“Transference”
By Sydney Leigh
It wasn’t because I didn’t love my child. I did.
But while my grief was buried under guilt and self-loathing, his father wore it like a shroud. He felt that if it had been him all along; if he had been the one charged with this blessing, things would have turned out differently.
So he may not realize it now, but when I sew the final stitch on this makeshift womb, the weight of his stillborn son inside him will counter the void our child’s death left.
And when he wakes, the guilt will be his.
Biography
Sydney Leigh is the evil literary double of a mostly sane writer, editor, photographer, artist, English teacher, and native of the North Shore. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in the Demonic Visions 50 Horror Tales series,Daily Bites of Flesh, Horrified Press’s Nightmare Illustrated, and numerous other anthologies and publications. Sydney’s first drabble, “Aquarium”, was published here on Hellnotes, and she will be featured in this month’s Servante of Darkness poetry blog. Last year, her first edited anthology won a Gothic Readers Book Choice Award, and she placed first in the Inner Sins Webzine Cross Words contest.
Her poem “The Undertaker’s Melancholy” is scheduled to appear in the upcoming Darkness Ad Infinitum anthology from Villipede Publications, where she also serves as a Letter Charmer and Nightmare Architect. She is proudly slated for inclusion in Firbolg Publishing’s Enter at Your Own Risk: The End is the Beginning with her dark gothic fairy tale short, “Rabenschwarz”, which will debut at the 2014 World Horror Convention in Portland, Oregon.
Websites and Links
Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6950333.Sydney_Leigh
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sydney.leigh.319
Villipede Publications: http://villipede.com/
https://www.facebook.com/VillipedePublications
Inner Sins: http://www.innersins.com/innersins_144.htm
Look for her website “the spider box” sometime later this year.
