Ladies of Horror Flash Project – #Horror #author Christina Sng @ChristinaSng @Sotet_Angyal #LoH #fiction

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Nina D'Arcangela

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!


April_2020_image04Little Four
by Christina Sng

Just another step, I tell myself, dragging Teddy, my best friend since birth. The road is so rocky, it’s hard to walk.
But after escaping from that truck, there’s only one way home: through the brambly woods and the old rail road.
These are the bad men Momma warned me about. The ones who take little girls and hurt them a lot.
When the bad men stopped at a small truck stop, I unlocked the door and took off, unseen, as Momma taught.
Take the rocky path, she always says, it’s hard for them to walk. That’s where I’ll find you. That’s where you walk.
Wait. I hear a car behind me. They’ve caught up. Too fast, I think. I race into the woods to hide behind a mossy rock.
A cold hand covers my mouth before I can yelp. I turn anxiously to look. It’s Momma in a long red hood.
The truck slows and stops, and the evil men get out, each one armed with a gun and an angry look.
Momma signals for me to stay low as she shoots each one in the head with her crossbow. They fall like dominoes.
We walk home, holding hands, singing a song. She reminds me to always kill them or they will be back for more.
I nod, smiling, clutching Teddy to my heart. Tomorrow I’ll be 5. Momma says that’s when my training starts.
Fiction © Copyright Christina Sng
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

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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!

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Ladies of Horror Flash Project – #Horror #author Chelle Storey-Daniel @burningeden @Sotet_Angyal #LoH #fiction

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Nina D'Arcangela

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

April_2020_image03

Robert
by Chelle Storey-Daniel

The whole town loves Robert. No one is sure how old he is but if you tried to count the wrinkles on his smiling face it would take you years. He tells off color jokes to other old men and flirts with all the ladies he encounters. Children gravitate towards him even when they’ve never met him before and he treats them all like his own. He spends every holiday volunteering at the homeless shelter and nobody leaves without a hug that lasts just long enough to renew their spirit. The town loves him so much that after he broke his hip hiking through the woods on his property to get to his favorite spot … they not only got together to pave the rocky path, they bought him a gorgeous bench and installed it in the center of the clearing so he can sit and feed the birds.
Robert makes the walk daily, even when his tired old bones creak and protest. It reminds him of the aches and pains that went along with clearing this land after he’d purchased it in his twenties. It makes him feel alive. This spot renews his energy and the peace he finds here allows him to sleep easily each night when he trudges home, using a flashlight to illuminate the path. He figures he will keep making the walk for as long as he can count and recount the reasons this land is so special.

There are one hundred and forty seven bodies sewn deep into the earth in Robert’s special clearing. Some of them, the families of course, he kept together and carefully wrapped their arms around each other in their graves before covering them in dirt. It just seemed like the right thing to do. Robert knows each of the people buried here by name and could tell you in intimate detail what their last words were, how hard they fought to hang onto their lives, and how long it took them to draw their last breath once he set about snuffing it out.

There are no grave markers but Robert knows how he laid them out. The ones he suffocated are nearest the trees. The ones who bled out are to the right. The ones he beat to death are on the left. The children, his very favorite, are all together in the middle. He does want to make the job easier for whoever eventually finds his playthings so he’s included names and dates in waterproof baggies clutched in the hands on those who still have them and tucked into pockets of those who don’t.

The town loves Robert and Robert loves the town enough to never pick from his neighbors. He’s wanted to, of course, but if there is one thing Robert has … it’s standards. No self respecting person would poop where they eat, he thinks.

 
Fiction © Copyright Chelle Storey-Daniel
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

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Ladies of Horror Flash Project – #Horror #author Sheikha A. @Sotet_Angyal #LoH #fiction

Posted on April 26, 2020 by Nina D'Arcangela

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

April_2020_image02Leeches
by Sheikha A.

