Spooktober 2022 Prompts
1. Portrait
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2. Vanish
She watched the horror rise from the shadow of the tub back first- arching and hair draped like a veil around the face. Slowly the thing turned its head, a crackling sound like a wab of paper slowly being crumpled up, before it then slumped and slid toward me, like as if it were a blanket being pulled by a child - a jacket of flesh - the picture of unreality.
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3. Abandoned
He sat in the lockeroom after everyone had left, on the phone with his girlfriend - correction, with his ex-girlfriend, before he hung up the phone and glanced outside a high window to a lightless, starless, window - and he wondered just how long he'd been on that damn call. He moved with a sauntering slump to the bench where he'd left his bad, only to find it was missing - vanished, and the door to the lockeroom open and closed behind him.
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4. Enchant
How long did the photgraph sit there abandoned, waiting there to be discovered - after sunstained and rainwashed, every face began to fade into bleached counterparts, old ghosts of their former selves. But it was a young child who found the photo, picked it up, flipping it back and forth before delivering the relic to their parents - who threw it away, and what a strange lesson to teach a child - exactly how to treat strangers.
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5. Misfortune
A scrying spell is far more insidious than you might thing, commented the professor with a twirl of their moustache, for it is exactly the paranoia of simple man that allows us to enchant their room around them. How else would birch trees have eyes, walls have ears, and shadows have those reaching arms - careful where you're sitting now, they chuckled dryly.
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7. Thorn
It is a state of misfortune when you lose a pen, stub your toe, wake up in a daze after a long night - but it is a different kind of misfortune to wake up with limbs missing and no womb. I had three fingers now, not on each hand, total, and I watched them curl into my hand, an alien, until they too skittered away, and I broke apart into many pieces - torn apart by the misery of it all.
6. Chasm
[spoiler]I have a hole in my chest- no teeth to chomp, no maw to yawn or swallow, just a simple black void that goes from my stomach and breaks open like a tree hollow on my back. I try to cover it up, but the sound air makes when it passes through me makes the same sound of barely-open windows, and I wonder who sits behind this window, this hollow, this chasm in my chest - and what it wants to see.
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8. Howl
There's a thorn in your wingblade, she said suddenly, and she removed the shirt to see a red string attached to it, as if plugged into the skin with this same thorn.
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9. Mirror
Fascinating behavioral observation, after the unexpectedly slow euthanization of their mate after arduous and failed attempts to locate a melting point, subject has made attempts to recover theit mate's body - what is left of it - and has ceased making sounds common for their species, instead continuing to make unitelligible sounds that no longer resemble their language, but rather - howls.
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My eyes darted up to the rear view mirror, waiting for that grey, limping figure to emerge from the mist that hugged my car. My dog whined in the seat next to me as I pressed my weight into the key as I turned it again and again in the ignition; we listened to the engine wheeze and stutter... and the sound of footsteps coming up the gravel road.
10. Broken
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12. Slime 3-5-3
The flurry of claws hits me in the jaw, and I draw up a hand too late, only to feel the wet and squishy mass left over. I can't breathe - the pain throbs and I as much as I want to clench my teeth through it, I can't close my mouth. Not without a bottom jaw.
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13. Haunt
Feline Slime -
leaves green goop pawprints
as it kneads
Green toe beans
Glow-in-the-dark claws
Sticky paws
Pouncing blob
Melting as it dives
SPLAT! - it lands
See-through Eyes
A scary surprise
Who wants one?
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18. Spirit
There's a room I can't walk into anymore, where the light is too yellow, the hum of electricity too sharp, and the memory too thick. I can't go back there - can't look at it, and when I dare, I forget to breathe. It's a simple bedroom - mine, in fact - the one I slept when I was nine years old. It looked out toward a bar through a dirt-stained window, toward a bar - where the Thin Man stood out in the yard. He stood silently in front of the shadow of a tree. I wouldn't see his eyes, only his long arms as he bit his nails with the sharp click... click... click.... - and every night when my window shuddered and rattled, I thought maybe - just maybe - he was trying to get in.
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21. Shatter
It's called a Watcher - it has teeth there its eyes should be, but it stares all the same, teeth wriggling and scratching each other in place as it quick literally takes in the world around it - oh, and it loves you even though you certainly don't and shouldn't love it back. It's the reason children run when they turn off a light, why you still open your eyes when you were just trying to sleep a moment ago, and you look around your room - and you think "Nothing's there," but you knew better once.
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25. Possess
"You promised" - She is the sighs by a window - for she picks apart a flower to fortell her fate, the skips rocks across the lake to sate her fluttering heart, and she waits in the evening sun for a lover to caress her cheek. Time stains the glass with dirt as it passes, and soon no light will get in - a prison that offers no warmth, no comfort, only those hollow echos of memory of simple charms and sweet vistas. "But you promised" and her hand touches the window - shattered long ago.
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31. Drown
We make our own prisons, decorated with the things we love, the people we love - bits and bobs of comfort so that we shut our phones off and turn the television off, close up the windows and lock the doors when the world becomes too close outside, as if it pressed in on all sides of your house - heavy breathing and a thick, thudding, heart beat.
And what happens when a house can't be left alone, when its never left to its own devises but become so full of the people living inside with that human stink - sweat, toilet water, and unwashed dishes. - Does it become angry that it can't get a moment alone? It's floors fill with that layer of grime, stomach acid just below the grout as its temper rises. It clenches its fist and speaks through gritted teeth "why - won't - you - leave - me - alone?"
Perhaps this is why the ghost stories frighten us so, of things become lost in their own homes, so entrenched - that our possessions become what defines us in our small comforts we so desperately grasp for. They are, after all, what we possess.
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I can't look over the edge of anything because my vertigo - but on a dare, I climb up to the spring board that overlooks an abyssal pool. The girl I like is watching, my friends are jeering, my parents don't know where I am, everyone's cellphones are tucked away in their puddles of clothing a ways away. But I walk across the board, I don't look down. So, when I jump, I won't be dizzy. So when I jump, I'll swim back safetly. But when I jump, I don't jump far enough, and the back of my head snaps against the reverberating board as my limbs collide and slip into the cold water. They laugh a moment too long, long enough for them to make another round of jokes, long enough for the water to ink red ... and for someone to scream.
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