The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Anchors
by Christina Sng

My legs feel like anvils
Anchored to the seabed.

My lungs, gravid with salt,
Struggle not to explode.

I cannot breathe
Nor see the sun above.

Only the blanket of night
Held tight over the sky.

There is no one but Death
Calling me in a voice so soft,

I no longer hear the shrieks
Of joy from my torturer.

Only the vision
Of my dead father

Telling me, I will be safe.
I will be home.

*

When the thick burlap
Is ripped from my face,

I do not see my murderer
Standing before me,

But my dad and grandma
Waving to me at the door.

Behind them,
The light is blinding.

Grandma bends down
To pick up my long-dead cat,

Boy, who died at age 17,
Now a kitten again

With bright blue eyes
And a mew so sweet,

I long so much to hold him,
Remembering

The days of being young,
The days of being strong,

When the world was full
Of hope and promise,

Before we innocently let
The darkness seep in

To completely devour us,
To completely destroy us.

My loved ones are safe,
In a better place.

It is time for me
To join them.

*

I get up with amazing ease
And step past my murderer

Who dissipates into dust,
Staring in horror at me

As he tumbles back
Into his existing loop of hell

While I race to my family
And together,

We walk through the door,
Returning to the place

Where evil cannot follow.

Fiction © Copyright Christina Sng
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

More from Christina Sng:

A Collection of Nightmares

Hold your screams and enter a world of seasonal creatures, dreams of bones, and confessions modeled from open eyes and endless insomnia. Christina Sng’s A Collection of Nightmares is a poetic feast of sleeplessness and shadows, an exquisite exhibition of fear and things better left unsaid. Here are ramblings at the end of the world and a path that leads to a thousand paper cuts at the hands of a skin carver. There are crawlspace whispers, and fresh sheets gently washed with sacrifice and poison, and if you’re careful in this ghost month, these poems will call upon the succubus to tend to your flesh wounds and scars.
These nightmares are sweeping fantasies that electrocute the senses as much as they dull the ache of loneliness by showing you what’s hiding under your bed, in the back of your closet, and inside your head. Sng’s poems dissect and flower, her autopsies are delicate blooms dressed with blood and syntax. Her words are charcoal and cotton, safe yet dressed in an executioner’s garb.
Dream carefully.
You’ve already made your bed.
The nightmares you have now will not be kind.
And you have no one to blame but yourself.

Available on Amazon!