Writober 2025: Day Twelve Parasites>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: Parasites
These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 12 of Writober: Microscopic Monsters
OctPoWriMo
Every Time I Vacuum I Think
A single hair shed
contains all of me
the twisted strands
revealing the unique
It detaches without pain
highly degraded fragments
Does it fear
never expressing its secrets
a piece of me gone
would I have kept it
somewhere in my carpet
blueprint of me
of my genome
sequence of my separateness
invisibly forgotten
from cells that have already died
turning to dust ahead of me
collected during growth
if I could choose
to exchange it for another
Writober Flash Fiction Challenge
Which is the Parasite
Every evening Effigo grabbed a soft handful of clay and sculpted a small figure. When the figure was finished, he would think any anger, or bad thoughts that had come up during the day into the little humanoid carving, so he could go to sleep free of worries and have good dreams. He imagined a new face every day and thought his technique would improve with such consistent practice, but the small clay figures turned out exactly the same every day. He made little shelves just the right size for each figure. And the figures in their little boxes filled his walls floor to ceiling. Every floor to every ceiling.
He built a second story on his house, and then a third. The main room of the house was now three stories high with hundreds of figures looking down at him. He began to feel like he was just a replication machine making the same figure again and again. He started purposely trying to sculpt little animals, plants, anything but that little goblin-looking figure, but it always came out the same.
One evening when he had an especially bad day, he yelled up at all his figures. What are you? What do you want from me? You’re like a bunch of parasites multiplying and taking up space. He heard a strange shuffling and shifting around the room. He heard his own voice whispering mean and angry things like a hissing ocean wave. Then he saw that they weren’t the same at all. They each had a different snarling expression. Each one sat, squatted, or leaned in a different position, but they all looked ready to pounce.
Halloween Photography Challenge
Today’s photoshoot was really fun. I cut a paper filter inspired by giardia under the microscope. This unpleasant microscopic monster is one of several I met in West Africa. He and his friends are terrible gut guests, but he takes a fun photo.
Experience Writing 
Oh wow, Maria… this one hit in such an unexpected way. The mix of science and soul here is so striking. That idea of our hair carrying our “blueprint” but being forgotten in the carpet? Haunting and beautiful. Makes me rethink every little thing we shed and leave behind. Brilliant take on the prompt!
~ Oizys.
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I’m so glad it spoke to you and resonated. One thing I love about these month long challenges is trying things I haven’t done in a while. I enjoy the contrapunctal form.
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