Okay, I once promised never to recycle content, but, I'm going all politician on your asses and going back on my word. See, my friend Charles Gramlich has been hosting this excellent Halloween Flash Fiction month on his blog and I've been playing along. He has three stories up, and he has posted all sorts of links to others who are playing along (lots of good reads, I highly recommend checking them out). I'm posting my story here because I know (and I know because I'm watching you) a lot of you don't feel like clicking over to my blogger page every time I say so. And that's cool. I'm just bringin' the spooky love to you.

The Empress of the Fescue

This is how a snake feels, awaiting the first rays of light to banish the insidious chill. This is how it will always feel, cold and alone. This is why my desperation grows–as hers must have-wild.

I purchased her at an estate sale to stand sentry against the hordes of sticky-mouthed candy-grabbers trampling my front lawn. My beautiful, winged, snarling chimera, the Empress of the Fescue.

With a childish thrill I ventured under the harvest moon to admire her fearsome grimace. Only a flattened patch of turf remained to belie her post. There was no time to gape, or wonder. She came with full fury, a winged wrecking ball to the back. I toppled forward against the dew-dampened grass, gasping for air.

Masonry talons clicked against the sidewalk. I heaved onto my back. She was there under the halo of light, waiting for my gaze to register her carven jaws stretched wide with hunger. Panic jolted my bones and I scrabbled away, clawed hands and bare feet churning the earth in desperation.

The grass was slick. I was slow.

Her terrible weight prematurely expelled the last of my breaths. That gaping mouth sucked deep into my own. I struggled to stay inside, but there was nothing to hold onto, no anchor to cast.

I pushed myself up with shaking arms.

Not me.

She, wearing me.

I fit her like a well-made suit, and she smiled. She did a small dance of joy, cavorting out of view as she tried her new legs. My head could not turn to follow. Cast in a haze of gray, my world contracted to a narrow strip of grass, a patch of siding, and my living room window.

It aches, sitting here with my knees hunched around my chin. A spider has built a web in the crevice of my right ear. The grass is cold against my immovable hide and I spend the long dark wishing for the following day to come without rain or clouds so I might briefly remember warmth.

I catch snippets of her through the window, clips from a movie I will never see. She seems happy. And why shouldn't she be? She has it all: my life, my husband, my flesh. And she has me, her Empress of the Fescue.