Nightmare
By Ciara Darren


She had the face of an angel and the mouth of a demon stretched across her Botticelli cheeks. Skin pulled on the bones of her shoulders. Blue veins froze beneath alabaster skin. Her breasts pointed beneath the caress of the wind, thin empty tools of her trade.

“I’ve got a good figure,” she slurred, swaying forward, “on account that I don’t feed often.”

The last words were said with a snarl.

She grabbed my wrist, pushing me back towards the door of the inn. I crossed my arms, to keep her from laying her claws on my heart. Cold, that was her touch. I shoved, hard and she fell back, off the stoop into the water of the street. She lay there, sprawled under the light rain.

“What did you do?” a man said, balding in his early fifties, rotund and slightly flushed from a beer.

“She was trying to get in. I think she has a disease. There are….lesions. I’ve got a woman and children stranded here.”

The man glance at the puddle where she still lay. “Can’t let her in,” he said. “Better board the place up, she’ll be back.”

“What?!”

“Look.”

I glanced at the puddle. She was gone.

“You can’t kill that one,” the man said. He cast me a knowing glance. “Better board the place up.”

I glanced around. The door was half off its hinges. This was supposed to be a quick stop, gather evidence of an old crime, move on. But the storm was raging, the bridge washed out and the two children were looking at me from around the balustrade of the stairs, wide eyed and refugees from the inclement weather like myself.

“I have nails,” the man said.

“How’d she walk away from that?”

“You can’t kill that one,” the man repeated.

The mother of the children, her hair frizzed out from the storm, stepped into the hall. There were grease stains from where she had been trying to make their jeep run. She held a candle in front of her.

“Let’s find wood,” I said. “We might have a hurricane on our hands.”

The man grunted and disappeared into darkness. It was deep dark when all the windows and doors were covered.

She was clawing at the front door before we had finished. The wind and the rain lashed down. We could hear those nails on the plywood.

“This is always the worst part,” the man said, tipping back his bottle of beer. The women and her children huddled near the old fireplace where I’d started a flame.

“What do you mean?” the mother said.

The man glanced at the door. “How do you find forgiveness, when there’s no one left?” he asked.

Then he disappeared. Outside the claws on the door ceased. There was a sound like a cat screaming and a ripping noise. The women and I covered the children’s ears. We locked eyes until the sounds ceased.


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Ciara tells stories because it's something she has to do. Her characters walk around and glare at her until she gives in. When not at the behest of these various entities she enjoys to travel, reads way too much for her own good and plots her way into a career and graduate school.