Constant Mutation

Writober 2025: Day Fourteen Mutation>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: Mutation

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 14 of Writober: Mutations

OctPoWriMo

Today’s Poetics prompt at dVerse Poets Pub fits nicely with today’s theme of mutation. Merril’s prompt is to write a version of the headless horseman.

It’s All in His Head

In the deepest night
alone and frightened
her footsteps echoing on the bridge
she conjures me.
I am her deepest fear
a headless man
on an angry steed
the big powerful faceless rejector
come to stomp out her dreams
but what does she want from me?

What if all she wants is a reason for her fear
to see me ride by to explain her feeling
have a story to tell when someone
sees her pale and trembling?

What if I disappoint, don’t frighten
her anymore: if she rejects me,
I’ll go back to being nothing.
I won’t get to ride through town
chasing every skinny Crane.

What if this year’s pumpkin head
is silly? I keep trying new things.
I like to carve, but eventually
I throw the pumpkin and it breaks
so I didn’t put a lot into it this year.

I don’t think I want to be here
clomping across a rickety bridge
in these dated, tired clothes.
I can feel her judging me
and finding me lacking.
I need to find a new head.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Pterus Day

Today’s the day. I’ve been looking forward to this day since my very first Pterus Day. Seeing the Nestors tall and thin in their matching pink satin robes with fuchsia collars, cuffs and trim shining in the light slanting through the temple. The most beautiful on the island with the most beaklike  protrusions, the most nestlike mouth features. And this year, I was selected to join them. 

After the ceremony I will join the Nestors in the temple serving the Great Pterus our creator and protector. From now on everyone else on the island will bow to me and I will have power over them as one of the most perfect and beautiful should. 

I know that I was chosen as the most beautiful on the island, but up close I can’t tell the difference between one Nestor and another. I don’t think I would know if it was one of them behind glass, or a mirror. We each smell of sweet straw and spring leaves. I start feeling a tingle at the back of my skull, but then I am pushed to the front of the procession and the crowds begin to cheer. I raise my ribbon-wrapped twig  and wave with my other hand. “Kah Rrra-kah” I sing as I start up the hill my head held high. 

Ribbon dancers throwing bright leaf pieces run in front of us for a while. The leaf pieces stick in our mouth nesting and muffle our singing but add color to our nesting. I must look even more beautiful. If that was possible. 

The dancers finished and danced down the hill behind us. I noticed the path was no longer lined with well-wishers and revelers. I had never been this far up the hill before. I must have slowed because the Nestor behind me nudged me in the back. I continued climbing.

A screech filled the air and a loud rotting wind pushed me back. The Nestors behind me changed the song and pushed me forward. I stumbled into a crumbling miniature version of the temple with no roof. I tried to run back out, but my ankle stuck in the thick nest of vines that covered the floor. I looked around, but the other Nestors were gone. The screech and stinking wind came again. I looked up into the open beak of the Great Pterus. A real, giant bird looking down from a giant nest, not at the most beautiful on the island, but the most appealing meal raised to his tastes.

Halloween Photography Challenge

For today’s photos I used a pipe cleaner wrapped with wires bent in different ways to represent a copied and mutating genome.