The Many Faces of Jack

Writober 2025: Day Twenty-five Jack-o-Lanterns>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: Jack-o-Lanterns

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 25 of Writober: Making Faces

OctPoWriMo

The Many Faces of Jack

Jack can be a woman
her face long, gaunt
as the house she guards
or plump and smiling
inviting the younguns
to the candy bowl
full of mini-toothpastes
or boxes of raisins
Not demons, but lamps
daring to grin into the night
flickering flames licking
at their fibrous cavities
aging them like progeria

Not all Jacks are women
I have seen gorged orange
men so full of themselves
that their seeds take half
the night to remove
yet so thin-skinned
that the slightest
attempt to peel back
the rind reveals a hole
Not tricksters, but wisps
distracting, pulling attention
with their glow, bluer than flame
a battery in plastic
with a false flicker

But some Jacks are more
than one pumpkin
perhaps eating their young
or shaved and carved
into elaborate scenes
some become clones
through books of patterns
Not monsters, but lanterns
Keeping the frights at bay
or gleefully lighting the way?

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Nuisance Calls

We had been getting nuisance complaints from this one small neighborhood for weeks. People’s jack-o-lanterns going missing from their porches, someone filling the street with chalk drawings including the message THERE’S STILL TIME, power outages, power surges, loud noises in the night that didn’t appear to be coming from any of the houses. We didn’t have the man power to keep going out there. There were real, violent threats that we needed to respond to. But then, on Halloween, the complaints just stopped. 

Concerned calls began around sunset from mothers and fathers that had taken their children out trick-or-treating. They reported that all the lights were out and no one was home. There wasn’t a single house giving out candy. The eerie chalk warning covered the street, and there wasn’t a single jack-o-lantern, not a single decoration, but the cars were still in the driveways. Leaving on Halloween and not giving out candy was not a crime, and we had real drunken disorderlies, assaults, and poisonings to deal with, along with cemetery trespass, and a bit of grave robbing. 

Two days later, after the rest of town had taken down their decorations, the missing persons reports began. The whole neighborhood, they never came back. It was if they disappeared from the face of the earth with no sign at all of where they had gone. If the chalk drawing wasn’t just a kid playing, there had been some warning, but time ran out.

Halloween Photography Challenge

I thought this exploration of the many faces of Jack (o-lanterns) fit well with the murmuration series that came up yesterday, so I cut a cluster of tiny Jack-o-lanterns and took it into the mirrorworld with some new orange lights I picked up for this season.