Red drips down the walls, pools in the crack on the floor. There is a sense of malintent that hangs in the room like an autumn mist, sweeping around gravestone and dead things. The moon casts the room in a deep crimson, a red veil shrouding the gore and misery.

The chamber is filled with a silence that comes with a still house, faucet dripping, doors squeaking, foundation crick-crick-cracking and wind bustling the shutters. Dead things, all of them.

But not all is still in the calling. Lips part, teeth dripping with life and memories. Chandelier swings, the chains clinking like nails on glass or molar on bone.

And that’s what this is, an immortal display. Of bodies hung on wire, blanketed by death and the dark things which answer at night. Souls lingering just on the tip of cool tongues and glassy eyes. White and hollow, the bodies.

And yet, there remains a non-soul who circles the room, stiletto-heeled boots that shine and reflect the scene in a fishbowl manner; curves and concave, distortion of the night.

She hungers still, her canines empty and her mind filled with the delight of new life.

Doors creak, and legs are shoved into the chaos of the night, throats open.

Flash fiction by Gracie S. Sivertson

The dreamy overcast, while normally an affront during any sunny day, offered a seductive lure tonight in the form of streaks of moonlight which peaked out from broken cloud formations. A tantalizing filter that tempted the crowd to follow the illuminated path up the hillside.

Nights were darker in autumn, she realized. Even with the lit torches held by others Juliana could only see a few feet in front of herself. It made it so she relied on other senses on the pilgrimage towards the sky. She felt the rough skin of tall grass and traced their individual stalks delicately, as one would touch their lover.

She was not sorry about abandoning everything she knew. She was only sorry that her leaving had not happened earlier.

She was famished. Not in the literal definition, but rather, Juliana craved a life outside of the one where she was nothing more than a wife to a man who offered her nothing in return. Yet, although her husband was weak, he was not stupid. It showed in the way he chained her to the duty of a modest housewife. A monument to the world to show that her husband could not only conquer lands, but, he was desirable man too.

Being desirable was far more valuable than wealth in her world. 

Crumbling stone, stumps of arms and half faces,

A broken fountain filled with clear water,

A graveyard of marble and metal surrounded in a field of daffodils,

There are vases of dead things long gone and forgotten,

A gentle breeze disrupts the sense of stillness and tension.

A man looks around at his treasures in disbelief.

He walks slowly, hands tracing a desolation of a life.

It is hard to know where you stand in reality when you look only at its reflection,

Harder still when the reflection revolved solely around you.

He wanders to the broken fountain to see, one last time,

And he takes off his shoes and his clothes and gets into the pool of mirror-liquid,

And he stares down, watching the ripples pull and distort,

His skin is cracked, the way old bones wither,

He peels back layer after layer of skin, trying to find the source of madness which brought him here,