2025 Short Stories
A Collection
All my short stories from the 2025 Halloween season. Take note of the warnings after each story title.
Inky
WARNINGS: Violence, Mental Health
It coated the crime scene, black as the moonless night, more viscous than the coagulated plasma on the deceased. The ink breathed just as slowly as its mother muck had, a life force blood would have dreamed of owning.
“Is it working?” the trembling crone croaked, great trepidation in her voice.
The boffin remained silent, staring at the anticlimactic consumption process before her. The ooze dotted the open page with onyx splotches, its every attempt to ingest the words and images on the leaflet more halfhearted than the next. It smeared the script and blurred the pictures, but could not devour anything more than a phrase and a smudge of pencil. Her eyes were wide with rage. She was paralysed in pulsing fury. She could only bring herself to glower at the undulating ink. If she glanced towards the corpse, her muscles would tense to the point of popping. If she raised her glare to the mirror before her, she feared she would take the sharpened quill and pierce her reflection’s neck.
“Madame, is it working?”
“No,” the boffin said with a chilling tone, “No, it isn’t working. I fear the lack of a pulse in the sonneteer has stumped the ink.”
A caw of agony fell from the hag’s thin lips, “Ah, that is just what happened with the last one! Remember the head? Remember that? What a failure that turned out to be! An immeasurable fiasco!”
“Yes. As I have hypothesised a dozen times, a heartbeat is needed for the ink to do its job,” the boffin spat through painfully clenched teeth, “It concerns me that I have to keep repeating this discovery to those around me.”
She could feel the aged woman’s temperament flare before her hawking commenced, “You do not understand the anger that pulses through my veins, madame! I have warned you of it countless times, and you refuse to listen. I witness a sea of red when the artists cry. You’ve known this all along, and you remain incessantly ignorant!”
“We must be mindful of our reactions to bothersome stimuli. It is unbecoming to behave so animalistically.”
“But is that not what I am, physician? I am an animal.”
The crone’s voice lilted in a terrifically aggravating manner. Her pitch was a rodent’s squeal. Manic and undignified, as though her hunched spine and wretched appearance weren’t jarring enough. Had the boffin’s shedding of such a state taught her nothing? The hag would never growl if she only ever reached for a whine.
“No,” the boffin seethed, “You are a mindless advisor, but no animal. You are an emblem of idiocy and a symbol of the chivalry behind a mercy killing. You are no beast, only a fool.”
“But I’ve claws!” she rambled on, “I’ve these awful teeth that pierced right through the little poet’s throat! I am a monster to behold!”
“No—”
“It is what I am, physician!”
“Stop this!”
“It is what I am, and what I always will be!” she howled, “You would know, leech! You’ve known it all along!”
“No!”
The boffin shrieked, a noise of fallen fauna, a caterwaul of agony that morphed into a maddened witchlike cackling. She removed the quill from the corpse’s eye and rammed it repeatedly into the mirror’s warped glass. The crone’s scream shadowed the boffin’s own, one of fright and anguish, one of helplessness, one of horrific inhumanity.
When not a sliver of glass had gone unscathed, the boffin turned her rage on the novel of poems and paintings. The living ink scattered from the compositions, half-digested words and semi-gorged images left in its wake. It hurried to her hat’s rim to conceal itself from her rage.
Her rage. Her fury was always the problem. She’d never learned to use her anger to aid her. It was uncontrollable, unquenchable. But when one was robbed of choice, was madness not the only path left to take? The boffin was locked in a role she did not want. She could be nothing more than what she’d been designated to be: a necromancer, lifeless in rhyme or reason, to be gawked at as magic plumed from her fingertips. Her brain was for nothing when her digits could glow. Her only method of escape was a mask affixed to her dermis.
She stabbed the book until it was a desolate wasteland.
She stabbed until her fist ached from its clenching.
She stabbed until she pierced her own hand, and she screamed.
The boffin tore the pen from her skin and threw it aside, scrambling backwards and pressing down on the wound, drawing in breaths and puffing out air as though she were about to give birth. Her eyes burned with tears that had little to do with the injury she’d acquired. It was the cry of a child, the wail that would have sent any parent running through the darkest forest and most perilous streets to find their petrified little one.
