Stitched Together

Writober 2025: Day Twenty-three Dismemberment>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: Dismemberment and Frankenstein’s Monster

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 23 of Writober: From Pieces and Parts

OctPoWriMo

It’s Open Link Night at dVerse Poets Pub, so head on over and link up one poem you’ve written, or just enjoy reading and commenting on the other poets’ poems.

Animation Framework

Make the being of gigantic stature—
Something so scaring
and unearthly in his ugliness
greater than his nature will allow.

Prepare a frame for the reception
of bestowing animation:

long locks of ragged hair
disgrace marked brows
contortions too horrible
for human eyes
a ghastly grin
wrinkled lips
voice suffocated

one vast hand extended
his hated hands before my eyes
intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins
to whose knees I clung
over feet chilled by the cold damp.

How dangerous
is the acquirement of knowledge:
A multitude of reverses
lay the foundations
of future success.

*Note: this poem was created from words and phrases found within Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Janie’s Neck Ruff

Janie always believed she was born in the wrong time and place. Turn of the century England would have fit her perfectly: fog, rain, shadowy alleys. And people wore gloves, all the time. Everyone. No one would notice a missing finger when their dead loved one wore gloves in the casket.

It was a time of discovery. Grave robbing was a career choice. Those doctors needed bodies. What a great excuse for desecrating burial sites: for science! And if some live ones became bodies, it would have been so easy to say Jack was busy Ripping. Such a great time to be a collector.

Growing up in her parents’ funeral home in small town America, Janie had grown up with dead bodies in the basement. She quickly realized that anyone she saw on the street would eventually end up on the slab. She liked to people watch, imagining how each of them would die, how much work her mother would have to do to make them “look natural,” which of their fingers she would put in her necklace and where. Sometimes she would see a finger that was so perfect for the next space to fill that she clenched her teeth and grabbed her scalpel in its sheath in her pocket. But the perfect necklace took patience, and in this town, every finger would come to her eventually. At this point her necklace wrapped around several times and looked more like a neck ruff of the seventeenth century, so maybe that was when she should have been born.

Halloween Photography Challenge

For today’s photographs I tried my hand at sewing up a monster from pieces and parts. I cut a head shape out of paper, tore it up, sewed it back together with thick thread and sewed that back into the head shape, then used the whole mess as a filter in the Mirrorworld.