The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Crickets
by Mary Ann Peden-Coviello

I float in a cloud, amongst many others just like me. When we first got here, we were panicky and tried to find out why we were here. But They fed us and occasionally took away some of us. Now it’s all routine.

Well, until this morning, when I was scooped up with some others and taken away in a box. Now I don’t know where I am or what’s going to happen to me. I hear the Big Voices rumbling, but they sound like thunder over the hills. I can’t tell what they are saying.

The top opens up and a huge hand scrabbles around. We try to escape. I am caught between two enormous fingers and lifted out of the box. I squirm and wiggle, but the fingers clamp more tightly. A monstrous round face peers down at me, grinning.

“See there, Petey, ya gotta hold ’em tight, but not too tight. Ya’ll squish ’em if ya hold ’em too tight.”

“Yeah, I see, Granddad.”

“Then ya take the hook and slide it right up ’em.”

I feel a sharp pain between my legs, then agony slices up my body. I thrash my arms and legs. I shriek and beg. But the horrible thing holding me takes no notice of my struggles and can’t seem to hear my cries of agony.

Then the hook slides up my throat and out my mouth, silencing me. My vocal cords are dissected.

“It looks almost like a little person hanging there on the hook, Granddad.”

I am a little person, you fiend! I scream, soundlessly.

“Ain’t you got some imagination, Petey?”

I feel myself fly through the air. I plunge into the water. I do my best to breathe in the cool water and drown myself. Anything is better than the agony searing my hooked body. But no, I speak too soon. I am yanked viciously out of the water, flung through the air again, and once more sink into the water. Beneath me rises a fish, mouth agape.

It swallows me and the hook.

Peace at last.

 

Fiction © Copyright Mary Ann Peden-Coviello
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Mary Ann Peden-Coviello:

Fright Mare-Women Write Horror
Short Story: One Hour Before the Dark

Women write horror and have written it since before Mary Shelley wrote FRANKENSTEIN. This anthology is to highlight the fact women write great horror and to kill the fallacy that they aren’t in some way up to standard. They are. Read here stories by Elizabeth Massie, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Lucy Taylor, and a plethora of other great writers as they work on your nerves, get inside your head, and bang out some of the scariest tales written today. I’m proud to present these women for your consideration, as Rod Serling might say, as I ask you to step into FRIGHT MARE. Lock the door and windows, put on a light, and remember, it’s not real. It’s not real. Midnight awaits, monsters scheme to take you away, the strange and weird wait in the shadows, but it’s not real. Is it?

Edited by Billie Sue Mosiman, the author who brought you the SINISTER-TALES OF DREAD collections and her latest suspense novel, THE GREY MATTER.

Available on Amazon!