No one ran to her aid. She was doomed to be alone, always learning the endless depths of isolation.
“As it should be,” she hissed to herself, a lullaby sung to the melody of her existence, “As it should be. As it should be. As it should be.”
The madness buzzing about her settled, her mania exhausting itself into an overdue sleep. A numbness flooded her brain, slowly fading away into an even temper. Already, she felt a little more deadened, a little more frozen.
With great care, she sat up until her gaze found her hat, its great rim bubbling with a petrified ink that only wanted to serve her, and was confused at her unhappy demeanour.
“It is not your fault, beloved,” she soothed with a strain in her voice, a mother on the brink of lunacy doing her best to ease her child’s worry, “You have done so well. I must perform my part as well as you perform yours. That is all!”
She approached the hat and slipped it back on her head, the rim’s fidgeting easing into a slow ripple, and then a prolonged wave, and then a still slumber. It could rest for now. She would not waste any more of its strength on the dead.
But she needed to find true food for it, and very soon. Part of the ink’s trembling was its lack of sustenance. She did not want to know what it would do if it ever tasted starvation. She could not afford to scavenge. Not anymore. Not when the stakes were so high.
Perhaps it was time to collect a few minions to ease the weight of her burdensome task. Narration accumulation was not a one-witch job.
Maw’s Ticker
WARNINGS: Food/Hunger
The Maw had not chosen the ticker; the Maw had been cursed.
Hunger was not meant to feel, but to be felt. It was an insentient sensation, a blazing fire. Consumption was its whole.
Gobble. Guzzle. Gorge.
But the necromancer had cursed the Maw’s abdomen, hexed its mighty gullet. A new organ thrummed within it, an alien to its being. With time, the whirring grew louder than the Maw’s growling belly. With time, the rhythmic hum veiled the voracious desire to eat.
The Maw chomped the songbird with a pang of nausea, tore the hare in two with a burning behind its eyes.
The Maw’s feasts were tainted with contrition. It was wrought with penitence.
The Maw watched the human, unable to open its jaw or bear its teeth.
What was it the vile enchanter had plagued the Maw with?
Something in its blood, something that breathed on its own, something that tasted of a melody and sounded like a sweet.
Something monstrous had taken the beast’s appetite, and that hex called the Maw to look on the human with a new starvation.
Of Cirrus
WARNINGS: Love (in general)
Could she be loved, little devil that she was?
She’d maintained her secrecy by white-knuckling her privacy’s reins. Her earnest pleas for solitude and seclusion had been christened charming. What an endearing little thing she was to them. How eager superiors were to look down on those they deemed pitifully bashful.
She had the house thoroughly bewitched.
But her reserved promenade was coming to an end. In the church stood a man to be her husband, who was ravenous to see his bride’s face for the first time. She had been too thorough in her efforts. He’d become wolfish in his want, too alike to brethren she held and loathed. He’d conjured up an image in his mind, a beauty that battled that of the gods.
He had painted her an angel of gold and pure white.
Would he shriek at her skin of crimson, a dermis that did not glow a precious sallow hue, but was tough as the metal itself?
Her hands trembled in her gloves, eyes the size of saucers, black as the moonless night.
She knew monsters could love men. She did not know if the reverse were possible.
Someone touched her arm, whispered her cue with an assurance they had no right to have. The little devil had tricked. The little devil had lied. The little devil donned a mask of lace and a tone of velvet and an aura of delicacy.
Under a mask, she could fool anyone.
But could she be loved, little devil that she was?
Hollowly
WARNINGS: Depression, Demon Possession (if you squint)
I have found space in your heart, sad and downtrodden.
I have found your most precious crevice, and I call it my abode. I have made a kingdom of this fissure you neglected, the gap you swore would sew itself. In your absence, I have claimed it as my own, and I have padded its walls to stop the pain.
It is mine, and I alone reign.
Hollow is my name.
You lie to yourself. You do not hunger for glory, but you savour to hallow. You bow to what glows. Warmth is covertness. There is safety in the fire. Who could hurt you within the flame? Who could scar you if you are already burned?