She levels in notions of power –
her hair has turned white as fur
of snow-deprived mount-peaks;
the old sage told her she would
lose the fecundity of her mind
(devil-leaden levels of her power),
she would be debunked to mate
with the corridors of her notions
(she resides between prophecies,
that she is bearer and harbinger),
and would birth dead foetuses
on beds of spirits that came back
for her. She says she is a swan
on waves of fire, on pure waters
of a place reserved to receive
her like a queen – notions of mad
dreams coming to her as fortune-
telling; the world is a diseased orb
in the pulse of festering hearts.
She sent worms to blood for food
of those she decreed faithless;
the old sage told her she would
be traded in flesh by her nemesis,
and her children would be born
as shadows looming over her bed,
the same throne she delivered
as sentences of illnesses to others;
and her body would carry bruises
of brutal pleasures until her notions
showed her the doorway to hell.
Fiction © Copyright Sheikha A.
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

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More from author Sheikha A.:

Screen Shot 2019-12-17 at 10.57.17 AM.pngNyctophiliac 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.

Available Here!

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Ladies of Horror Flash Project – #Horror #author Angela Yuriko Smith @AngelaYSmith @Sotet_Angyal #LoH

Posted on April 26, 2020 by Nina D'Arcangela

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

April_2020_image01

Game Faces
by Angela Yuriko Smith

“Checkmate,” one god said.
He smiled with self-assurance.
There was no answer.
The other god reached
across the board for her queen—
an overlooked threat.
“Maybe a stalemate,”
she said. “This time, no losers.”
He narrowed his eyes
seized hold of the board
and flipped the pieces skyward—
pawns shattered on tile.
“Everyone loses,”
he said. “I win or no wins.”
He stomped on the shards.
“It’s in this moment,”
she said. “That we all collapse—
humanity lost.”
She knelt and retrieved
a pawn, crushed beneath his heel
and set it upright.
“Without every piece
there’s no more game, no more wins—
every pawn matters.”
Beneath them the world
continued in its orbit
unaware of us.

 

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

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More from Angela Yuriko Smith:

The Bitter Suites

Book a stay at the Bitter Suites, a hotel that specializes in renewable death experiences. Whether you schedule your demise as therapy, to bond with a loved one or for pure recreation, your death is sure to give you a new lease on life. Renewable death is always beneficial… at least to someone.

Available on Amazon!

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Ladies of Horror Flash Project – #Horror #author Bailey Hunter @DarkRecesses @Sotet_Angyal #LoH #fiction

