The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

In Greener Pastures
by Melissa R. Mendelson

Words. So many words. My words fluttering down into my mind, spilling across my tongue and out my mouth. Beautiful depictions. Interesting characters. Inquisitive and Inspirational. These words give me power, make me want to take on the world and change it for the better. They’re like Monarch butterflies storming the skies, and there is a little girl standing in the field with one hand open and outstretched. My words come in for a landing, filling her hand, her mind, and her heart, and she smiles.

I watched the little girl run off, but as she did, my words did not follow. The Monarch butterflies just hovered, maybe one stray clung to her shoulder as she shared my words with those that she knew. But they did not believe her. Prove it, they said, and she couldn’t. Later, she would find that butterfly dried and dead, caught in the fabric of her life, and she would throw it away along with the memory that she had because maybe it was not real.

My words still fluttered, grasping at air, trying to breathe. The words were mine. They were me trying to be heard, felt and lived, but a wicked cold wind was blowing. An echo was growing. Prove it. Are those words really yours?

My words are looking for greener pastures because there must be some place out there, where they could grow and thrive and live, but now they are falling down, twisting into some kind of strange circuitry, cocooned into a metallic state, where lips part and spill out the words that I once held.

In greener pastures are not the remains of what was so many words, my words. In greener pastures, the cocoons do not remain but burst open with razor sharp wings, cutting down anything, anyone that dares say otherwise. In greener pastures, the shells that you find in the grass, stomp on and crack apart are the dreams that I once held, stories I wanted to tell, but those shells are simply that, shells because my words became hollow, slipping further and further away.

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Fiction © Copyright Melissa R. Mendelson
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

About Author Melissa R. Mendelson:

Melissa R. Mendelson is a horror, science-fiction and dystopian author and poet.  She has two publications with Wild Ink Publishing.  One is a prose poetry collection, This Will Remain With Us, and the other is a short story collection, Stories Written On Covid Walls.  She also self-published a sci-fi novella, Waken and a small short story collection, Name’s Keeper.

If you’d like to learn more about Melissa, you can visit her accounts here: www.MelissaMendelson.com