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(NOTE: I've been reading too much classical work).

The siren had many times betaken herself to the woods, and there, beside herself with delight, she beheld the lakes and ponds fair to look upon, over which every sturdy tree let fall its leaves of green and of orange. Now and again she would sing to herself, as she walked the woods, whatever she had heard of the street singers; and her husband, no mean listener himself, whom she had loved beyond measure through all their years together, would walk beside her and hearken to it too. She had heard it whispered in the town markets, and again at the ports where she and her husband were wont to fish, that a witch’s rite had lately been held in the woods, “in the south,” as they said, though what that might mean she could not tell. Nor did the uncertainty deter her, for she would be walking there at her ease, and scarce a month remained before she and her husband should set out for the old Golden Krone Hotel.

She walked out in the early morning, and while she delighted in the green grass beneath her pale bare feet, there came to her the smell of smoke from a torch lately burnt out; nor could she turn her mind from it, and before long she followed where it led. So she came upon a clearing in the woods, and in it stood a table spread with a white cloth, and upon the cloth lay the stripped bones of some small creature, slight enough to be a fowl’s. Beside them sat a head like a mummy’s, its eyes hollowed out and its mouth gaping, as though it had been struck dumb with terror in the very moment of its ending.

Another step she took, and there rose to her ears the singing of those streets which he had loved, swelling by degrees until it wrung from her a cry of fright; and turning, she beheld her own face within one of the hollow circles of the tree behind her, not so plainly as in a mirror, yet plainly enough to show the stars within her eyes, which cleared before her sight even as she moved her head to seek where the sound was wandering off in another quarter.

When she turned, her eye fell upon something, and then upon many things, moving to and fro among the trees, now here, now there, appearing and vanishing in the gloom. Yet what was that yonder, stirring where nothing ought to stir? And lo, it is upon her!

My husband was a wily old rapist, but he had other qualities, too. Not among them was throwing out the bath water.

He could pick the horses, though. On race day he’d wake up early, boil up some water and soak a while. Then he’d dress himself up neat, I’d give him a big smacking kiss good luck at the door and he’d stroll off and win big. I was ever so proud. But then of course I would see the mess he left behind in the bath.

The winnings always went straight to the pub, you know. Never any left over. But anyway it was the bath water that drove me most mad.

I do remember locking him out of the house one day. Because of his infidelity on one of those trips of his. I never told him how I knew. And once again he hadn’t thrown out the bath water. So we got into a yelling match and I swung my tits out the first floor window and teased him with my big nipples and said I could have any man I wanted. I watched him chase the local kids up and down the lane with February biting at his flesh until he screamed at the front door and pleasured himself as some kind of public act of revenge. He wasn’t mentally stable.

I let him back in before the frostbite. He was shivering too much to hit me. Our reputation among the neighbours never really recovered after that. And soon enough, I was once again pouring out his bath water into the grass.

Well that all changed today. Now someone else can deal with your bloody bath water, am I right? Tee-hee-hee!

The curtains open to my forest, my forest of dreams. In the centre, the heart, is a clearing. There is a table and a spotlight of sunlight slips through the canopy and shines on it. On this table lies a white lace tablecloth and on this tablecloth sits her head. My grandmother.

The audience of trees surrounds the silent, bodiless performer. I pass their thick trunks and enter the light, placing my arms on her stage and my hands cupping her cheeks. I look into her empty sockets, then down to her smiling lips.

Oh how I’ve missed you, you wonderful woman. I pity these trees for they will never hear you sing, rivaling the songs of all the birds to which they are accustomed. You had the most beautiful voice but I cannot remember it, only the feelings it brought me. Your eyes, your clothes, your smell, it all escapes me. But I could never forget your kind face.

The way you treated me, I wish I could treat myself. The care I felt I could never show another and you harboured talents I could never muster. I was present in all this greatness, but I never felt like a lesser woman.

The one I trust and who held me dear, you didn’t inquire about my future or scold me for my past; you were happy that I was there. As this sun shines on you now, you shone on me then. I take solace in that when I grow old and look into a mirror, I’ll see you again.

I dreamt of a forest.

No usual sort, I may add. The trees were bare and crooked, filled with dead hollows and recesses carved deep into their demented timber. I walked among them and did imagine among some the soft sound of agony. A woodsman had been at one, and where his axe had chewed there streamed thick black sap trickling like blood into unsated Earth; its exposed bark groaning in agony.

Onwards I crept, dreamlike, and discovered within this fantasy an enclosure. Beyond the circling thicket I trod and there, saw it.

