There is no ‘slaughter’ without a little ‘laughter’.

This is the second instalment of the exercise in descriptive and visualised writing. It’s a first draft, read into that what you will.

Click the picture as always, ‘Shoot to thrill’ live follows.

H xxx

☛ It was a cliché wedding and the old folks wished them well. Vow’s were taken, tears shed, and a smiling bride and groom kissed for the first time as husband and wife. An effervescent bride glowed, her radiant husband brimmed with unadulterated joy, and the newly weds cut the perfect cliché royal couple, bringing hope, happiness, and the promise of legacy for generations to come.

 

Or so the masses thought.

 

 

☛ His bloodied right hand hung clenched at his side. Gentle Annis, black eyed, naked, bleeding from  both nostrils and her right ear tried her hardest to looking through the fuzz of her semi-concussed mind and eye’s. The pristine white bed clothes surrounded her in a tangled mess, and one dainty shoe hung by the toes from her right foot over the end of the bed. Bloody and torn, laying confused on her back, trying for all the world to cut through the static of her mind and deduce where she was and what had happened.

 

The absence of thatch above her left her trembling. ‘What strange place is this?’ was all she could think beyond the extremities of pain. Confused further by the lack of weight of her hair, and the absence of it around herself. She could not hear the familiar sounds of those birds that visited her tower home, nor feel the never ending breeze that flooded it daily. The bed beneath her was not a lumpy palate of straw, and the presence of a pillow she had never had held her head lead to further concuss questioning as blows fell remorselessly upon her.

 

Flashes of lightning, repeated extreme force and pain filled her eyes again and again, and her cliché perfect nose broke with a whip lash crack beneath the centre of her brow.

 

A sliver of bone broken from her nose sliced with extreme force into the frontal lobe of her brain; Gentle Annis’s pleasant, happy, and gentle demeanour vanishing forever beneath the ‘Handsome Princes’ cowardly hand.

 

“You will obey me without question!” he screamed at her through his madness and his twisted rage filled mouth. “You are not a woman of the people, you are the property of me!”

 

It had been twenty minutes since the service had concluded; fifteen minutes since they had, smiling, entered the nuptial chamber; ten minutes since he had rendered her unconscious and raped her. Her dress torn to shreds lay around her, and her God Mother from the land of the Fae looked on in anger.

 

Her wedding gift white riding cloak hung from an Gentle Annis shaped bust beside a sumptuous mirror, six feet in height and three metres in breadth, standing within a heavy dark wooden frame suspended from a beam above the floor. In the centre of the mirrors unblinking eye, a brilliant arctic white flash silently exploded, and Gentle Annis’s vision cleared in an instant.

 

Taking in the image before her of a naked, alabaster white male, bloody of fist and sculptured of body, Gentle Annis rolled quickly to her left, casting her screaming husband from her to the wooden floor beneath their wedding bed, to land on, and break his left shoulder.

 

Grabbing a heavy silver candelabra from beside the bed in her small and perfect left hand, Gentle Annis leapt to the floor after the Prince. Through muscular raised arms, a smiling Gentle Annis delivered blow after blow after blow to his head and chest until his right eye popped from its socket like a cork from a champagne bottle onto his cheek. His silence and concave face the cliche image of a horror story’s worst nightmare woodcut, the smallest of breaths and gentlest beats of his heart remaining only of the life of the blonde Adonis that was her husband.

 

Naked, smiling, and kneeling in a pool of blood the size of her husband’s ego, Gentle Annis paused to catch her breath.

 

A moment and a lifetime later, standing, walking no longer with a coltish gait, Gentle Annis sauntered with erotic sensuousness to her scarlet silk lined wedding gift, and lifted it from where it hung; holding it against herself, thrilling at the softness and the warmth of it against her bruised and broken skin as she bundled it against her naked chest.

 

Casting the riding hood onto the disheveled and bloody bed clothes,  Gentle Annis, for that is what she now called herself, ‘Gentle Annis’ now forever dead in her minds eye, turned and strolled toward her husband’s writing desk in the far left corner of the chamber, extracting his exceptionally sharp, bone handled letter opener from the mess of correspondence he had left in utter disarray.  Wielding the six inch bladed knife with competence and a wicked grin, she turned to the wall to the right of the bed. Standing on the edge of the heavy oak bedframe, Gentle Annis  cut the velvet bell pull that hung there at the extremity of her reach, leaving a two metre length hanging from her grip. Alighting, shivering less with cold and more with greater anticipation, Gentle Annis wandered around the bed to the near corpse of a Prince. Bending her husband’s naked foot upward, creating tension and exposing his achilles tendon, she slashed o hole between tendon and bone, and thread a tasseled end of the bell pull through the broad gash she created, tying it off with a double half hitch around his shin. The other end she threw over an oak support beam holding the canopy above their bed; and then she pulled, and pulled, and lifted the Prince up!