Posted on April 25, 2020 by Nina D'Arcangela

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

April_2020_image04

Molly and Frank
by Bailey Hunter

“Come on Frank, it’s time to go.” Molly stopped a moment to watch the flames curl and kiss the ceiling of the old barn house. It was always time to go. She let out a long sigh and grabbed Frank. “Now. Unless you want to burn with them.”
Frank was constantly trailing behind. He had been with Molly forever. In fact, she literally could not remember a single moment before life with him. They had been on the road since the beginning. They would stop for a while, but never more than a year— and it always ended badly. But Frank loved Molly and would follow her anywhere. He would be there to protect her whenever she needed and she was there to comfort him through the rough spots.
There were a lot of rough spots.
Molly, Frank in tow, shuffled down the old dirt road leaving the screams and the inferno that would eventually swallow those too, behind.  She no longer ran from these scenes. Time had taught her that no one really looks, and if they do, she is not the one they are looking at. 
When she first arrived here it was strange, and she was small. She sought out the good… the kind… the caregivers. She needed their care. It wasn’t too long though before she realised she could never stay with them, no matter how good or kind they were. After a year, maybe two, the questions would start. Then the endless doctors’ visits and tests would begin. A child who doesn’t grow is a concern. The only blessing is that back then, when a child went missing, it rarely went beyond the community, and often could be dismissed as lost in the woods, or drowned in the river. Nature claimed its own more often then.
As the decades went by, Molly had adapted. Her tiny frame and wide eyes were no longer a weakness but a strength. She turned away from the kind, and into the filthy arms of the cruel and vile. This way, she could remove them without question. She didn’t have to concern herself with the hole she left behind. During that time she and Frank learned a lot about how to lure, and how to dispose of the human filth. There’d been a few dodgy moments which only taught her that death was their issue, not hers. She learned firsthand of pain and suffering, turning it into an art of her own. 
Time has a way of tipping and twisting things after a while. She and Frank no longer cared if those who took her in were good or bad, kind or evil. They all had to go. In this age of digital footprints, and interconnection where news traveled as fast as it happened, there was no other choice as Molly saw it.  For the good ones, she made sure it was swift and gentle. They deserved at least that. She took her time with the cruel ones though. It was fun to watch the realisation emerge from widened eyes that inside the child was a monster more fearsome than anything they could ever become. It was in those moments she almost understood what she was… why she was.
Molly pulled Frank in for a big hug. “I know you hate that part,” she whispered in his fuzzy ear, “but it’s for our own good. You understand that, right?”  Frank said nothing, and simply hugged her back. Molly started walking again, the sounds of sirens slowly growing louder in the far distance. The fields were warm this time of year, and the wheat already high. It would be a good place to sleep tonight, and Frank would watch over her to keep her safe.
Fiction © Copyright Bailey Hunter
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com
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More from Bailey Hunter:
Bailey is a publisher with Dark Recesses Press.

DeadWomenInLoveCover_FrontDead Women in Love

Harvey Drago, Intangible Private Eye, is back in DEAD WOMEN IN LOVE.

Join him as he investigates the brutal death of a history professor, as well as the disappearances of several ladies of the evening. Both cases turn out to be related to the mysterious human-shaped piles of ashes being left around Nashville, and the decades-old theft of priceless Egyptian relics, including the mummy of a nefarious pharaoh. Supernatural Investigations Bureau agent Amy Marten weaves a seductive spell over our hero, as does the oddly rejuvenated Pam, his long-time occasional paramour. Is it his body they’re after, or his heart? Maybe his soul? Or is it something even more intimate than that?

 

DarkRecessesPress.com

 
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Ladies of Horror Flash Project – #Horror #author Ela Lourenco @ElaLourenco @Sotet_Angyal #LoH #fiction

Posted on April 25, 2020 by Nina D'Arcangela

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

April_2020_image03The End
by Ela Lourenco

Grey… everything is grey now. The colourless fog blends as one with the dull grass, as grey
as the absolute silence. First came the sickness and mankind died in the millions until the
last one was dead.
The Earth wept as the disease spread to the animals and trees. Carcasses and torn up roots
littered the ground atop the unburied corpses of man.
The skies darkened as carbon dioxide filled the stagnant air and ripped the paint off
everything it encountered. Nothing remains, the Earth is now a dead piece of rock in space…
Fiction © Copyright Ela Lourenco
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

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More from Ela Lourenco:

awakeningDragon Born: Book Three
Awakening

The Royal tournament, the Karnac, is fully underway. But there is deception and betrayal at every turn. Unseen dark forces are at play, both within the school grounds and out with. Even the Gods are unable to help when a new threat looms over them all.The very existence of Azmantium depends on Lara fully becoming the Child of Fire and casting aside the Shadows lurking in every corner of her beloved planet.Can she overcome the challenges that await? Will the Shadows cover the world in darkness? Only Lara and her friends can change the fate of Azmantium.

Available on Amazon!