An altar carved deep in stone, atop which in the centre sat a head dessicated beyond all years. Eyes wide, peering into the soft embrace of its mortal lover, and speakig a dead tongue.

Closer, I could hear them sharing sorrowful words. She, not yet an adult, wore a silken gown through which I could see her pale body in its entirety, and a garland wreath around her head from which flowed thick blonde hair down unto her waist.

At last, she stroked the head on the altar and rose, walking towards me. I did not see it at first, but she clutched in her hand a butcher's knife, its sharp metal blade kissed with an ochre pigment which stained its edge. In the dream I stared, baffled and unaware of what was to occur.

Raising the knife to my throat she spoke to me from beneath red lips: "shall we follow Michaelangelo" the sibyl seemed to say. I was dumbstruck, and words which oft spoken wake the dreamer left me unconscious to the world.

She slid the knife across my neck.

Falling, I heard before awaking screaming the sibyl repeat herself, this time in old Aramaic:

"In the room where women come and go, talking of Michaelangelo".

In dreaming of death I slept, and in dreaming died

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>>25625779
Who are you?

Adulthood.


The girl studied the face in the graveyard for the rest of the night by the flickering lamplight, her fingers still black with freshly dug dirt as they manipulated the sunken eyelids, lifted the lips to expose the teeth in the receding gums, pushed and pinched the soft cheeks, the wrinkled skin already spotted with rot.

Her father would've been horrified, furious, hurt, confused. He would've pleaded and accused. He didn't understand. She had to do it. She couldn't let this only chance pass. She had to look at the only face that could've shown her her future, that fleshy window into the void, that putrefying crystal ball shaped like her mother's face. If there's one truth in this world, the old ladies say, it's that every girl becomes her mother. So she studied, she examined, she prepared.

By dawn, she knew. The head had become just a head.

The woman laid it back to rest and walked home.

A Bad Prompt

No two ways about it, the faint chiaroscuro and Ellen Terry lookalike don’t stir much inside him. Somehow the contours of her shirt caught his eye more than her un-Greek profile. Reminded him of the Bargue plates he spent hours copying in school (apparently Picasso did the same), he still saw shadows as shapes that should be drawn before the subject of a piece. An image is made not from you but an absence in the shape of you. Like those handprints at Lascaux with pigment blown around them. Just what is that expression on her face anyway? Not endearment. If the artist had included the reflection of the High Lights at exactly the right place in her eye, he supposed, it could’ve manipulated him to some affection. But his mind had already wandered. You know it was nearly twenty-thousand years ago, he thought, that those Lascauxians daubed their cave walls with inspirational paint? Not scribbles but real art, beautifully observed. And those handprints with paint all around them remain stamped seven hundred generations later. Like someone reaching through the stone, and right to us.

I was here.

He suddenly wondered what he’d say back. We built a magnificent cathedral that has stood for eight hundred years in the centre of Paris. Though actually that caught fire about five years ago, Notre Dame, though money was quickly raised from the international community to restore it; now cosmetic rather than historic. Still, the fire was something. The old green and grey stone suddenly livened by red and orange. Do you remember? That was a grand display of all the arts: God’s, man’s, the devil’s. Marked by a pillar of skyward smoke, do you remember? It sang louder than any cathedral choir. We all wanted it saved of course, but nobody stopped looking. Everyone secretly backs a fire.

He’d probably tell them that.

He glanced at the prompt image again and ended his piece by bathetically typing out

alas poor yorick.

bump

Portent. Yes. I’m sorry. I must go. Where. Try it. There. I love you. Sick of this smell.

Samuel. Samuel. Samuel. Samuel. Samuel.

Enclosed by thicket and shaded by canopy. I was for minutes or days or weeks or months or years. I felt no hunger or thirst or sleep but I smelled putridity and I saw through my scattered vision Samuel. Empty eyes bored through me or paid no mind. I am sick. I have to leave.

From North to West, West to East, East to South, South to West, West to North, North to East, East to South, South to North, North to East, East to West, West to South, South to East, East to North, North to South.

A flock of cardinal and repugnant stench. It followed not the wind, for what wind in a place without momentum, but the movements to and fro the copse. I could squeeze through the trees, the bushes, the beds, the vines, and each time I don’t arrive. My legs had taken me to no where, where, all roads lead to Samuel. The scent that trailed me, what remains of Samuel, had become true north. I would always return. Cardinal vis a vi Samuel.

