Timeless

The wrath of a jealous woman is a bottomless, dark and fiery pit filled with the thick miasma of her vengeful heart. Everyone knows about Zeus’s jealous wife Hera who turned one lover into a cow, another into a bear and another into a mere echo. Never to speak her own words for the rest of eternity. But a mortal woman can’t do that. A regular human being, no matter how upset, cannot turn the mistress into a cow and send a fly to bite her across the world. A regular person cannot turn his lover into a bear and trick her own child into killing her. No. Humans can’t do that. 

That’s why they are so scary. A jealous woman has not the ability to change the cheating pair into animals to live out the rest of their lives in humiliation. 

-------------Graphic depictions of violence and gore. Stop reading if faint-hearted.-------------

So instead women use their harmless exterior to cook poison into the family’s food, or maybe their slaughterhouse experience to skin her boyfriend’s body and hang it from the architrave like a belated christmas decoration. Boil the head for a delightful pot of carrot soup and the thigh a fine steak to go with some mashed potatoes and pumpkin slices. 

Some prefer the less gruesome, more peaceful. Simply overdose that wretched girl with morphine and cradle her dying body and watch with delight as she gasps in vain to cling onto her pathetic little life. 

Some do it out of love, to show that they can love deeper than anyone. Enough to sacrifice another life for it. Smothering the elderly, melting flesh into soap, even offering up the tender bodies of their pretty little sister to satiate the need to be loved by another.

To Madame Lucille Laflèche, there is no one that deserves more love then herself. A noblewoman from France, living on young American soil because of her husband’s request. There is nothing she could possibly lack. Wealth, beauty, admirers, she had them all until she was no longer satisfied with all that she had anymore. 

On a walk one day she passed by the butcher’s. A single whiff of the putrid air and a look at the whole pig hung head down by the gaping hole in it’s abdominal and the Madame knew what she had been missing all this time. 

Oh, the piercing smell of iron in the air that clears up the grey clouds in one’s head. The thick crimson pouring out like thick syrup out of the smooth and rose tinted skin of the young maiden. Accompanied by the screams that slowly descend into pathetic whimpers and finally! Peaceful silence like no other with only the dripping of blood onto the white porcelain tiles is music to the ears like no other for Laflèche. Each pitter patter was like the calm of a spring shower. Each plop like an isolated note during a concert. 

The young maidservant bound by her ankles, suspended from the dome of the empty ballroom. To Laflèche it was like art no other. 

The swine at the butcher’s couldn’t possibly be as beautiful a scene as the bound maiden whose naked body was spotless save the gaping slit in the center of her white throat. It was as if Venus herself had embodied the still warm corpse and was calling to the bewitched Madame. The tender hands of Laflèche that has never seen a day of manual labor raised itself yet again to glide down the front of the nameless servant girl as the Madame slowly peeled off her skin like she would a glove after coming back from a cup of tea with the other noblewomen. 

The blood collected in one of her prized porcelain vases was sent to be prepared like the blood jelly enjoyed in the East. The thumping heart into an elegant glass jar of alcohol for the Madame’s viewing pleasure and the skin cut into pieces to use at night, an organic face mask in it’s own right.

Of course, it won’t do for the lady of the house to do such lowly acts such as mopping up the floor. The plentiful maids and page boys are enough to clean up the remnants of the work of art. Such a pity, if only they could open their mouths to sing praises for the Madame’s macabre work. But alas, no one must know the manor’s secret and the servants are certainly not the ones allowed to tell. With tongues plucked out and lips sewn together by the consequences of a noisy tell, the secret of the manor is safe from those outside. 

Hush hush

The fun

It has just

Begun.

The outside never quite understood. Why is it that the lady of the Gallows Manor never seemed to age and instead appeared more youthful and alluring as time went on. 

“A witch,” people whispered.

“The devil’s incarnate!” Others bellowed.

Yet what can the peasant folk do to a noble lady from the Old World? Hang her? Her husband was the court’s judge. Who would dare? 

Burn her at the stake? Exactly what evidence did they have to accuse her of witchcraft?

While the townsfolk asked themselves over and over on what to do to the woman whom time can’t touch, she died in her sleep at the hearty age of 66, with a smile on her face and the youthful glow of a young maiden. Untouched by the grime of the world.