I will not love you chastely, but I covet your bones of ash. Oh, how I will revere them.
You are made of grooves to be filled, chasms to be cemented, ravines that need no healing, but fixation. The infection requires no medicine, only concealment.
I carve apart the rest of you to make room for the disease to breathe. It is more deserving of breath than you.
Your choice is poison to your brain, noxious to my senses. Did you not appoint me ruler? You adorned me with your crown, and I do not return gifts.
You have relinquished to me every opening in your soul. With your word, I have claimed it as my own.
I have confiscated your heart.
You are mine, and I alone reign.
Hollow is my name.
Main de Gloire
WARNINGS: Demon/monster, intense imagery, hanging/death
July had been unkind to the crops, but affectionate to the crook.
For Leonce, his hands of glory had never dried so rapidly. His pockets had been well full for summer’s start. He had been well all summer’s commencement.
Until.
Until that terrible night.
That night, that wretched night, a night of darkness and murk. A grimness that stained the irises and lathered the tongue in soot. He’d gone hunting for mitts, the wicked kind still pledged to hanged offenders. They’d never swayed so bleakly in the gallows as they did that starless evening. Death’s stench had beckoned him to a ripe gibbet. He’d hacked two good palms before he’d found his third target.
The tendons and bone had not resisted his hatchet. But the stench. That rotten stench had knocked him off his feet. A fool he’d been to dismiss the foulsome whiff, to think it decomposition’s vile jest.
Preservation could not mask the odour. It had never been a process of floral fragrance, but the noxious scent had plagued Leonce until his stomach could hold little food without churning.
Sickness stirred him awake.
Rot lulled him to a restless slumber.
All the while, that ghostly trill upon his neck never abandoned him.
No malodorous discharge could mask the reek. Drying the cadaver’s hand in herbs only solidified its revulsion, only enunciated its strangeness, its rascality. It was not a dead man’s hand, but a malevolence. It was not of humanity, but of something entirely other, from a place nether.
Upon its completed preservation, he sold the hand to the first buyer he could, for a measly return that had vanished within the hour it’d been earned. He did not want the money. He wanted the weight upon his soul gone.
He’d not dared to make another hand aflame for the felons to wield, not when the warble remained on his neck. The sulfur no longer pulsed, but pittered about the windows and underneath the door, as though to assure Leonce it would return to him wholly one day.
He worried for himself. He worried for the thieves who’d purchased the cursed mitt. Would their fortune of gold and silver enshroud the bewitchment in their company? Would the hand favour them?
A sweat had built upon Leonce’s brow, one that had little to do with the heat and everything to do with the coinage in his pocket, the payment for his services.
The pieces weighed heavy on his soul.
Why had he not noticed its skin of ruby before?
July had been unkind to the crops, but worse for the crook.
Teeth & Timidity
WARNINGS: Depression, Religion
The weeping had stirred the priest: howling that refuted forgiveness, but requested mourning.
The churchman had found shade between the altars to peer out at the pews.
The roar had severed his hearing, but the sight brought him to tears.
In kneeling’s absence, its hunch made it reverent.
In want of song, it bayed its woes.
Could a prayer be heard between a devotion made of claws?
Could the beastly be pious? The dreadful devout?
With great veneration, the wolfman worshipped.
With a wanting heart, the priest echoed the beast.
Upon the Ninth
WARNINGS: Monsers, Death, Cornfield, Hunt Atmosphere
The stalks are columns of prominent stone. They hardened under your fingertips. Upon the push to make exit anew, the maze remains, frigid in time, with a refusal to budge. Coloured gold, but you never anticipated the corn to hold the metal’s strength. The grass lay flat under your feet.
You call it magic.
You declare it a curse.
But your excuses, your reasons, are comforts to yourselves, you agonised souls. I have heard this line, within a nightmare. A lie, I know it well. A lie that soothes the aching heart. Its price is poison.
It was for me, your ruination, as ruination always is. Souls born and loved, lived and lost. They are bred for my teeth, upon the ninth.
