First, the right setting,
the right lighting, the right sounds.
Thick, mothy darkness,
a moment of moonlight,
preferably green and watery.
Swirls of mist, very spooky,
dark forest, empty shopping mall,
haunted house, ruined church
abandoned space station,
lonely cliff top, ghostly train.
Now, noises off-faint footsteps,
clinking chains, shocking shrieking,
harrowing hooting, crazy cackling.

Secondly, remember props:
buy those pumpkins, 
carve those faces, empty sockets,
ghastly grin, glowing orange 
in the twilight, casting shadows
in the moonlit garden.
You also need a manic mask-
think – clown, skeleton, dummy,
witch, zombie, green alien.
Costumes must be truly terrifying-
horribly hellish.
Black, flowing cloaks, blood-stained dresses,
phosphorescent rib cages, satanic goat’s horns.
All the cast of the darkest nightmares

Sarah Das Gupta is a retired teacher from Cambridge, UK.Her work has been published in 12 countries: US, UK, Canada, Australia, India, Germany and others.

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If you would like to be part of the Rural Fiction Magazine family, follow this link to the submissions guidelines. If you like contemporary dark stories and poems, you may also want to check out The Chamber Magazine.

—remembering ¬¬a farm foreclosure.
For Darrell Ringer, 1953-93

“Thank you,” he said, while the black eyes 
drilled from the shadow of his ballcap 
as we stood in the sunbaked square 
of a Kansas town where we’d just rallied 
against such business as no one with honor 
should dare to defend—then drove 
over pocked macadam, between shoulders 
cascading with purple wildflowers, wheat 
turning green to gold—the field after field, 
the rich carpet called forth, turned over, 
culled with such care that I, for one, 
don’t have blisters enough to imagine—
and beneath it the black earth seethes 
with world-feeding life. Then we arrived 
at his farm. Beautiful, I’d often thought, 
this life, how the green soybean hug 
at the earth and alfalfa explodes into pink 
and animals trudge toward us in the slow-
motion rhythm of paddock-bound shadows 
until their heads hike up with quick interest 
when haybales are pitched with a thud
between the tarnished steel rails of the crib. 
But the earth and its moods are uncertain, 
despite the disconsolate pleading it gets
when sleep doesn’t come, that a storm 
please pass by without flooding at harvest; 
that a drought not set in, the wind not whisk
topsoil to a powder-dry ash floating off 
in a glitter-filled cloud to the red 
of a summer-long sun. And of course 
words are addressed to the Notice of Debt 
that’s attached like a leech to the title, 
which is after all a mere sheet of paper 
approved by the courts but without 
the least smell of wet dirt to grace it. 
And of all he foresaw or was faced with, 
what he couldn’t agree to was losing this land 
without even a fight. They might take it all, 
but the fight, at least—they couldn’t take that. 

Of David Salner’s sixth poetry collection, John Skoyles, Ploughshares poetry editor, said: “The Green Vault Heist is not only a beautiful book, it is great company.” Salner’s debut novel, A Place to Hide, won first place for 1900s historical fiction from Next Generation Indie Book Awards. This poem is reprinted from The Green Vault Heist. Both books are available on amazon or from the author dsalner@hotmail.com 

Please share this to give it maximum distribution. 

If you would like to be part of the Rural Fiction Magazine family, follow this link to the submissions guidelines. If you like contemporary dark stories and poems, you may also want to check out The Chamber Magazine.