Writober 2025: Day Eight Inanimate Objects Come to Life>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: Inanimate Objects Come to Life
These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 8 of Writober: It Seems So Alive
OctPoWriMo
Undead Revived After So Long
1. Trapped deep in the dark, how long has it been?
It appears you spent some time rotting before you arose hungry for brains.
Why is your gray jacket torn, your purple shirt tattered?
Your tongue perpetually protrudes like a kid trying to concentrate.
I wind you up and with a whiny waddle you dump orange, red, blue, green
The centers of your ears look like backwards B’s.
One eye bulging even your nose hole is crooked.
Does it tickle? It seems like it would tickle.
2. I can’t believe you’re still full.
Why is your gray jacket torn
your purple shirt tattered?
I twist, twist, twist the knob
in your right arm.
The centers of your ears
look like backwards B’s.
One eye bulging , even
your nose hole is crooked.
Can lack of sun explain
that yellow-green complexion?
It appears you spent some time
rotting before you arose
hungry for brains.
Trapped deep in the dark
how long has it been?
I wind you up and with a whiny waddle
you dump orange, red, blue, green.
You trot toward the table’s edge
but I won’t let you fall.
3. You trot toward the table’s edge
but I won’t let you fall.
I can’t believe you’re still full.
Can lack of sun explain
that yellow-green complexion?
I can’t believe you’re still full.
Does it tickle? It seems like it would tickle.
Can lack of sun explain that yellow-green complexion?
Why is your gray jacket torn, your purple shirt tattered?
I can’t believe you’re still full.
Trapped deep in the dark
How long has it been?
It appears you spent some time rotting
before you arose hungry for brains.
Can lack of sun explain that yellow-green complexion?
I can’t believe you’re still full.
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
Play Things
They looked so playful, like a jumble of dolls. Bethany had been to girls’ houses who had so many dolls that they piled them up like that. She would never throw her dolls in a pile if she had some. She tip-toed closer. All of the faces looked up at her.
“Hello?”said Bethany. “Do you have names?”
They shook their heads.
“Do you have a mommy?”
They shook their heads.
“Can I be your mommy? I’ll name you Bunny and you Buttons. You can be Flower and you I’ll call Sunshine. I’ll call you Mona, Casper, Coraline, Damian, Lucien, and you can be Boo. Do you want to come home with me? “
They nodded, stood onto four legs and followed close behind Bethany, their heads protruding around her head.
“Do you like tea? she asked. I’m so glad to have so many dolls to play with.”
Halloween Photography Challenge
Today’s images are about the importance of the rib cage. I tried a more realistic cut, but it was too fragile and the ribs broke off. So I went for a representation of a rib cage, and made a second filter by putting what I cut out on a piece of plastic.
Experience Writing 
That loop of refrains really mimics the wind-up…. genius, Maria! Curious: did you start with the image of the toy, or did the repeating structure pull the zombie to the surface? Either way, the “whiny waddle” lives rent-free in my head now.
~ Oizys.
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Oizys, thank you so much for the question. I’ve been hoping that the prompts and responses would drum up some discussion. I was having trouble coming up with an object for the cube exercise. I wandered the house looking for interesting things I could turn in my hand, and I suddenly remembered a section of a cupboard in my kitchen where I stashed a bunch of Halloween candy toys I bought for the Halloween Photography Challenge years ago. I opened the cupboard and there he was, the little wind-up zombie, and when I picked him up, he pooped out a ball of red hard candy. I was so surprised he was still full of candy. I knew he was what I was looking for. I listed all my observations in my journal and then put the lines I liked the most on the two cubes, and rolled them like dice for my poem. I was happily surprised to get those interesting repetitions for the third section. I hope the process doesn’t remove the “genius.”
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Maria, I love this peek under the hood. As someone who writes before/after notes, I’m convinced process notes don’t kill the magic, they prove it. The cupboard jump-scare with the still-full zombie is chef’s-kiss serendipity, and the dice-cube constraint totally explains the eerie déjà vu in section three. Also, “whiny waddle” is now canon in my brain’s sound library.
~ Oizys.
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🧟♀️🎃
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