Word Power

Writober 2025: Day Twenty-four Spells>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: Spells

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 24 of Writober: Predicting a Return for Revenge

OctPoWriMo

To Get Rid of a Man

Nine needles, nine needles broken in threes
Three times write names, the names of each

Write one name backward for love to reverse
placed on the paper needle pieces disperse

Five black candles, four red, and three green
Hang one black candle upside-down on a string

drip wax from a doorway onto these things
collect dung from a black and white dog in the street

When the candles have burned down to stubs
whoever you curse will bark and run

Collect everything in a paper sack
Toss in the river, he’ll never come back.

Note: This poem was inspired by “superstitions” in Appendix A of Gumbo Ya-Ya_(Aal) published in 1945 by the Louisiana State Library Commission. This spell is my own concoction: Don’t try it at home 💀🎃.

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

The Face in the Tower

Beshda left quietly before her dad woke up. He had been over-protective since her mom disappeared. When she told him about finding the abandoned carnival in the woods he had turned pale, his hands shook, and he yelled at her as if she had done something wrong. He forbade her to ever go there. If he had only told her why: that all the good left in her mother had gone into Beshda when she was born; that he had to do the unspeakable to keep his daughter and all the innocents safe. But he wouldn’t give her a reason. 

She had the old leather-bound book she had found in the hidden compartment of her mother’s bookcase tucked in her backpack along with several candles. The mist gathered as it always did around the base of the screaming tower. The silently screaming face with its teeth and wide eyes was so realistic it could have been a woman cursed to only observe the world from the side of that tower forever. The paint on the pointed roof was fading, and when the light hit the tower, it was easy to see it was carved and painted, but Beshda chose to believe it was a beautiful witch who had been trapped there, and she planned to free her.

The book was full of colorful drawings, and there, near the end was a picture of the carnival before it was abandoned, and the tower without a face on it. She sat down in front of the giant screaming face and set her candles on the ground. The words on the page didn’t make any sense to her, but she lit her candles and did her best to read them. The first time through, when she came to the end, nothing happened. She looked around and it looked like the mist was clearing. She tried again, using a long a instead of short, and other changes in pronunciation. 

This time as she approached the end, the sun broke through the clouds and she felt a light moving from deep inside, the warm light exited through her mouth, eyes, and ears. She felt herself rising off the ground. A beautiful woman smiled up at her from far below. She couldn’t move. Then the woman tilted back her head and cackled the most evil laugh, turned her back, and walked away. 

Halloween Photography Challenge

The way spells are repetitions of both ingredients and incantations got me thinking about the murmuration series I did last year, so for today’s photos I cut very small shapes to represent a cluster of spell ingredients, then attempted to express how they build power through repetition.