Pentober 2026 - Day 21: Table

Ok so, what is Pentober? Promptober? It's a writing tradition that's been around the web for a while where you write up a short story every day in October based on prompts. Some go for pen and paper, some digital; everyone has their own style. I'll be posting here, and I'll be using the prompts from https://www.topinfiction.com/p/pentober-2026 

House rules are that I vomit-write the story; no planning, just taka taka taka on the keys. I get ONE edit at the end of the draft (if I even have time, lol), then we post it. House rules also say that I get to play catch up and do multiple days separately on one day or combined if work gets wild and I can't write. Get it? Got it? Good! Here we go.

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"What's on the table for today?"

"I mean we have quite a lot to go over."

"What's top of mind?"

"Exhaustion."

"Are you sleepy?"

"I'm bone tired." "What's been keeping you up?" "On the surface? Work stress. Partner stress, which is caused by their work stress." "Let's go deeper. It's always deeper than that."

The shadow struck a match and started lighting candles while humming, arranging the candles across the low table before them, pouring salt, and ink, and blood in discrete lines in some pattern that Bert couldn't understand. They were a weird therapist, but they worked. Bert wished he could remember their name, or anything about them.

"Close your eyes." Bert's eyes closed.

"Focus on the stress. See it and feel it in your mind. Let it take shape. Let it speak to you. Let it give you its name."

The humming continued as incense and perfume began to fill the air, from somewhere, water was sprinkled on Bert. It tingled slightly.

Swirling sparkles and static, visual snow, started to form shapes behind Bert's eyelids. It was a hulking mass, muscular and tumorous wrapped around a circular maw of spine-teeth. It had gentle tendrils rising out of the folks and shooting off into the distance, connecting to others like it. It was a mesh of a being. Bert couldn't tell if it was one or many.

"Do you see it?"

The therapists voice seemed far away; it came from all directions at once, as if he was entombed in their directives. Bert thought to himself, 'yes' and the Therapist seemed to sense the response.

"Show me."

The office Bert was laying down in, the Therapist's office, appeared before him. The entity he was envisioning, his stress, was sat on the table, tendrils stretching out past and through the walls of the office. Bert couldn't see the Therapist, but could sense them.

"What's their name?"

Bert made a noise he couldn't explain.

"Where are they from?"

Bert explained. It was something from before he was born that would live long after he was gone. It was not so much a thing he was experience as an entity he was passing through, being chewed up and spit out by, forever to be altered by the process of consumption.

"Open your eyes"

Bert was back awake, eyes open, same office but without any of the candles or salt lines or what have you. He was alone. The Therapist had left, and had left with something of Bert's.