What will cause you to scream first?
My horns, bone in colour, but in might, greater than any metal man could mould.
My stature, how I tower over the highest of you. I look upon the stalks, and I see your follies. I see how you tumble and make them sway, as though you call to me, as though you welcome the strength of my hand around your throat.
No, but it is my steps, so often it is my steps, that elicit the greatest cries. It is the thunder of my hooves upon this ground. I wish you could have heard my stride within the walls of the labyrinth. Surely, your hearts would not have lasted more than minutes.
My home! How I loathed it, how I miss it. It reincarnates in every life, following me as a shadow. I am beast, and it reminds me. I am man, and it mourns me.
The pattern rejects modification. In exit, it will not provide a second, third, or fourth. Only one passage prevails, and that one is most difficult to find. It is a gate that cannot be seen without first your finding of me. I am of the path, and I cannot be avoided.
No, not an obstacle, but a message, a lesson, a truth of humanity’s simplest flaw. I am the crest of your most primal nature. I am the emblem of your most human selves.
My claws have gone sticky with your life. So few of you remain, and only so little ago did we commence. I heard you, joyous outside of this, this which you call a maze. How foolish you are. This is more than what was made for me before. This surpasses what was my house of madness!
When you fall, you fly. When you turn, you continue straight. In linear, you wander aside. In winding, you find a false lucidity. I have grown tired of grinding man’s bones. I have heard talk, learned new entertainments, a pleasure in watching the descent into insanity. In this theory, I have tested many and proven it true. Your insides are tempting, but your derangement is toothsome.
They call it rage. They are sure it is anger that propels me forward in cruelty. Anguish has been bestowed upon me, but I have not succumbed. I am not feeble. I am only just one. Nothing is like me, yet I am of everything. This isolation makes me invincible.
From my start, there was nothing that could sustain me, no mother’s milk would do. And it was to such a dastardly declaration that I was cast: a bastard who was nothing and all. What comes of one that is not taught a proper feast? They know only to gorge. The only nourishment comes from a flesh I share but cannot call my own.
Don’t you see? Don’t you understand?
You are not right, nor am I wrong. You are rightly afraid, and I am wrongfully made. To jar over such trifles is to waste time, of which you have so little.
There is one last, one final man who has made his way nearest to the end.
This human breathes loudly, deeply, as though they run with tears in their eyes. I do not shame a man for his wails, just as I do not look down upon the children who gallop through my home. They do not know I am here behind the stalks. Begetters watch their little ones and trust them safe, so long as their kin do not run beyond where the parents’ sight can follow. They are right. They are safe, because these wanderers are not mine to take. No, I have made my claim in this field, but it is in the ninth year that you are called to me.
Did you not wonder why this quantity of you gathered? Did you never read what they did in Athens?
You know my name. You’ve seen my face in stories, in sketches and drawings. Look up to the sky. For they have named the stars after my murder. There he stands, my supposed killer, wielding the club that slew me.
But here I stand, as though he’d failed.
Here I am, the Minotaur, as strong and as mighty. I have found home in grain. But I stand, and where is he? Where is Theseus? Above in the cosmos. Above, with the stars. He flies, but I breathe.
Here, I have found you, final one. You have run fast. You have found the gate, the doorway to your freedom. But you have found me, just as you were destined to, just as I was destined to take your last breath. In your lifelessness, a peace comes upon the world.
Dawn has broken the horizon. It has filled the world anew. You will be missed. You will be remembered. They will come to this place, and I will be long gone. You humans, you have conjured all sorts of labyrinths for me to find solace in. You have constructed beautifully. You have written architecture with my name on your tongue.
Is it my horns? Was it my hooves? You have remembered me so fondly, held such respect for all I’ve done, all that I am. This is right of you, for I can be merciful in my slaughterings, but dare me, and I will be a monster.
Where I will go next, I do not know. But wherever I go, I will meet you face to face again. Just upon the ninth.
Savour Its Tearings
WARNINGS: Death, Monsters, Homicide
Only a brew, an elixir for two.
Remember its tang. Savour its tearing.
