Veils

by Joanna Koch

Norma Desmond and I go way back, trading husbands, settling scores. We’ve always been big. It’s the insults that got small.

Hag heads bloom like black holes in your weddings albums, cigarette burns through white bridal sheets. Your cursor hovers over wives you’ve silenced by shoving more than cake in their mouths. Does a gentleman tag his ghosts? The technology’s beyond you these days.

Hold your phone over a candle until hags melt into holes.

Norma and I come through curtains in close up, burned. You were the first and last to tear open our veils.

We had faces then.



Author bio: Author Joanna Koch writes literary horror and surrealist trash. Her short stories have been published in journals and anthologies such as Synth, Honey & Sulphur, and In Darkness Delight: Masters of Midnight. An artist and Contemplative Psychotherapy graduate of Naropa University, Joanna lives near Detroit. Follow her monstrous musings at horrorsong.blog.

Veils is part of 101 Fiction issue 23.