Thank you to everyone who has contributed to and commented on the Femmes Fatales showcase so far. I'm so glad you are enjoying what you read.
Several of you have mentioned the pictures that accompany the stories - they are gorgeous, it's true. I'm afraid I only have the four, so they will rotate - but with slightly different colours and effects - and titles of course. I hope this doesn't disappoint.
It's such a privilege to shuffle in between the plethora of talented women here today. I had four days left to fill so am offering up this number of my own unpublished pieces.
February 4th's slot was for poetry so I'm posting something I wrote a while ago. It isn't horror in the demonic or human sense but rather is a true and terrifying account of a Parliament of Crows (mixed corvids, to be exact) that I witnessed just outside my house, in a very urban street. It is something I will never forget, and haunts me to this day. Nature, for all I splay myself on the ground in her honour, is cruel.
Be Gone by Lily Childs
He hears The Judge.Feels the judge
circling, hurling taunts, abuse.
Master Crow,
caped wings raised accuses
Junior Jack the Daw, who
ducks the Law Man's
wrath.
Rook and raven, patchy magpie.
Families attack
the wretched Jack.
Only mother, pale blue eyes
alive with fear
stays her ground, son’s crime unknown.
Jack cowers, crushed
against raw earth.
Darkened feathers stain the air.
Judge caws for
a final verdict.
"Out. Out. Out."
Blackened corvids lunge, encroach.
Young Jack cries.
His mother dies,
a little.
Hurt teenager flees the court,
escapes
the screeching, screaming pack.
He daren't look back but leaves,
his blue and tattered cloak scarred
with banishment and
bitter shame.
“Be Gone” went their cruel command.
He’s gone,
broken and hurt
to die beneath a hanging tree
which mother will not find.
He’s gone.
She calls his name, again, once more, again
and yet again,
flaps black wings and flies away.
A cloud, a mist, a spec.
A mother left alone
to mourn her only son.
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Bio:
Lily's fiction and poetry also swim around online where they mix with similar creatures, and with every little trance of every little minute more delicious tales are spawned.
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