That it followed. Followed the tail of a woman, a tarry of a woman sallow. Of the mind, of the soul, of the body, stripped of all my tallow. And Samuel. His head sat in eye of this copse, upon a stone pedestal cracked and mottled. Was it always so?

Light reached inside here only through a sliver of canopy that rested on his temple. Always this temple. I loved you. Everywhere I land you face me, you must have loved me too. Yet every time I begin to accept you, this disgusting rot in my nose and I retch and I cry and I’m sorry and I must run. Somewhere. I have to try, maybe there, I loved you. I’m so sick of this Samuel.

I want out.

The Shape Between Her Hands


Every evening, Mara set the little brass key on the table and waited for the room to remember.

At first, nothing happened. Then the wallpaper paled. The clock stopped. In the hush, the old house filled with people who had been gone for years: her mother at the window, her brother with a book tucked under his arm, her father pretending not to listen.

They never stayed long. They were only the impressions grief left behind.

Mara had discovered she could hold them there by bringing her hands together. Not touching—never touching. Between her palms, the air grew warm, and a face would form, faint as breath on glass.

Tonight, her mother appeared first. She was young again, hair pinned at her nape, a half-smile waiting at the corner of her mouth.

“You’re late,” Mara whispered.

Her mother’s lips moved, but the words came from the key on the table.

You can stop now.

Mara’s fingers trembled. She had spent twenty years gathering these scraps: a shoulder, a laugh, the tilt of a head. She had thought that if she held enough of them, her family would return whole.

But the figures behind her mother were already fading. Her brother turned a page. Her father looked toward the door.

Mara opened her hands.

For one bright instant, the room was crowded with everything she had loved. Then the air went cool, the clock began again, and the key lay alone on the table.

In the morning, Mara placed it in the post and addressed it to her brother.

For the first time in years, she let the house be only a house.

The Dust Cartographer.


Every evening, Ada swept the dust from the parlor table into a neat gray hill. Every evening, she drew a road through it with one finger.
The road had begun as a game when her brother was alive. He would name a place—an island, a city under the sea, a village where nobody ever grew old—and Ada would map it in dust. Then he went away to war, and the maps became the only places where she could still find him.
On this night, she drew the village he had described as a boy: seven houses, a crooked well, a bridge over a river no wider than a ribbon. At the far end, she made a tiny figure with a blunt fingertip.
The figure lifted its hand.
Ada leaned closer. A breath of cold air moved across the table, though every window was shut. The little river shivered. The figure began walking along the road, leaving footprints in the dust.
She could have brushed the map away. Instead, she placed both hands around it, careful not to touch the fragile world. “Are you there?” she asked.
The figure stopped beside the well. It raised one arm, the old signal they had invented as children: I see you.
Ada laughed, then covered her mouth. Behind her, the clock struck midnight. The dust stirred. The village softened at its edges, and the road began to vanish.
“Wait,” she whispered. But her brother had always been better at leaving.
When the room grew still, Ada carried the dust outside and let the night wind take it. In the morning, she wrote a letter to the people who had known him last. This time she sent it somewhere real.

The museum’s smallest exhibit was an empty glass case. Its label read: THE LAST BREATH OF THE HOUSE OF VELL.

Visitors smiled at the joke. Mara never did. She had been a child when the house burned, and she remembered her mother running back inside not for jewels or letters, but to open every window. “A house must be allowed to breathe,” she used to say.

Years later, Mara became the museum’s keeper. Each evening, she polished the empty case and listened. The other rooms clicked and sighed as they cooled. This one stayed quiet.

One stormy night, a crack appeared in the glass. Mara reached toward it, fingers spread, and felt a cool breath pass between her hands. A shape gathered in the dimness: a shoulder, a cheek, hair pinned at the nape. Her mother’s face, not quite finished.

Mara did not ask why she had come back. She asked the question she had kept for years. “Were you afraid?”

The shape wavered. Then, from somewhere inside the case, came the familiar answer: “Of course.”

Mara’s hands dropped. She had imagined courage as the absence of fear. Her mother had taught her otherwise, without meaning to.

The crack in the glass widened. Air slipped through it, carrying the faint smell of rain on hot stone. Mara opened the gallery doors. The museum’s stillness loosened; curtains stirred, and the old floorboards gave a long, relieved creak.

At dawn, the case was empty again. Mara replaced its label with a new one: A WINDOW, LEFT OPEN.

When the first visitors arrived, she stood beside it and let the room breathe.

