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EJ Trask's avatar

oof that last stanza

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Honeygloom's avatar

😏

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Bill Hiatt's avatar

Excellent!

By the way, though there are no wolves in suburbia, there are coyotes.

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Honeygloom's avatar

Ha! Very true, we see them here pretty often actually as we live adjacent to a nature preserve. This was just inspired by my neighbor’s hound dog though😅

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Bill Hiatt's avatar

I don’t live next to a nature preserve, but I do live in the Los Angeles area, where former coyote habitats have all been developed. But coyotes are very adaptable and have made a place for themselves in the suburban landscape. They generally pay no attention to me when I’m out walking in the pre-dawn hours, but they’ve been known to stalk people walking dogs, and smart pet owners know to keep their dogs and cats indoors after dark and not to let the dogs into the backyard to relieve themselves without accompanying them,

I think there’s a horror story in there somewhere.

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Honeygloom's avatar

Mmm maybe a little chupacabra vibes

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A.P. Murphy's avatar

Excellent - enjoyed them all, the last one is particularly spooky. I recall we discussed already the feeling resulting from the sensation of something inside - could that be the origin of all body horror?

The final painting is also particularly creepy - to consider that some Victorian artist somewhere thought a beautiful girl on a mortuary slab would make a fine subject for a painting.

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Honeygloom's avatar

I can’t speak for the wider world, but my body horror is born out of my neurological situation. Which does sometimes make it feel like things are crawling out of me or on me or biting me, but also causes chronic migraines and a billion other absurd things.

Fibromyalgia, for example, is a sensory processing disorder in which the brain doesn’t bother to filter out a lot of what it would for normies. I generally describe my brain as a nightclub without a bouncer that’s always over capacity. That then kind of puts your brain in perpetual panic mode, which does a lot of weird stuff to your body, unless you can limit input by, say, hiding in your dungeon instead of going to the pub. Although, alcohol is excellent for dumbing down your sensory processing center, I have to admit.

That painting is so weird. It’s called “The Autopsy (Anatomy of a heart: She had a heart!) The Victorians sure loved a dead person 😅

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