touching, reassuring, testing their integrity.

.

Then sudden as a squall, gathering momentum

Striking when no one expects them to

With invisible fury

And no discretion whatsoever

A blessed tsunami whose time has come at long last.

.

Alas.

.

For the world is still

Unmoved by my thoughts.

Miserably constant

Sickly sweet with rot

.

The moon is out

Sheer and translucent as my skin

Taut against my shrinking bones

.

I think deep down I know

.

I never saw the smudges before

Soon I think they will solidify

Into the familiar faces

Of my mother, my sisters

The fully-faded ones

.

The ghosts that make

This dying city run

.

.

Fiction © Copyright Amanda Worthington.
Image courtesy of Pixabay