The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
Noora
by Sheikha A.
Moon’s echo smothers a blinking void. My lineage is tied to Oath of Ash. Mother’s blood didn’t just become riddled by cysts. It was gradual degradation—spiralling vortex. Soon, a net of dust cocooned mother. There wasn’t an aura of death in its palpable sense; a layer of moon-mist collected on her body like nacre, and breathing stopped. The cause was never known. I was still enwombed when mother arched her last whisper; and an onyx horizon tightened its chest. Father turned into reef. Occasionally, the blood of poachers cutting their feet on his jagged substrate fed his untenable basin of grief.
gouged twilight a mollusc lays its shadow-bead
I was from a clan of amber-fire hues — wild, true and immaculate. Moonlight arcs could dare bevel my lustre, and I would still radiate like a burning string of constellation. The heat within me could turn whatever touched me into dust of golden flame.
orphan-pearl
blooming
in organic flesh
I was born rare, nourished to procreate; harvest my powers of predation. Untimely poachers, never quite knowing the correct season of my appearance, proved abundant. Hidden within my habitat were mounds of teeth. And fire. They came like pilgrims to acquire me pure. My clan only just became hungrier. But, all above, there was an oath to honour.
lake comets
a shoal of feeders
darting upwards
Fiction © Copyright Sheikha A.
Image © Copyright Alex Grehy.
More from author Sheikha A.:
Nyctophiliac Confessions:
Poems by Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee
“The night is cold enough to inspire poetry,” says Sheikha A. in her poem, “Reading My Bones.” This is the basis of Nyctophiliac Confessions – poems that are introspective and luminal, poems that require a certain amount of silence and space to be fully formed and appreciated. Reading these poems, I imagined that they were the kind of poems that assert themselves unbidden during a bout of insomnia. (A nyctophiliac being someone who loves the night or loves darkness).
Nyctophiliac Confessions is the 17th installment of Praxis’ chapbook series and contains twenty-six poems written by two poets, Sheikha A. and Suvojit Banerjee, interspersed with abstract paintings by Robert Rhodes.
