The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Change 
by Christina Sng 

I took her hand and held it through the iron bars separating us. Her face was shrouded in darkness but I heard her breathing. Faint, but still breath. Not the rasp when we eventually turned.

We were too tired to talk. The chase took away the last of our reserves. Now we just waited for the change. How would it feel? Would it hurt? Or would it be like death, an eternal sleep we had no awareness of?

I thought of my life before all this. I thought of everyone I had ever loved and who loved me back. People who came into my life and touched it. Brief, exuberant moments of unbridled joy and elation. Too many to remember as they began flooding my mind.

I tried to stay with each one for as long as I could, but like a moving picture book, the pages kept flipping faster and faster until the story was over. They dissipated like exhausted clouds in the aftermath of rain.

The darkness pulled me. This crushing exhaustion shutting down every part of my body. I became light as the wind, soaring away to another universe. Still, I felt her hand clasp mine. I called her name but no sound emerged. Then, she loosened her grip on my hand. With all my strength, I clung on.

An all-too familiar rasp broke the silence. She clutched my hand even tighter, holding onto me. Now it was my turn. I let go of the world as I faded into the darkness.

Fiction © Copyright Christina Sng
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

More from Christina Sng:

A Collection of Nightmares

Hold your screams and enter a world of seasonal creatures, dreams of bones, and confessions modeled from open eyes and endless insomnia. Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares is a poetic feast of sleeplessness and shadows, an exquisite exhibition of fear and things better left unsaid. Here are ramblings at the end of the world and a path that leads to a thousand paper cuts at the hands of a skin carver. There are crawlspace whispers, and fresh sheets gently washed with sacrifice and poison, and if you’re careful in this ghost month, these poems will call upon the succubus to tend to your flesh wounds and scars.
These nightmares are sweeping fantasies that electrocute the senses as much as they dull the ache of loneliness by showing you what’s hiding under your bed, in the back of your closet, and inside your head. Sng’s poems dissect and flower, her autopsies are delicate blooms dressed with blood and syntax. Her words are charcoal and cotton, safe yet dressed in an executioner’s garb.
Dream carefully.
You’ve already made your bed.
The nightmares you have now will not be kind.
And you have no one to blame but yourself.

Available on Amazon!