Staying With the Breath

Writober 2025: Day One Breath>Response Post

🔗Links in the Table of Contents are Jump links to my responses to each of the challenges
🐦‍⬛This is original work created by Maria L. Berg and this post counts as copyright. All rights reserved.

🎃OctPoWriMo 🦇Writober Flash Fiction 👻Halloween Photography Challenge

Today’s Theme: Breath

OctPoWriMo

Take a Breath

I watch you
as you lie
so still. Breathing?

I come close
filled with dread
is this the end?

I try not
to wake you
as I inspect

if you will 
ever wake
to me again

Is it strange
how I hold
my breath until

I see you breathe?

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Living in an Echo

Souxie had just laughed it off when she complimented Paul’s white suit with a pink skinny tie, and he said, “What this? I always dress like this.” She felt silly in her teased hair, blue eyeshadow and pink and sky-blue striped mini-dress, but he seemed into it. It was eighties night at Top Rum, and he was cute. 

When he invited her up to see his apartment, she jumped at the chance to see what they had done inside the old Tower Records Warehouse. She had heard the apartments were open and spaceous though the building still looked like a warehouse on the outside. Some graffiti that yelled Watch Out! in pastel colors grabbed her attention as he pressed numbers in a keypad. The sound of the combination made her think of Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto, a song that had played at the bar. 

Her satin stilletoes echoed on the concrete steps as they climbed to the second floor. He was telling her how much she was going to love what he had been able to collect. It wasn’t just an interest; it was a lifestyle. They were both breathing heavily when they reached the top. Then she saw it. The entire space was like walking into a Vogue spread from 1983. White furniture, pink wood floors, white blinds floor to ceiling along the walls. Light poured in behind the blinds as if it was the middle of the day. But it was night. She peeked behind one of the blinds: there were rows of neon on brick walls. No windows at all. At least he wouldn’t be bothered by traffic. 

“You want a drink?” he asked. 

She watched him cross the room to a bar between two huge dracaena marginata plants. She held in a laugh as his huge shoulder pads bounced around his ears when he pulled two glasses from behind the bar and filled them with ice. “Sure,” she said. “What are you having?”

“Two gin and tonics coming up.” 

She crossed the floor to take a seat in the closest white chair when she was suddenly stuck. Her heel was caught in a crack between the floorboards. She slipped her foot out and squatted down to tug her heel free. That’s when she noticed herself in the odd small box of a TV on the floor. She waved at it, but it kept showing her foot getting caught, then her foot slipping out of her shoe. She was glad she hadn’t bent over in her minidress. She watched her foot slip from her shoe a few more times and then she saw herself see the TV and wave. It was a strange sensation, like she wasn’t herself.

“What is that?” she asked.

“What’s what?” he said, bringing the drinks and handing her one with a cherry. His had a lime.

“Your weird floor TV.”

“Oh that. Isn’t it fun? So totally eighties don’t you think? There’s a camera over there.” He gestured toward a plant. “It’s on a delay and then repeats, like a long guitar reverb, or a reality echo.”

“But it’s just aimed at feet,” she said finally reaching the chair, putting her glass on a small square side table and staring at her crossed feet on the screen.

“Yes. It captures a step. Each step we take is a half of a breath in motion. Most of the time we don’t think about our steps, or our breath. But in my screen we can separate ourselves from them and watch them for a while.”

Paul put his drink on the side table next to Souxie’s and walked over to an entertainment center with a turntable at its center. He flipped it on and the room filled with Michael Jackson’s PYT (Pretty Young Thing). 

He flipped through his shelves of records. “I have some pretty rare vinyl,” he said. “It’s really the only way to get the true eighties sound.”

She took the cherry and tossed it into the nearest planter. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but she didn’t like cherries. She liked lime in her drink, so she took his drink, squeezed the lime juice into the drink, and then put the spent lime into the glass he had given her. She sipped his drink. He’d never know.

He came back over and grabbed the glass with the lime in it. “So what do you think? The eighties had everything right? These days everything’s so small, compact. I like things big, bold, bright, you know?” He held up his glass. “Cheers,” he said and clinked her glass, his breath quick and shallow.

She smiled glaring-white perfectly straight teeth through shiny pink lips, and watched him drink most of his drink, pushing the slice of lime to the side with his lips. She wondered what about him she had thought was cute. It wasn’t his greasy, slicked-back hair, or his stubby-fingered small hands. It wasn’t the little alligator on his Izod shirt, or his silly Swatch watch. An eighties night was fun, but she definitely didn’t want to live there. She was contemplating the best way to extricate herself from the situation when he gasped and gurgled, started clawing at his throat. She held her breath. His eyes pierced hers then flashed to her glass. As he fell to the floor, his glass slipped from his hand spilling ice over the pink wood. 

Souxie sat back, sipped her drink and watched his breaths slow until they stopped, then she watched him breathe again—his head by her feet in the strange old box TV—he stopped and then he breathed again, and then again.

Halloween Photography Challenge

The Bogeyman to me, is the man that was under my bed at night, waiting to grab my ankles if I got out of bed, especially if I needed to go to the bathroom. So for today’s images, I attempted to recreate the fear of those grabbing hands, shooting out from under the bed.