Prompts for #EmptyOctober 2022

A series of prompts for writing and art, split into loose categories by week.

You’re Invited!

When doll slips from the confines of her bed-box and stumbles downstairs, there’s an odd rectangle waiting at the table: a folded sheet of thick, creamy paper. It’s for her, obviously—why else would her miss have put it there, next to her oatmeal and tea?

But doll isn’t sure.

“Miss, what’s this?”

Across the kitchen (a distance which doll’s eyes easily skip over and her body has never managed to cross), her witch doesn’t glance up from the stove’s vast fire. Doll smells the ashy tang of crumbling pine and the rich, rotting musk of burnt deer.

Poor Little Thing

Poor little thing without a proper name sitting in the corner of a diner, sipping a cup of coffee bought with stolen money that’s running out so much faster than she hoped it would. Victim-coded, trying not to let her body shake; the waitress keeps on glancing over at her, seems halfway to offering her some sort of help or calling the cops. She can’t tell which, hopes it’s neither.

The Dream of Meat

You are dreaming.

The oddity of recognizing this does not impede your progress forward into the dining hall’s elegant vastness. Nor does it permit you to deviate from the path the dreaming part of you—the part that weaves the world—has chosen for you.

“Oh, you’re finally here!”

There is a dining table, a perfectly formed slab of rock stretching impossibly across the hall’s floor, and at its head stands a prism-headed man in a hastily drawn suit. His layered voices sound exactly like him.

That The Seasons May Turn

Her lips press against your skin like sun-warmed feathers, soft and gentle, lingering only long enough for the poison to soak in. Each kiss leaves you shivering against the dead field below you, fingers twitching against soil rendered cold and lifeless by winter’s harsh grip—

You don’t look at her.

The elders made that prohibition quite clear, before they sent you out to offer yourself up. Once they would have scooped out your eyes before leaving you for her to find, but now there are better ways and your vision was bad even before the acid’s touch.

With a Chisel

He’s rock-hard already when she stops teasing him to fetch the gorgon, dolldick waving proudly (or perhaps desperately, if the little drips oozing from its tip are any indication) in her workshop’s warm air.

She’s been careful not to touch it, but that’s hardly a barrier; his body has so many other sensitive places for her hands to linger, and the plug buzzing against his prostate certainly helped—it’s always been his weak point, though she’s been careful not to give it the sort of hammering that might push him over the edge. That would ruin things.