It’s Halloween

Writober 2025: Day Thirty-one Halloween>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

These are my responses to the prompt post for Day 31 of Writober: Happy Halloween

It’s the end of another Writober. Congratulations to everyone who participated. This month has been quite a journey. Thank you for sharing your poems, stories, and pictures. I enjoyed them all. What a great way to share the Halloween Spirit.

Now for my final creations to send you off into this Halloween Night.

OctPoWriMo

Halloween Lives (in the squirrels)

Tonight the streets
will fill with monsters
each mask coloring
history’s sins: impostors
begging and threatening
where the unknown wanders
under porchlights’ glow

After each of our fears
embodied comes alive
we’re sorted into those
who thrive and who hide
As the hours slip through
darker things show darker sides
treats run out, leaving tricksters

But true demons aren’t the eggers
or armed with toilet paper
not even the goblins that smash
the pumpkins are as depraved
as the one that returns day after day
and nibbles and scrapes
at a jack-o-lanterns face

Writober Flash Fiction Challenge

Muddy Footprints

Beatrice was so sick of the gardener coming in the house and muddying up her clean floors. He seemed to think his work was more important, and she could just rewash the floors, as if her efforts and time had no value. Her frustration and anger grew every single day. Even during a drought he managed to have mud on his shoes, and from the smell it wasn’t always only mud. The man was a menace.

The ghost of the lady of the house had been coming to the end of her bed at night. She had always liked the lady of the house. Her sudden disappearance had been explained as a mishap, a fall from the cliff where she liked to walk to clear her mind. But the nightly visitations had convinced Beatrice that there may have been foul play.

Beatrice shared her frustrations with the mistress who nodded, but she was always nodding. Her head appeared to be almost severed from the back, but Beatrice ignored that and took the nodding as commiseration.

On Halloween when the veil was thinnest between the worlds of the living and the dead, Beatrice saw the mistress in the glass of the door as she mopped the floor. The gardener must not have seen her. He appeared to walk right through her as he stomped into the room, but he only made a couple muddy steps before his eyes went wide; he gasped and grabbed his chest then fell flat on his face on her shiny, clean floor.

Beatrice smiled and clapped a couple of times, she hummed a tune she had never heard before as she went to work making it look like he tripped and hit his head. The floor was wet, she had been mopping, after all, and he never watched his step.

Halloween Photography Challenge

For today’s photographs I wanted to revisit a couple of the filters I cut this month that I really enjoyed.