This is Drabbletober, the podcast of tiny fiction.

Hello, and welcome to Drabbletober. This is episode 26, season 2, for Sunday the twenty-sixth of October 2025. I'm Elizabeth Guilt.

Your one-hundred word story for the day is:

Making a Myth

by Elizabeth Guilt

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Mara sits where she's told, and the engineer places the cap on her newly-shaved head. He tinkers briefly, and they all come swaying sinuously to life. The cap's sensors read tiny movements in Mara's scalp muscles, track signals from her optic nerve. When she looks left, so do the snakes. When she smiles, the snakes relax; when she frowns, they rear.

"Woah,' says the engineer. "That works really good! I'll take it off..."

"No.'

He reaches for the cap, and seventy snakes bare their fangs.

He knows they're not real. But Mara's snarl, haloed with furious snakes, freezes him rigid.

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Take care, everyone, and I'll see you tomorrow for episode 27.

https://www.elizabethguilt.com/drabbletober/s2episode2