Quick note

The sudden influx of posting is largely due to my having been pointed in the direction of Lily Childs' Feardom. Each Friday, she posts a three word prompt for no more than 100 words of dark fiction. I am enjoying the challenge. If you write dark things, or think you may want to, that is a lovely forum and a great space to share and learn. If you simply like to read dark things (which are sometimes also funny), you're encouraged to do that, too.

Wed

She arrived on the tide,
his Irish bride,
with her too-bright hair
and her soft green eyes
alight with love.

Her gloved hand paused on the door
of his coach and four, as she skipped
the creaky step as though she knew
it made the sound of dead things.

I’ll wager he never told her
how that came to be,
the things he’d done to me
not so long ago
when I was pretty.

She will learn, tonight,
of his unnatural appetite
for terrible tangles
of flesh and fear.

His desire satisfied,
she will fly from him.

Straight to me.

Stock in Trade

“Not your night.” He takes a long drag.

I shrug. “Dreamers got the mark first.”

“You’re slow.” It’s a warning.

Can’t let my nerves show. “I’ll get the next one.”

“Best had.”

I follow the stench of copper. Iron, too. Ahead, a boy pushes a girl up against the wall. She doesn’t resist. I wrap myself around them, my shape their shape, their breath my breath. They topple, fall.

I hold their essence in my mouth until Shadow arrives.

“Girl tasted bitter.” He knows I swallowed the boy.

“Girls always do.”

He smiles. “Only some.”

Definitely not my night.

Tribute

Skin like papyrus rasps against mine. I would close my eyes if I could. He slithers, scents me, savors tiny sounds I can’t suppress. I shiver, but remain, a sacrifice required for another year of food for the town’s children. Children I will never have.

My corruption began when he entered the room. It compounds when he enters me, a sharp dart in a dark place. I bleed as I was meant to. His skin warms, softens.

“Inhuman, that’s what it is,” a witness whispers. She means inhumane, but speaks the truth.

He isn’t human.

And now, neither am I.

Recompense

He walked the spirals willingly, each step a memory. Here was her hair like fine silk on his pillow, there taut tendons as he stretched her beneath him. A twist brought mornings spent tending their bruises – some on the inside, where the dark thing grew.

A thousand steps for the days he’d kept her. A thousand pinpricks, each in a different spot, his poisoned nerves dying upward, until he could barely make the final turn.

She stood, pitiless and perfect, her malice a reflection of his love. At her feet, the darkling child crooned to taste his heart.