Always Screaming Inside

This morning I searched “Halloween” in my WordPress reader and found some fun posts.

• At Robbie’s Inspiration I found a link to Teagan’s Books Halloween Game / Creativity Challenge with a chart for combining three prompts for inspiration.
• At Sammi Cox Writer 13 Days of Samhain (vol iv) starts tomorrow. If you like combining prompts like I do, these prompts might work with our visual Writober prompts for extra story inspiration.
• At Star Hermit I found Origami Jack O’Lantern Rituals with a link to how to fold origami jack-o-lanterns that is simple and fun.

If you missed this morning’s prompts post, I’m responding to Fear of the Screams in the Night.

For today’s images to mix things up a bit, I had fun folding origami jack-o-lanterns and took pictures of them screaming. Then I played with a filter I made last year that kind of looks like the Scream mask from the Scream movies.

OctPoWriMo 2023:Facing Our Fears

For the Meet the Bar prompt at dVerse, Björn wants us to think collectively, writing from the pronouns “us” and “we.” I think this fits well with my ideas for the OctPoWriMo prompt, so I’m combining them today.

Body Horror

Human bodies are so fragile
Our skins so thin and delicate
Every function intertwined
so easily unbalanced or misaligned

We think we’re mighty
with power over all
We destroy and kill
and take at will

Yet the prick of a pin brings blood and pain
(Violent red sticky shame)
The slice of a knife can kill or maim
(and life will never be the same)
We tear and break and ache and age
The skins we’re in that scar and slough,
our only tethers, barely hold us together

Writober 2023

Here’s the beginning of my flash story:

Disembodied

After falling down the embankment and through the rotted tree trunk on a hike in the forest behind the house, I felt smaller, like I was shrinking. Everyone’s faces looked bigger, and bigger; eyes further apart, spaces between eyes, noses, and mouths as if they were separate, moving on their own. When I touched my face, it felt the same, but everyone else was mostly blank space like they were coming apart.

Today I woke up and had become so small that I could see them, the eyes, nose and mouth each had their own bodies. Each face was a collective of separate entities working together. I told myself we don’t normally notice it because we’re used to it, like a smell that disappears after being smelled all the time.

Or maybe that wasn’t it, maybe I didn’t get small, maybe I never came home. I looked closely at the giant eye sitting at the table closest to me. The blue of the giant iris, not light, nor dark, nor aqua, looked familiar. The nose, standing out in the garden, thin and straight had that imperceptible bend in the cartilage at the end that could have been the result of running to answer the phone in the dark and running into a door jam. And those teeth, behind the thin lips, the way one of the teeth on the bottom twisted and overlapped the one next to it couldn’t be a coincidence.

I ran my finger over my bottom teeth. These creatures, these separate entities, these huge walking sensory organs, they’re me, my face.