The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

To Build a Wife 
by Elaine Pascale

As young girls they had been taught to sing and dance.

They had been raised to cook and clean.

They had been trained to defend their homes.

They had been given pills, copious pills, to make them forget.

Each day they would wake and the forefront of their minds would be to please. To cook, clean, make love, sing, dance, and smile (always smile). They had no idea where these instincts came from but they were all encompassing.

Alivia, always curious, wondered what would happen if she didn’t swallow the pills, if she hid them instead. In another world, she would have been a great researcher or scientist and not someone whose value was measured in a clean home and a husband whose belly was full and whose sexual needs were satisfied.

After a few days of stuffing the pills in her pillowcase, she began to understand that she had desires of her own. After a few pill-free weeks, she no longer cared if the house was clean or if her husband was hungry. After a few months, she realized that she and the other women had been horribly manipulated.

It’s abuse, she thought, and it can’t continue.

She had sent secret messages to her friends, imploring them to stop taking the pills. A few did; the others were afraid. The pill-free women let the dishes pile in the sink. They let the clothes remain in the hamper unwashed. They let their husbands wait in their beds while they read or wrote or considered the constellations through telescopes.

Their disobedience was met with punishment.

Alivia saw the bruises and wounds on her friends’ flesh and felt the sting of the penance she had received. Some wanted to start taking the pills again. “It would be easier,” they explained. But Alivia liked the taste of freedom more than that of any pill and she vowed to unlearn all they had taught her.

Except for how to start a fire. She was glad they had taught her how to start a fire.

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Fiction © Copyright Elaine Pascale
Image courtesy of Pixaby.com

More from Elaine Pascale:

The Kitchen Witches

The women of Cape Cod have a story that is dying to be told. If only they could live long enough to tell it.

When Fiona Walker is contracted to write about a party attended by her social circle, her friends begin dying. She captures the competition and misery of the women around her through three different stories.

In Wishes, Melanie Voss discovers a Time Between Time where nothing that happens counts. Initially, Time Between Time is a welcome escape from a life spent watching the clock while doing chores for her family. But something sinister is in the Time Between Time and it is headed straight for Melanie.

Death and Taxes tells the story of Nashville DeCota, the Cape Capo. Nash swears that she is not the Island Impaler, nor the Tooth Snatcher, but she has just as many skeletons in her closet. When her husband, Derrick, is kidnapped, she has to come clean about her crimes if she ever wants to see him again.

Fiona tells her own story in Hazing, where she finds that the real source of evil behind the deaths of her friends is worse than she could have ever imagined.

Available on Amazon!