Under Wraps

Writober 2025: Day Twenty-two Mummies>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: Mummies and Death Rituals

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 22 of Writober: They Were So Well Preserved

OctPoWriMo

Death Rites

Death isn’t rolling over and resting an arm
on a chest that lifts and lowers
beats and hums with warmth
or flickering eyelids, sticky with dried sleep 
half-smiling lips stringing drool to a pillow
stale breath on a hairy tongue 
the urge to pee forcing feet to the floor
in a rush, tooth brushing, coffee making
hunger, cravings, breakfast choices:
cooking or not. Circling around each other.
Trying not to get in the other’s way.

Death isn’t the ticking of time, the daily rush 
yet is applying make-up and arranging hair.
Death isn’t rushing to the car to sit in traffic
yet is locking the door and leaving home behind.
It is not the soft kiss and “See you tonight”
yet is the reminders, all the little reminders.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Preservation

Mark had been getting up in the night ever since we found it. At first, I thought he was having nightmares, and getting up to clear his head. But now I was worried it was becoming a ritual, a habit of avoidant behavior. I wanted to know for sure before I talked to him about my concerns, so tonight, I slipped on my robe and followed him. He floated downstairs as if in a trance. Went out the front door and by the time I followed him out, he had a shovel and was standing in the yard. 

I took a seat on the stoop. He didn’t move. Just stood there staring past the trees along the dirt road as if he expected someone to arrive. It felt so strange watching him like this, but he had to be doing something every night, didn’t he? At least it was a comfortably warm night.

When we found it, we had been digging along the side of the house because I wanted to plant some roses. Suddenly, Mark started coughing uncontrollably. He said a bunch of dust exploded into his face. I looked in the hole he had been digging and saw a hand. 

I screamed, “Mark, there’s someone down there.”

He finally stopped coughing and sneezing, and dug out a perfectly preserved body of a man. It was so well preserved it looked like we might have buried it the night before, and the police were pretty sure we had at first. But tests showed the body had been there for over two hundred years. They still had no idea who he was, how he got there, or why he wasn’t decomposing.

Mark finally turned back toward the house. He had a glow of youth about him. The whites of his eyes were so bright they looked like they were glowing. It must have been the moonlight. By the time he climbed the front steps, the shovel was gone. Where was he stashing it, and why? 

He didn’t acknowledge me, went into the house and shut the door as if I wasn’t even there. I was more curious than I had been before I followed him out here. 

Back in the bedroom he was under the covers breathing deeply and evenly. I slid in beside him. He was so cold.

Halloween Photography Challenge

Today I was thinking about what makes mummies scary, and I thought they want to rule, enslave, take over. And how would they do that? They would have an army of mummies, or they would turn us all into mummies.