The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Spider Psalms
by Angela Yuriko Smith

She kneels before the bone-pale page to write the pain that simmers within her. Ink and brush, every hairline stroke must carry breath, bone, discipline, and the courage to break silence. She has ground the ink from the ashes of her dreams and mixed it with her own blood until it shines like a wound beneath the new moon. The secrets descend from her brush, thin as prayer, dark as prophecy, and then a spider descends from above. It lands, all joint and hunger, scrabbling fear on eight legs. Startled, she tips the ink dish, and her work drowns, vanishes, and is erased as she drowns, vanishes, and is erased…

…but the spider lives its own truth. It moves with agency, each footstep a mark, each mark a syllable in a silent whisper-language from before man claimed the earth. She leans closer to see the trail left behind is not the destruction of her words but script, not accident but authorship, writing in the only alphabet it owns. This thing, too, is outcast, erased, silenced. Her pain unravels into empathy, a recognition of the sacred divinity in them both, the power of words created without permission, the sovereign right to write the pain.

spider writes black psalms
her skin becomes sacred page
co-authoring truth.

Fiction © Copyright Angela Yuriko Smith
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

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Angela Yuriko Smith is a two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author, former president of the Horror Writers Association, and publisher of Space & Time through Authortunities Press. She helps writers build sustainable creative careers through Authortunities on Substack. To connect, visit authortunitiespress.com.