With his head fifty centimetres above the bloody floor,  Gentle Annis pulled the white riding hood from the bed. Using the white fur outer of the cloak she began to mop up the blood, slowly transforming it from pristine white to arterial red. Once all of the blood had been lifted, laughing, Gentle Annis lay they reddish riding hood beneath her inverted husband, regaining his letter opener, slashing his carotid arteries, and allowed the blood to flow down across his closely shaved jaw line, over his temples, to drip onto the hood, reddening it further, moving it about, colouring any remaining spots of white.

 

Ten minutes after slicing incisions into his neck; Gentle Annis’s white riding cloak completed its transformation into Gentle Annis’s red riding hood.

 

Her Fae God Mother looked on in adoration.

 

 

☛ Reports over the days following the handsome Prince’s wedding and murder include a submission from the Eastern Gatehouse, 4pm, the day of the wedding. In a shaky semi-literate hand the log reads –  “ a smal young wuman with hair the colour of cousin Trev’s wife’s white dress, so a bit grubby like, wearin’ in a red riding hood pased this way just after four bels. She are carrying a basket like me Mam has, an she had bread an biscuits in it, but the biscuits were no as good as me Mam’s. She said she were goin to see an old woman out in the forest, an give her the good stuf in er baskit like me Mam’s. Lance Constable Jock Smiff”

 

☛ To encounter a place with such a heavy canopy was unexpected by Gentle Annis, as was the weight of the wicker basket filled with only the finest stolen bakers delights, hanging by its handle from her elbow. Darkness within the forest was heavy and thick; canopy above, the undergrowth below, and the trunks of  tree’s stout and tall pressed in around her. Totally unafraid, Gentle Annis was mildly confused by this knowing it was still at least two and a half hours until sunset as fallen leaves and pine needles crunched underfoot, whilst beastly irritating winged insects buzzed their tiny bodies and wings around her face. Assailing and biting Princess Gentle Annis with utter glee, laughing at her pathetic attempts at swatting them away with a switch made from a fern frond. What could only have been a wolf howled sadly in the near distance.

 

Had Gentle Annis grown up anywhere other than a tower in the sky, she would have known the difference between a ‘wood’ and a ‘forest’, but alas she did not; had she done, it was not a direction would have remotely considered. A ‘wood’ being an old english word for a stand of trees, and ‘forest’ with Frankish origin’s stemming from Norman invasion, ‘foris’ meaning ‘outside’ in regard to the law, and not always a stretch of land covered in tree’s. In essence, it was a patch of land kept by nobles, aristocracy, and royalty to preserve game for solely for the hunt, exclusive only to themselves. Deer, roe, and wild boar the main mammalian inhabitants. Hence, a place royalty hunted regularly was among the last places to be when outrunning a rather irritated Queen and her chronically henpecked King and husband.

 

Nine hours, and one wedding earlier, the most dangerous known beasty in the forest was the wolf, their collective only moreso; by tea time that night tables had shifted and worms had turned with the wee lass in the red riding hood putting the fear of God into everything within a one hundred kilometre radius around her.

 

Except one.

 

Out after an afternoon of hunting and gathering, a kindly wolf crossed picked up the scent of fresh blood. Blood that reminded him in texture with every breath taken of a young boar, yet slightly more alluring. Wondering if the lads from the Club had partaken a little sport after drinks, the wolf wandered along the path home. Oddly the scent of blood increased the closer to home he got, and he wondered if either his children, or possibly his grandchildren for that matter, had bought tea around to the small wooden cottage he and his wife of seventy wolf years had inhabited? As that thought concluded, and his mind strayed to a thorn in his foot, the wolf walk straight into the source of the heady scent of blood, and the small red riding hood adorned lass reeking of the same.

 

“Hello my dear, my sincerest apologies for bumping into you as I did. Are you hurt at all?” the wolf conversationally said.

 

“Hello to you too Mr. Wolf,” said the smiling Gentle Annis, inspecting the wolf from head to toe as she did so, “no I am in fine fettle Sir, however, did my bump damage your foot?”

 

“Why no my dear” chortled the wolf, “‘tis this foot that caused our folly no less! Something has managed to lodge itself within my paw, and my old eyes do me disservice as I cannot see what it is that is there.

 

Deftly, gently, Gentle Annis lifted his front right paw, extracting a thorn the size of a nail from its central pad in one swift move.

 

“However, can I thank you my dear, for I am now in your debt. Had we not met as we have, the thorn may have festered, and with my wife’s eyesight being worse than my own, we would never of removed it, and I could well have died!

 

“I do need a bed for the night.” said Gentle Annis, hungrily eyeing the wolf.