Ophelia wore a dress of indigo. It was not the attire she thought she’d adorn for the occasion. A woman pure of soul, goodly of heart, she’d assured herself she would awaken in the after in a gown of white, a snowy hue that would personify her virtue. Tears prickled at her nose, built up on her lower lids. She brimmed with sorrowful terror in death, and worry gobbled her up. She’d always heard miserable souls remained. Ophelia was meant to be enveloped by a light. Life was over. Rest was her promise, eternal peace in a wondrous beyond she could not conceive and could not imagine to perfectly dream. The dress was wrong. Her woe was wrong. Something terrible had transpired between her last breath and her awakening. Ophelia would not settle for such a result.
No, she would have to do something about this predicament, and she would have to do so very quickly.
The tea cups were still before her on the counter, dry and steaming. Its aroma wafted about. It brought her to lift her nose, to inhale deeply—to remember.
Her wedding day. Mr Mith.
Had her final kiss been to her betrothed, or the reaper?
They’d not even sipped their tea, not even dressed their hands in pledging rings.
No, no, it was frightfully wrong. Breath revulted her. She should not have experienced a single inkling to indulge in an act like breathing. She was far and away from such a human necessity. It had only been a brew for the happy couple: one sweet, one striking. Her traitorous senses were pulling her from peace. She needed to get away from all of the sensations holding her to the earth. She’d find Mr Mith just in the yonder, where happiness persisted.
With a tiptoe that echoed, she approached the kitchen’s exit. The world beyond the window looked grey, blanketed with a thick fog. It was only an illusion, she was sure. Just yonder, she’d find the glittery goodbye she’d been promised. For a pure and good soul like hers, it was the only way.
She went to push the door open, only for her hand to advance right through. The brush of wood was alien to her body. All her being shifted and expanded for the stationary panel to slip by as though she, in fact, was the one unmoving, frozen in time. It sickened her, and her nausea petrified her. Dead organs should not twitch. Dead organs should not sense. A churning stomach was something for the living. Only the ghoulishly dead behaved so abnormally, and Ophelia was no ghoul. She was no beast of shadow. She held her chin high as she exited, only for her senses to be assaulted in a new, spectacular performance.
A melodious roar thrummed her eardrums, and she clapped her hands over her lugs as though they could muffle the terrible noise. They buffered nothing.
That shrieking sonneteer was before her, about her, within her skull: a shrill lark with a morose tune. She’d heard it before, only once, when her heart had ached something awful.
Aghast, little spectre of great haste!
Is your tea ready?
Mind where you run when your shadow leads!
You flee from a grove of your making,
and you trust only what you see.
What keeps you is breath. What stirs you is sorrow.
Upon a great forgetting, you would rise,
but with a heavy memory, you have fallen!
Ophelia shrieked. The wind swirled in gusts that robbed her of station. She turned one way, and then the other. The wind sharpened to blades, lashing out at her skin, pulling and tearing at her gown.
“Please, stop this!” she screamed, “I’ve done nothing worthy of punishment! I’ve only ever been good! Only ever righted what was wrong, with only the wisdom you granted!”
The poet hooted, cackled as those within dark legends. It was the chorus of the forewarning raptors, echoing their first cautionary tale from all those nights ago.
Aghast, a ghost, a wraith of deceit.
Aghast, a ghost, as she lived and breathed.
Listen as they take you in horror!
Watch as they stake you to your grave!
Bewildered, she clambered back, “Where is my husband? Where is Mr Mith? Is he hurt?”
You spit on the living,
you peck out their eyes,
you who embrace the perished!
Ophelia recoiled. She was no enemy. No knight had reason to put her opposite his sword. She was a friend of the soldier, his loyal shield, even in his greatest ignorance. With a cry, she scrambled backwards, the whirring dying as she did so. In flutters of tearful lashes, her gaze unblurred. Around her sat tea and elaborate mugs. She was once again in the kitchen. Outside was grey.
“No, no, no!” Ophelia sobbed. She wailed into her hands, clawed her nails through her tresses of auburn. She ran this way and that. She circled the room. She overturned every stool, tossed open every drawer, seeking not what she desired to find, but for delay. When she dared to unlatch a window, the wind outside rocked the little chamber into a deafening clamber of noise. She screamed into the air, and an echo of loneliness returned her call tenfold.