Deep inside the copse atop the chiseled marble altar the maiden extended her arms forward and stared into the cypressgreen eyes. She contemplated a universal biography of being and becoming and something else, something beyond word written or spoken and beyond the dactyls and trochees and spondees of the poets and beyond the reason of the philosophers. Something that only existed in the blood of men. The unveiling of a resplendent essence hidden inside the sable pupil that expanded like a droplet of ink soaking into a papyrus. A working of divinity that electrified horse-riders rushing westward, a divinity effective in the living and not in the dead, in the changing and not in the petrified, galloping past the dolmen rocks carrying bronze swords and lances and racing towards the Aegean. Then spirits populating the peaks and valleys and caves and plains. Spirits haunting the palaces and islands and forests, driving men on both sides of the sea to war to be spent like bloodstained currency to pay a sempiternal debt. Then darkness. Then rebirth. A first strike against the ways of old. The unification of civilization against barbarism until barbarism took over. And a final reckoning when men carrying the crest of the One to drive away the many of more primeval times carved the course of history into stone to become unchangeable until the consummation of the world, until the ways of men would be extinguished. All blazing and humming beyond the translucent windows of sable and cypressgreen, the rimpled world unattainable by reason and sense and the understanding of men.

In the valley, people brought their troubles to Elspeth in jars.

A farmer arrived with a jar of cracked earth, asking for rain. A bride brought one full of wind, hoping to quiet the storms that worried her before the wedding. Elspeth listened, then set each jar on her table and placed her hands around it.

She could not make weather. She could only persuade it to remember where it belonged.

For years, she had kept a jar of her own beneath the table: a black cloud no bigger than a plum. It held the storm that had taken her daughter’s boat. Elspeth had caught it too late to save the child, but in the cloud’s dark heart, she sometimes heard a small voice humming.

One autumn evening, a boy came to her door carrying an empty jar. His village had gone months without rain. “They say you can help,” he said.

Elspeth put her hands around the glass. The air trembled. Nothing came. She tried again, drawing on every old promise and every hard-won trick.

Then she heard the humming beneath the table.

She lifted the black jar and held it beside the boy’s. For a moment, the storm beat against its walls. Elspeth had spent years keeping it there, afraid that letting go would mean losing the last sound of her daughter.

The boy watched her. He did not hurry her.

At last she opened the lid.

Cloud rolled across the room, filled the chimney, and swept through the valley. Rain struck the roof in silver handfuls. In its first steady patter, Elspeth heard the tune her daughter used to hum, fainter now, but free to travel.

The boy ran home laughing. Elspeth left the jar on the table, empty and bright. Outside, the rain kept falling.

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"Feathered Foretelling"

Leah sanctified the altar in the predawn air. Purifying stone, preparing censer, and swathing skull. The handful of nuts and berries cast towards the treeline were not of a hallowed nature. Gallant Anastasios had shown her how birds favored certain foods above others. His heart for battle tender to nature in equal measure.

A handsome raven perched sentinel while she worked. Leah fancied his approval in the vocalizations for her ministrations.

"Perhaps Apollo himself watches me awaiting to deliver a message," she mused aloud. "What better form than such as this? Feathers of beauty, mighty talons, and harsh voice of one who would speak harsh truths. A song all which take heed and matching that of chorus in noblest companions. Yet still a taste for delicacy both in sweetness of nature's bounty and of the tender flesh."

Lighting the incense, Leah breathed deeply of the aromatics. Her fingers caressed the cotton and sunken features of the skull. The wizened face smiled up at her.

"Oh Gods above I beseech for your words and guidance."

Power suffused her body, her grip becoming lax as the trance-like state deepened.

Leah's vision unfocused seeing all the paths which might lie ahead for herself, her country, the world.

She saw the raven swoop down and snatch the venerable skull out of her grasp, croaking calls like laughter as it soared away.

Leah screamed.

Thunder boomed above and Leah stood frozen, certain her fate was sealed.

Sunlight warmed her face. Apollo's messenger returned, alighting in place of the bones.

Leah reached out trembling hands and lay them upon glossy black feathers.

"Fear not, fellow servant," it said. "Lord Apollo has seen your kindness towards his portentous messengers. Ask your question."

Leah paused. She had been sent for a purpose. The weight of responsibility weighed on her shoulders.

Her heart had questions. Of love, indecision, destiny.

"Lord Apollo, my love is headed to battle. I must know the outcome to the victor and of his safekeeping. If I have only one question I must know as Aphrodite has smitten him for me as I have been struck for him. Appreciation for your winged messengers stemmed from his respect of them as well. I have him to thank for seeing past what others label ominous to the beauty within. Reveal our fates my Lord of this trial before us, no matter the victor. Our lives would be dedicated to all birds should his tour be favorable."

