October 2026 - Be Careful
They will strip your bones, but only if you’re not careful.
The harvest begins much earlier—within hours of learning your warm, wet home is now theirs—with subterfuge to lull you into acceptance. Before you notice the siphons breaking through your walls, they’ll disperse a sweetness that sticks all over, muffling any protests your body puts up. And it will protest. It has spent years, decades building a fortress of solicitude, creating a delicate balance of give and take, a circular economy revolving around a singular soul.
In a moment, by happenstance, something familiar but foreign becomes two things then four then one million things crowding your insides and pushing your self against the walls. It forces you out—out your mouth in the morning and your skin that stretches overnight. Out of your mind when your thoughts are replaced with worries for the thing inside you: are you giving enough, is it taking enough, will there be enough of you left?
The people will tell you what a blessing it is and you’ll agree but wonder whether the saints also felt their ribs kicked from the inside, and thought of their miracles as monsters. Towards the end, when you’re sucked bone dry yet swollen like a toad, that is when you must be careful. Because the only thing left for them to take is your memory. They grow beyond you and take with them the evidence that anything was lost. You sag and reknit into a new shape that almost looks right. But they will change you, irreversibly. Emotionally, physically, yes, but also in a way much less mundane.
Before they leave, they take pieces of their new selves, which were so meticulously built from your old self, and lodge them into your very marrow. They leave bits behind—like a map of where they’ve pillaged—that overpower any selfish thought, any memory of regret. And they were right. It is a blessing, a miracle, that you can yield a new soul from pieces of your own and enjoy the experience so much that you’ll let it happen again, and again. You spend the rest of time in a magnetic field oscillating between them and you, wondering how they can exist both there and here.
Perhaps a mother’s love is the ache of the baby, left behind in a body that made them, trying to find their way home.
Chelsea Clark
Right Left Write’s October prompt was Gothic Harvest. New prompts are announced monthly February-November in QWC’s Pen & Pixel email newsletter.
Find out more about Right Left Write at www.queenslandwriters.org.au/rightleftwrite.
Right Left Write’s October Prompt is Gothic Harvest