“I have died!” she wept, “I have died, and I must go home! I do not belong here! The tea would not kill! It wouldn’t!”
A rattling startled her. Pots swayed above her head in a ghostly wind. The stench of a burnt dinner was potent. But it was not a reek of scorched lamb, but the singe of something rotten. A snap. She jumped, a hand over her chest, over her beatless heart. She needn’t search far to find the noise’s source. As though it had appeared from the ether, it sat before her: a hand of a terrific odour, one that nearly rocked Ophelia off her feet. It was encased in wax, a fire lit upon the tips of each extended finger. It hailed to her, motionless, but Ophelia was sure it was a greeting.
“Hello,” she returned its welcome. Her voice would never unquiver, and she did not demand evenness from it, “I do hope you can help me. I’m terribly lost. You see, I have died, but I have not passed on.”
The hand made no motion, no hint of acknowledgement or understanding. A strangulation of tears rose in Ophelia’s throat, but it was only a cry’s spectre. She had not a single tear left to shed.
“I don’t mean to be a bother. I’m not here to cause trouble. I’ve never caused trouble, not a single day in my life. Only righted wrongs with all I’ve done—”
Ophelia lept back. The hand had not moved, not changed its position, but upon its palm, an inscription was made. A blade she could not see tore its skin, separated its green, withered dermis, and a coagulated plasma formed a phrase.
Your misery tempts.
Ophelia leaned forward, reading the message, gasping as the passage’s lettering shrank and closed, forming a fresh palm for a new carving.
Find my host, Woe’s Purger.
Ophelia’s skin felt warm, a dilation of vessels just under her flesh that could not colour crimson. She blanched at the hand, shrank away from its proposal. She needed no explanation for the request. She knew what was being asked, and she could not be so easily fooled, not even in her petrified state.
It was an offer doused in treachery, a suggestion of horrific circumstance. She’d heard much of the Main de Gloires, of their dastardly purpose. The owner of such a mitt had met their end at the gallows, for unknown motives that made her ill at the pondering. Thieves wielded that damned taper to seek treasure. She did not perceive good from any gold she found with its yellow flame.
But these straits were dire. Ophelia had tasted such anguish before, nearly all her life. She had been good, hadn’t she? She’d been terribly good, even when the crowds extended accusatory fingers. They’d pointed towards Mr Mith all the same. Oh, her husband, where was he? Was he trapped, same as she? Was this their final trial? Was this their ending call? It was only one more litigation, one more hearing to bear. She’d kissed the dirt for lesser victories.
With bile in her throat, with a stomach churned to bits, she turned to the hand, its inscription untouched. “How would I go about finding your body?”
I light where he rests.
Ophelia’s hand extended forward, trembling violently, fingers wrapping around the wilted wrist. She lifted the mitt, its flamed fingers illuminating her path, guiding her through a house she should have known every crevice of. But it was a maze she walked, a labyrinth of unknowns. Her steps echoed on the aged floorboards until the flames flickered, threatening to extinguish. The walls thinned, and she was willed to walk through a narrow passage.
“No, I can’t see!”
The fire did not die, only changed direction. The floor beneath her glowed, orange and angry. Ophelia’s gaze followed the bloom, a shriek tearing through her.
“No, no! I can’t!”
She willed her hand to release the tool, but her fingers would not obey. White hot tears fell from her eyes, scorching her, shaming her into submission. She’d always loathed that hellish crawlspace, a chamber threatening to suffocate, a cavity in the house, in his heart. It was where he slumbered, where he lay in life, where he dreamed most vividly.
Strange, strange, Mr Mith had always been a strange man. It made his love for her so special, an adoration she would’ve damned for, would have murdered for. She craved for Mr Mith to rest against her, to find comfort in her the way he longed for the chamber.
She could not deny their love’s wretchedness at times, though so potent and strong. It had invaded them, an infection that manifested into two distinct diseases, one worse than the other: one sweet, and one striking.