A second raven joined them and then, to her delight, a third.

"My heart soars and Aphrodite also favors your plight. That you would rather use your Sight for love, knowing all which lies upon your vision, is moving. Your beloved shall return unharmed. Indeed, I will grant you to know your people shall be victorious. Aphrodite has sank her arrow into his breast and your beloved is steadfast in his devotion towards you. Go forth."

Tears streaming from her face Leah kissed the raven's beak.

His feathers preened. "Don't kiss the messenger."

Betty's heart had slowed to a relieved pump. He nerves - slowly - unfurled from the frenzy that had come before. She asserted control over her own breathing. Once again rational thoughts entered her mind. She reassured herself: yes, it's dead. The skull is dead.

That is not something anyone should need to tell themselves. But not ten minutes earlier Betty found herself staring at death awakened. The coffin reduced to splinters. The grave surface dashed and pummeled into tormented ripples of loose earth. Its occupier had left. It was seeking her out. It intended on generational harm.

The skeleton knew where she lived. The first strike of the big pink dildo obliterated the family door and left a girthy scar carved straight down the thick oak. A rigid bony hand brought back the phallic mace, knuckled tight by the ballsack, and swung it back for another strike. Betty was already out; the soothsayers had told her: beware the cock and bollocking.

She fled across the moors, nude footed, skirt in hand, taking the route she had traced ten thousand times since she was a child.

The sharp clicks of the white piano key formation horror slowly filled her ears, and when she looked back through the morn she saw the horrific thing articulate; the stiff, unbending scaffoldry of raised death and the contrasting mockery of its grip over the big pink dildo, that damned elastic truncheon which snapped and whipped itself rigid with every other stride only to collapse and contort under its own weight during the next.

The trees and bog gave way to the grove and its chill spring that flowed like soundless glass out of the rocks. Ankles in the wild font, a lightning fast prayer, a pocketed offering to the rivulet and one defensive swipe up the bank with the sanctified frond of ash she had waiting for her. All returns to its nature. Prayers to Wotan.

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Very many submissions this month!

~Competition~

>>25621123 | “The siren had many times betaken herself…” by Anonymous

>>25621274 | “My husband was…” by Anonymous

>>25621781 | “The curtains open…” by Anonymous

>>25622617 | “I dreamt of a forest” by The Nightmare

>>25625879 | Adulthood by Anonymous

[cont. below]

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[cont. from above]

>>25625899 | A Bad Prompt by Anonymous

>>25626873 | “Portent. Yes. I’m sorry. I must go.” by Anonymous

>>25627336 | The Shape Between Her Hands by Anonymous

>>25627397 | The Dust Cartographer by Anonymous

>>25627628 | “The museum’s smallest exhibit…” by Anonymous

[cont. below]

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[cont. from above]

>>25627822 | “Deep inside the copse…” by Anonymous

>>25628516 | “In the valley, people brought their troubles…” by The Weather in Her Hands

>>25629927 | Feathered Foretelling by Anonymous

>>25629955 | “Betty's heart had slowed…” by Anonymous

~Voting~

https://strawpoll.com/X3nkPjjY5gE

>[countdown to voting deadline]
https://countingdownto.com/w4/display/voting-deadline-wibac-oct-2026-olit

I'm surprised there are so many submissions with the tight deadline, good show

does this thread need to stay alive?

>>25632251
Yes. It must live.

>>25632364
Understood. I will protect and nurture it until my life withers and my eyes can no longer read it.

>>25621123
Spooky. Particularly the last paragraph which fit nicely in that classical tone. Clever having your Siren be in turn lured in by her lover's sounds of the town.
>>25621274
Was going to discount this one but feels like an old painting with the lewd imagery. So it came off as more funny, this battle between husband and wife, than unsettling like the last line tries for. It's always funny how stories can change from bad to good like yours.
>>25621781
>sits her head
Lay or lie would have been better here and gone more to the idea Grandma is resting. I suppose I'd want more as to why the clearing was chosen for Grandma to remain.
>>25622617
Biggest sticking point is calling it a butcher's knife. Even calling it a huntsman's knife to almost go with woodsman would have been a better option. I looked up the quote but fail to appreciate its inclusion.
>>25625899
>Everyone secretly backs a fire.
I like this line alone. Focusing on the church seemed like it had a better grasp on you than all else.