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Ladies of Horror Flash Project – #Horror #author Sonora Taylor @sonorawrites @Sotet_Angyal #LoH #fiction

Posted on April 24, 2020 by Nina D'Arcangela

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

April_2020_image02

Bones into Blood
by Sonora Taylor

A woman walked into a field
With flowers white as bone.
She knelt into the grasses and
Began to dig alone.
The only one beside her was
The body drained of blood,
Blood that sat in mason jars
Within her cozy home.
As she dug, her bones grew weak,
Her skin a clammy cold.
She wiped her brow, then started when
She saw her fingers coiled
Like the bones of that poor body
Lying at her feet.
Her feet, now shriveled like her hands!
She let out one last scream
As her blood seeped into the dirt
And disappeared below.
She glanced and saw the flowers were
No longer white as bone.
They took her color, took her blood,
Then took her heart’s last beat.
She fell into the grasses near
The body at her feet.
Fiction © Copyright Sonora Taylor
Image courtesy of  Pixabay.com

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More from Sonora Taylor:

74533110_1104998099694619_4901851685367840768_nLittle Paranoias: Stories

Is it a knock on the door, or a gust of wind? A trick of the light, or someone who’ll see what you’ve done?

“Little Paranoias: Stories” features twenty tales of the little things that drive our deepest fears. It tells the stories of terror and sorrow, lust at the end of the world and death as an unwanted second chance. It dives into the darkest corners of the minds of men, women, and children. It wanders into the forest and touches every corner of the capital. Everyone has something to fear — but after all, it’s those little paranoias that drive our day-to-day.

Available on Amazon!

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Ladies of Horror Flash Project – #Horror #author Kathleen McCluskey @KathleenMcClus4 @Sotet_Angyal #LoH #fiction

Posted on April 24, 2020 by Nina D'Arcangela

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

April_2020_image01The King
by Kathleen McCluskey

Surrounded by his faithful queen and his ever vigilant bishops, the King decided it was time to finally end the reign of the Black King. He positioned his knights to his left and one in front of his beloved queen. The faithful legion of pawns knew they were about to be sacrificed for the better of the kingdom and stood proudly in front of their monarch. His castles at the edges of his land were ready to move forward in the heat of battle.
The battle raged and soon the king had found himself staring into the eyes of the black king’s knight. He moved his spouse out of the way but new that the knight could not advance any further. He must move in the direction that is solely his. The king struck. The black king’s knight lay at his feet defeated. The king looked around and with horror filling his eyes he could see his beloved was in peril. He moved his castles and instantly the threat was gone. The black king’s bishop lay dead at the castle’s base. The queen retreated as the castles began their assault. The black king was in their trap. The king’s wife being angry that a lowly bishop would advance on her began her move to dismiss the black king’s defenses. She drew her sword and with a few mighty swings the black king was in her grasp. She stood in front of the black king and swung her sword. With one colossal swing the black king’s head lay at her feet.
The king was pleased that the black king’s sovereignty of terror was finally over. He could now have full control over the lands until a new black king would appear at the edges of his territory. He pulled back his queen, his bishops, knights and castles. His ever vigilant pawns were always read to sacrifice themselves in the name of glory.
Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com
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More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!

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The Ladies of Horror Flash Project – #Horror #author Marge Simon @Sotet_Angyal #LoH #fiction

Posted on April 23, 2020 by Nina D'Arcangela

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

April_2020_image04
Little Natalie
by Marge Simon

Mr. Sweeney next door paid me a visit yesterday. It was the first day after the funeral, and I was celebrating quietly in the kitchen with a quart of Absolut. The doorbell rang several times before I decided to answer it.  I composed my face to an appropriate state of sadness and opened the door. There he stood, that nasty old man. He handed me this poem and a photo of me he must have taken eight years ago with my favorite stuffed toy, Leo. Sweeney tipped his hat and left without a word.
Little Natalie

 

She knows she is precious,
with her little girl face and arms
lugging her toy lion around,
she can’t jump and play
like a five-year-old should.
Oh, how they love her!

 

She begins to grow pubic hair,
and her periods come and go;
all of thirteen years she is,
but still she looks like a child.
Oh, how they love!