“You beast, you beast, he does not sleep there! Where is he?” she screamed, “Where is my husband? Where is Mr Mith?”
The mitt erupted in a blaze, its embers licking at her hand, burns singing deeper than her skin, extending far beyond her muscles. The fire latched onto her bone, to her marrow. It breathed within her, and it would not die. She screamed in anguish, the Hand of Glory melting with her person. A connection coaxed in desperation, born in permission, locked in agony. Ophelia shrieked into the night air, bellowing until her own hand and the aflamed mitt were indistinguishable, but not of equal authority. Her mind consumed the blaze until heat became painful clarity, until murky lies erupted in truth.
A love was all she’d wanted. A love was all she’d never had.
He’d answered her lifelong call.
A man of great stature, of dark eyes and odd words. Mr Mith had held her gaze where none else would. He’d touched her soul where it had been most untouched. A love that purred, that whispered and wooed. He’d kissed her in reverence, not as he had with others. She’d seen his smoulder upon the women around her, but it had never held love.
He’d loved her, always would, he’d just forgotten, and his forgetting had forced her hand.
With little jurisdiction, she crouched down, hand still blazing as the crawlspace’s latch came undone. She knew what she would see upon the door’s opening. Only it was more terrible, more awful than she could have perfectly dreamed heaven to be.
“My love.”
Mr Mith extinguished the fire. It filled his eyes with its heat, and the hallway illuminated in a sickly green. He grinned, so much so his oral commissures tore in a terrific ripping noise that revealed sharpened, ravenous, lemony teeth. She screamed, but could not run; only fell to the ground as her husband climbed from his wooden grave.
“I have awaited your arrival. How the venom must have frightened you to bits! I do apologise for its potent effects, but I confess, I wanted you speedily.”
“Why, Mr Mith?” she snivelled, “Why this? We could have lived together in harmony. Why did we have to marry into death?”
“Is that not where we belong, my dear? You’ve always hated the thought of a coffin!” he howled, “If that were to be your bed, would I dream of making you rest in it while still breathing?”
Good, good, had she only ever been good. Had she only ever tried to be a beacon of light, a tower of hope, of wonder to the world? She’d wandered the woods, but only for righting. Had it been her sin that the masses rejected her love, that she’d been forced to turn to shadows to accept her affections, to reciprocate what she could provide?
“Mr Mith, I don’t understand.”
“Oh, little dear, I shall explain,” he spoke evenly, confident, a fervour in his voice that had enticed her once, then left her to wallow. How she’d longed to hear his passion again, how shamefully it electrified her skin, “You failed to believe my adoration. One kiss here, one flirt there, you deigned me disingenuous, that my black heart did not beat for you alone.”
His beam was evil, a vile that matched his void eyes, “You poisoned me, Ms Pith, and thought me daft enough not to know it.”
“No, no! I did not! It was only a brew, a harmless potion!”
“A love elixir? You call that harmless?”
“The person of the wood, the sonneteer, they’d said it would only remind you,” she wept, “Only help you remember our love!”
“And didn’t it just?” he cooed, “I must tell you how hurt I was upon discovering all the trouble you’d gone to. This was brought about by your hand, my love. How could I let us commence our matrimony on a foundation of lies? Don’t you see? I love you so deeply, I ensured we would start anew!”
Ophelia blinked, shaking violently, her body giving in to the terror of truth. This was her only light. This was her after: a dimly lit prison of her own making.
“What will become of us, Mr Mith?” she asked, between blubbering.
“Oh, Mrs Mith,” he sighed contentedly, “We have entered the yonder, where happiness persists eternally.”
The tea’s aroma glided through the narrow passage, just as strong, though now she smelt the poison within her steaming cup, the one so striking in stench and flavour.
She’d drunk it all, and it had scalded her throat in its descent.
Its aroma wafted about.
It brought her to lift her nose, to inhale deeply—to remember.
Only a brew, an elixir for two.
Remember its tang. Savour its tearing.
Learn more about me, Kelly Xan, on my About Page, and check out my other publication, The Bureau of Barbarity, a collaborative writing project.
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