Red Widow Moon

Her body quaked as she sat curled in on herself on the damp ground, the moisture causing her muddied jeans to stick to her paled skin. Her arms hugged tightly to herself and every once in a while, a violent shudder would rack through her body that was not entirely caused by grief.

Staring up at the old, white church that stood resolute before her, her sunken in eyes burned over the naked form of the man who she was supposed to marry. His arms and legs had been nailed into the holy building with railroad spikes, looking very much like the image of Christ’s crucifixion but the circumstances were far from those told in the Bible. There was little left of his carcass, given that most of it had rotted away or had been eaten by the crows.

Stains of various colors had painted themselves across what used to be the bleached expanse of the front of the church where he now hung as a warning to all the other monsters that decided to visit, his entrails and bodily liquids the medium, the church the canvas.

She had sat in that exact same spot the last two months every single night, silently waiting. The first month, she hadn’t known for what, but after the first full moon had arisen after his outbreak and his decaying corpse had twisted and broken itself so that he could take his beastly form even after it’s human host was dead, she began to plan.

It had been an accident, the entire thing, but that didn’t make the bitterness swelling inside her heart lessen in the slightest. It was almost incomprehensible how this could have happened to her Lucas. She had told him not to do it, begged him to say no but they needed the money so he had willingly agreed. Who knew that one use of a dirty needle and the wrong vile of blood could cause something so malevolent to be born inside a human? And he had shaken and shuddered just as she was doing now, her eyes hallowed and her body thin and brittle as a crisp, fall leaf.

After he had changed on the night of the full moon those two months ago, she had told him to run and he had but… one can only outrun buckshot for so long. That was when the people strung him up and forsaken him for the demon that he was, though he hadn’t attacked anyone in his state of miscreation. He had been trying to flee while he was still under control to prevent any sort of accident from happening.

Now she sat, huddled in the mud, her body shaking, not from the cold, but by some strange devilry inside of her as she watched the hours tick by as the sun set and the moon rose high into the clear night sky. During the days, she had broken into the lab which had since been shut down because of the incident, only to methodically repeat the very same process on herself until she found herself in a similar state as her lover.

Her pupils dilated as something started to claw at her insides and her head snapped up from where it had been bowed. With both delight and despair, she watched as the skeleton nailed upon the church began to writhe and dance as well until it took the shape of the atrocity from before, cursed by the sight of the full harvest moon that hung in the night sky, a giant red eye starring unblinking at her.

Something inside of her suddenly snapped and she cried out loudly in pain. It only took her a moment longer to realize it was her bones breaking and rearranging themselves to fit this new body that wanted to spring forth. The woman continued to cry out in pain, a long scream of anguish but it was not long before it became garbled in her throat as her vocal cords restrung themselves and the scream slowly turned into the low howl as her head tilted back of it’s own accord and she knew.

She knew that she would have her revenge, and she did. Just as the townsfolk before, she herself became an artist that night and painted the town with their blood and carnage, her whole world now a canvas, just waiting for her to make the first stroke as she composed an admirable piece of art in memory of her beloved Lucas.

The crows were never more pleased when the sun rose the next day.