Imagine a wide tabletop scene arranged like a child’s secret treasure collection, bathed in soft, even daylight from a nearby window. The surface is a worn, honey-colored wooden table, textured with scratches and faint paint stains. Every inch is covered with small, real-world objects placed in deliberate, artful disorder. There are old marbles, brass keys, seashells, dice, buttons, coins, puzzle pieces, stamps, tiny animal figurines, bits of ribbon, a magnifying glass, and the corner of an open book with yellowed pages. A glass jar half full of sand sits near the center, with a toy sailboat perched beside it. To one side lies a tangle of string and a pocket watch with its lid open. The lighting is bright but diffused, creating crisp, shadow-free focus across the whole composition. Every object appears tactile, polished, and color-saturated — vivid reds, deep blues, and aged metallic tones all balanced together in a nostalgic still life.

In the background, a faint hint of a patterned wallpaper and the blurred outline of a wooden chair add depth, but the focus stays entirely on the tabletop clutter. The scene feels frozen in time — as if someone was just here, gathering their favorite trinkets for display.

Picture a cluttered wooden workbench inside a lakeside boathouse, lit by the soft golden glow of afternoon sun filtering through dusty windows. The entire tabletop is scattered with vintage fishing gear — a half-open tackle box overflowing with colorful lures, tangled lines, cork bobbers, hooks, and shiny sinkers. A faded map of the lake is spread beneath everything, its edges curling up where a reel and a folding knife hold it in place. A pair of weathered leather gloves rest near a coffee mug stained with dark rings. Beside it, a small jar of earthworms sits open, and a few have escaped onto the wood. There’s an old photograph of a proud fisherman with his catch tucked halfway under a spool of thread, and a cracked glass bottle containing a single feather lure floating inside.

The light in the room feels nostalgic and serene, glowing through the window’s thin curtains and glinting off the metal tackle. Shadows are soft and long, catching on the ridges of a carved wooden fish that leans against a pile of coiled rope. In the background, you can make out blurred shelves lined with jars, an oar leaning against the wall, and the suggestion of rippling water beyond the window. Every object feels like a story from summers long past, perfectly arranged in the timeless, hyper-detailed realism of an I Spy tableau.

One of the reasons I love Flux so much is that it doesn’t prompt like everything else, and definitely not like Stable Diffusion. Prompts are all little stories; poems to the gods of the latent space. Anyway, here’s the prompt:

An ancient cemetery buried deep within a gnarled forest of dead trees. Wrought iron fences lean in haphazard broken lines. The air is still and heavy, thick with the scent of moss and decay. Leaning gravestones jut from the earth at crooked angles, their inscriptions long eroded by centuries of rain and grief. The moon hangs low and hollow through the twisted branches, its light fractured by webs of fog that drift like slow ghosts, it does little to pierce the darkness of the jet black night sky. Roots coil around broken tombs as though trying to reclaim the dead beneath, and crows, black and silent, watch from the skeletal canopy above. The silence here is complete, but not empty; it hums faintly, like a secret too long held.

The forest itself seems awake, its branches creaking with whispers that rise and fade without wind. A young widow in a pale green dress aproaches, she moves carefully, her lantern flickering as if afraid to burn too bright. The earth shudders with her every step, damp soil sinking beneath her feet as though something below stirs in answer. The shadows shift with intelligence, forming faces, reaching hands, and somewhere in the darkness, her name is spoken softly by a voice she hasn’t heard since childhood.

She walks among the gravestones, her pale dress brushing against thorns that snag and hold as though unwilling to let her go.

The gnarled branches of a long dead tree transform into a specter of skeletal death reaching out for its next prey, fingers stretching impossibly long as they grasp for her trembling form. The air curdles around her as its touch nears, dragging her not into the earth, but into the cold abyss of her own remembered terrors.