The Blurry Truth

Writober 2025: Day Eighteen Cryptids>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: Cryptids

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 18 of Writober: But They’ve Seen It

OctPoWriMo

How I Got Rid of the Boogeyman

The only childhood monster I can 
think of is the Boogeyman under my bed.
I had a tall bed, an antique princess bed;
when I was little I had to run and jump
to get on my bed. There was plenty
of room under there for the Boogeyman.
I think I always feared people. Mean people. 
Bad people. Killers. I think I feared men 
in hockey masks, and men in other masks. 
People who break into people’s houses 
and steal children’s piggybanks. 

When did I grow out of my nighttime fear? 
Was it when I grew tall enough 
to jump from the bed, jump far enough 
so the the grabbing hand couldn’t reach 
an ankle without his head coming out too, 
and his giant shoulders getting stuck 
under the frame?

No it was Sweden, when they sent me to Sweden.
There was no room under that IKEA bed.
In Sweden there were trolls, but they didn’t 
come in the house. I guess I was too busy 
learning the language, trying not to embarrass myself 
being confused and homesick to worry about the monster.
The Boogeyman lost interest while I was gone. 
He didn’t wait around under an empty bed for a year.
I guess that’s how I got over my fear.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Tough Love

Stanley didn’t cry for his parents when he got scared in the night anymore. They were practicing tough love and believed he was just crying for attention. And in a way they were right. He wanted attention. He wanted them to pay attention to the monstrous man whose claws darted out from under his bed. The man-monster had matted smoky long hair and smelled like hot sweat and wet dirty fur. The claws pinched and tickled any bit of Stanley’s skin that escaped from his covers. Then he cried wanting attention when the man-monster came out from under the bed and started crawling up the walls and staring at him from the corner by the ceiling. Tonight, Stanley really would have liked some attention because that shadow man with the very long claws was perched on the headboard of his bed, staring down at him while his head was on the pillows. Stanley really wanted to scream for the rest of the night, maybe the rest of his short life, but his parents wouldn’t come, anyway.

Halloween Photography Challenge

It’s a perfect drizzly Pacific Northwest day for Bigfoot to be out getting a shower au naturel, so I thought it would be fun to capture some Bigfoot in my world. I did my best to cut his furry-bigfootedness in a paper filter then took pictures of the security light across the street through the leaves.