 

Just an innocent wee child,
who covers her mirror
with her pet rabbit’s blood,
pours Pine Sol into a flowered cup
and serves it to Mommy as tea.
Oh, how they …

 

Inside her head is a dreadful wish
for her brother, mommy and dad,
she says out loud she’ll kill them all
for the pleasure of watching them die.
Oh!
 
Might have known someone wasn’t fooled, even if family and friends were. Actually, it’s not a bad poem, even if it doesn’t rhyme like poems should.  Anyway, he’s harmless enough.  Knows I’m adopted, knows I don’t give an effing damn about these people.  He’s not, — can’t be, normal like they were — or he’d never have given me this poem.
I must confess I’m pretty proud of how I pulled the killings off, making it look like a robbery and multiple homicide, like Capote’s In Cold Blood. I said I hid in the clothes hamper when I heard shots fired. Of course, they never questioned my babyish innocence. Yet something tells me I better keep an eye on old Sweeney. He might be thinking to blackmail dear little Natalie, and she wouldn’t like that at all, no sir.
Fiction © Copyright Marge Simon
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

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More from Marge Simon:

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The Demeter Diaries
by Marge Simon and‎ Bryan D. Dietrich

‘The Demeter Diaries’ is a record of love and longing and the inevitable horror that arises between the minds of Mina Harker and Vlad Dracula as they court one another in waking dreams. The dialogue, written in both poetry and prose, imagines a psychic connection that develops between the two even before Dracula arrives in England. As Dracula makes his way from Transylvania to Whitby on the doomed ship Demeter, the two would-be lovers transmit their thoughts across the waves and lands that separate them, alternately wooing and terrifying one another with the idea of love eternal and all the dark delicacies necessary to ensure it. Front cover art by Wendy Saber Core, interior illustrations by Luke Spooner.

Available on Amazon!

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Ladies of Horror Flash Project – #Horror #author Nina D’Arcangela @Sotet_Angyal #LoH #fiction

Posted on April 23, 2020 by Nina D'Arcangela

The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

April_2020_image03

Introspective
by Nina D’Arcangela

I sit here alone, thoroughly abandoned, and deserving so. Awash in paralytic dread, I mourn what I have not yet lost, but know will soon be stolen from me. I yearn to believe hope is not dying, I long to hold it near, to cherish it dearly. I ache to know some degree of stability; struggle to somehow make it last, even for just a moment longer. But assigned the jester’s roll, I am yet again the patch, never the permanent fixture. Brilliant shimmering trinkets surround me, I see their shine, their gleam, yet I shield my eyes from the pain I know awaits if I gaze upon them. To feel what I have felt, to know what I have known, to watch it dissolve from a distance is a torture I cannot express. I batter my fists impudently against this unrelenting barrier, but again, I act the fool. I can only hide for so long. Reality slams against my senses, intrudes upon my torment, dares me call this solace. This damning truth insists that I allow the glimmer to dim, to see with wide eyes what would be shown to me, that which will be stolen from me. Yet still, for all the anguish, the tears, the pain that will not allow me to draw even a single quelling breath, I see beauty. I see only you, and you will destroy me.
Fiction © Copyright Nina D’Arcangela
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

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More from Nina D’Arcangela:

Mental Ward: EXPERIMENTS

A dank basement, shadow filled hallways, the deep echo of a metal latch being thrown while faint screams are heard… These are the things you might experience in a place where the unspeakable happens, where conscientious action and moral turpitude turn a blind eye in the interest of advancing one’s own personal pursuits in the most deranged and unjustifiable manner. The type of place where power corrupts, and depravity runs rampant among those imbued with it. A place where the unfortunate are abandoned to the devices of those who convince themselves their actions are in the best interest of science.

Mental Ward: Experiments is a collection of ten short stories that demonstrate the worst of humanity’s ambition in the interest of ‘civilized’ advancement. Step into a world where sanity is left behind, and horror is what the doctor ordered!

Available on Amazon!

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