Tourmaline .’s Halloween Challenge
Today’s prompt is Zombie. In a way, my filter shapes are like zombies eating my brain and mindlessly replicating (on every glint of light). Not having a clear idea for today’s photo-shoot, I did some research and found some interesting online resources I thought I’d share:
PBS did a series called Monstrum. At first, I thought it was a documentary series about the origin of Zombies and their evolution through film, but that’s only three episodes of season two. There are four seasons about all sorts of monsters. In Season One I found an episode about Icelandic zombies called Draugr. I know what I’m doing for Readers Imbibing Peril’s Peril of the Real! What could be better than Monster Documentaries from PBS?
~which led me to The Magic Island by W. B. Seabrook (1929), a first hand account of Voodoo in Haiti. I looked up W. B. Seabrook on Wikipedia, turns out he was an occultist who also happened to be a cannibal.
~and also inspired me to watch my DVD of George Romero’s original 1968 Night of the Living Dead and plan to have a Romero movie binge, because I’ve never watched his other Zombie films.
I finally figured out my inkblot filter idea and was learning that it didn’t matter what color paint I used, it all comes out as black, when I noticed one of the inkblots looked kind of like a zombie . . .
Then the mirrorworld was overrun by zombies!
New Poem
Quick question: Have any of you joined Poetizer? It’s a social network for poets and poetry I read about yesterday. I’m curious about it, and wonder if any of you have tried it.
Today’s theme is Surrendering Guilt.
Today’s prompt is to write in Traditional Mongolian Meter. Grace outlines it this way:
The elements of Traditional Mongolian Meter are:
- written in any number of quatrains.
- syllabic, usually 7 to 8 syllables.
- head rhymed. Technically, head rhyme is just the first consonant of each line matching. However, while still alliterative, with the matched consonant heading the line, it is often seen as the first syllable in each line rhyming with the first syllable of the ensuing lines. Rhyme scheme aaaa bbbb cccc etc. (Remember the rhyme is at the beginning of the line, not the end.)
- alliterated, although alliteration can occur within a couplet and need not be contained within a single line. If true or near rhyme is not present, alliteration of the first word of each line is a must.
I like the idea of “front rhyme,” so here goes:
Survivor’s Guilt
Surrendering guilt is like
surfacing through heavy silt
surrounded by barbed scales and gills
searching with clawed hands for a hold
~but~
Letting guilt go is like
lemon juice on everything
Lessons in Love—repeatedly
Leaping lighter toward life
Writober Flash Fiction
Today’s image for inspiration is a photograph by Tim Walker for Vogue UK 2011. You can read more details about it in this post from Nature in Photography. Our character, a young woman wearing tattered, flowing clothing, crouches atop a door, watching the two cheetahs in a room filled with sand. One cheetah looks out a barred window where the sand is flowing in. For me, this says apocalyptic woman vs. nature story.
I heard the cats roaring and snapping behind me. My tire-tread sandals cut through the sand creating a spray which I kept out of my eyes with goggles and my ears with headphones that probably haven’t worked in a decade. I thought I felt hot breath at my back as I took the sharp left into the nearest house, open and barren like most the houses here.
Maria L. Berg #Writober7 Day 6
“Now. Now,” I shouted, with my last breath, bursting through the kitchen into the main room.
What could have been a fancy parlor, or comfy family living room, was filled with sand. Sand poured through the bars on the window creating a massive dune which I raced up. I perched on the top of the open door that would have separated this room from the kitchen, and caught my breath, listening.
I heard excited voices, squealing and barking. Scorch did the barking, self-proclaimed leader always bossing us around. “Tick, the net. The net!” Then a bunch of screaming.
The plan must have gone wrong because the slim head of the first cheetah and then the second entered the room below me. I stifled a gasp, and tried to breath silently. It was hard since my chest was still heaving and my heart pounding from sprinting for so long. Scorch made me the bait because I’m the smallest and fastest, or so he said. I think he wanted me to get eaten. One less to worry about.
All the sand I had kicked up under my dress was drying on my sweaty skin, and I was starting to itch like crazy. Why weren’t they coming with the net now? The cats were just standing around. One faced the barred window as if judging if he would fit through the bars, or perhaps was gazing at the sun, while the other slunk back and forth along the far wall where the sand hadn’t completely covered the floor.
I wanted to yell out, maybe Scorch didn’t realize I was in here, but then I saw the blood in the cheetah’s mouth as it sneered at the bars on the window.
Experience Writing 