Always Wanting What We Don’t Have

Writober 2025: Day Six Psychic Powers>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: Psychic Powers

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 6 of Writober Who Controls Our Minds?

OctPoWriMo

If I had a Psychic Power

If once I had the power, it could not be changed
I wouldn’t want to see things that could not be changed.

I wouldn’t want to read minds like movies on screens
Secrets in lies cover beliefs that can’t be changed.

I wouldn’t push my thoughts into others’ minds to
force good behavior because after nothing’s changed.

Never choose to recall it all (though I may have
in my youth): I would go mad when your memories changed.

I’ll choose telekinesis, moving with my mind
stopping crashes, deflecting bullets: paths can change.

I would move matter: heal the lesions, end the pain
with the power of the mind the body has changed.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

At Face Value

This has become one of my favorite ways to interact: meeting new people, making fast friends, then convincing them that it will be thrilling to have our cards read. They’re all a little afraid at first: to be tricked; to not be tricked; to learn something about their future; good or bad. So I volunteer to go first. No one in my group ever goes after me.

I have never met a true psychic, but with the turn of the first card, I can tell if they believe in what they’re doing or they’re faking.

The first card is always the death card. Right there in the center. This gets all sorts of reactions from whoever I brought with me. Then the Devil, crossing over it, as if in opposition. Gasps from behind me. By now the person across from me is usually flushed or pale. They stammer and make excuses, make up all sorts of possible interpretations like death is the change from facing our demons, spinning it to some sort of positive. Next comes The Lovers, and here’s where it’s hard not to laugh. Most of my companions laugh nervously if they haven’t already left the tent. After the Lovers is the Tower burning, the reader’s hand is shaking by now. There’s no eye contact anymore. I have so much fun listening to them trying to spin that one. If only they took things more literally, but instead they go to symbolic extremes. When the Judgement card comes up, even the most confident con-artists suck in their breath. 

So I was exhilarated when I sat down tonight. But the young blond with curls around her face like she had stepped out of the thirties, and business fashion to match, stood in front of a wheel of collected cards of different styles, her head in the center like a bullseye, and stared at me. She didn’t move, arms crossed over her chest, peering down at me as if she could see right through me. My companions silenced and lost their jovial mood. Finally one of them said, “Are you going to do the reading, or what?”

She looked up and blinked several times. “Of course. Welcome.” 

She sat across from me and handed me the cards. I was confused at first, but then she said, “Shuffle.” 

When I was done, she cut the cards, and just above a whisper she said, “I remember you.” 

She placed Death in the center as if it was the card she always put there. “You used to sip tea with my grandmother. She had a special dark root blend.”

She turned over the Devil card and placed it across Death. “And you would laugh and laugh with my mother. She had a dark and sharp sense of humor.”

One of my new companions said, “What’s going on?” Another said, “I don’t know. This is too weird for me,” and like that, my new friends were gone, blending back into the crowd that thought the fair was only rides and games.

She smiled as she placed the Lovers Card. “You skipped along the cliffs with my sister who was always tempting fate.”

She turned over the Tower. “So I must admit. I’m not surprised to see you.”

When she got to Judgement, she didn’t look worried at all. 

I guess I had been tempting fate, playing with fire, rolling the dice, but it had been so long since anyone had seen me, seen the real me, I thought it was fun to taunt the humans. 

“So you want me to call up the Devil and get this party started?” she said. 

“No. I’ll do it. I kind of let things go too long after our little spat.” 

Halloween Photography Challenge

I really enjoyed today’s photoshoot. I cut a paper filter of a radiating circle shape, then cut that shape into wavy strips and layered some back in. I attempted to capture the flow and resistance of psychic energies.