This piece was written for Claire Riley's Horror and Thriller Month on Facebook. Claire's latest release, Odium, launches this week, and you can find out more at www.clairecriley.com.
I'm getting quite a taste for Flash Fiction, as it doesn't take quite such an investment time wise, but you can still make quite an impact. Let me know what you think of Corruption, hopefully you'll enjoy it.
CORRUPTION
We look down in unison at the pair of gleaming, crimson, gloves. Then raise our eyes to one another.
I have led the woman before me down that darkest of corridors which terminates in the sanctity of sin. A desolate and destructive course from which her return is no longer an option. As an angel, she had come to me, a wife, a mother, a carer. Unaware of what lay behind the glass until her eyes met her own, and let me in.
Yes, an angel, pure in thought, and in deed. Yet what I see before me now reeks of my corruption. Her wings torn from her shoulders, leaving naught but bloodied stumps and soiled feathers upon the ground. A carpet of crushed and bloodstained evidence of my unbridled fury at the purity she had dared bring to my dominion. An angel, now fallen from grace and condemned to Hell, as am I. I have turned my face from the glory of God, and now turn the faces of others in the palm of my wicked, twisted, hand.
As I hold her gaze she rubs her hands unthinkingly, like an automaton. Scrubbing at stains from which she can never be free. There is no spark within her iris, for I have extinguished that kind soul which burnt so brightly, dwelling there before coming into contact with me.
Only now does she look down, but I do not. I already know that the blood will have washed away, leaving only microscopic traces beneath manicured nails. Instead, I look over her shoulder. Her husband is obscured by the sheets of the bed. Uniformly hotel-white, with a dash of colour of my own design. He could be sleeping. He is not. Unless, that is, you wish to cavort with the poetic, and regard death as the eternal sleep which sees no dawn. The spray of blood across the headboard, the wall, the print of some unrecognisable city, announces that she has fulfilled her task.
It is a shame my confined view prevents me from bearing witness to the remainder of our handiwork. The other room where my desecrated angel created two angels of her very own. Releasing the souls of her children from a life ruined by a mothers crime.
Soon, she will turn. Her eyes open to her actions for the very first time. When she does I shall wallow in her screams.
I shall be content.