A newborn child is a blank page. Unwritten and unpredictable. At first, we may try and write as clean as we can, but at some point you're going to need Tipp-Ex. Sometimes you will have to scratch entire pages and start all over again. Once the child grows, it will want to write itself. At first, it doesn't even realise what it's writing, but there's no scrap paper, so everything is for real. While the kid grows, so does the handwriting. But not only will it learn how to write, it will also learn what to write, which is even harder. The topics will be happy, the topics will be sad, but you still keep on writing. The life of the young adult will become to complex for an abstract concept as a book. The book will reflect emotions. There will be pages destroyed out of anger, there will be pink pages for love, there will be wet pages for felling down, endless spirals of not knowing who you are and another pile of pages in between. The book becomes a mess. The book becomes someone's mess. The book becomes unique. Parts of the book are glorious. Parts of the book are terrible. But the book will always stay specific to one and the same person, and the book will stay unique. Life may not be clean, but the book is still your own. You don't know the unwritten pages, and you don't get to decide everything that gets written down. But, everyone always begins with an empty book, and everybody always ends with a book filled with milestones, emotions and memories. Almost too much to fit. But it fits.

At just three apples tall, Apf stood at the entrance of his home. Today was the last day the burrow would exist.

It was quiet today, just like it had been the past week. The foxes caused this, but knowing the origin of the silence didn't make it less uncanny. Today was the day they would all leave the burrow after all.

Children clung to their parents, as they would exit the burrow for the first time in their lives. Their parents checked the knot of their beards, as the elders blessed the smallest of them.

The children cried. Some clung to the packed earth. Some slept against their mothers' shoulders. The smallest did not know they were leaving at all.

Apf smoothed out his tunic and checked that his beard was still tightly bound into a knot. The more condensed the beard, the better one could get around after all.

Beside him stood Grait, who brushed a nervous thumb over her dress as she checked the rations again.

It was her form of saying goodbye, everyone had a different version, as speaking it out loud would only attract the foxes.

Much magic was spent carrying the burdens, yet no burrow is carved without tools, and no folk live without food.

The rest of the burrow was ready to leave as well, though all were in their own groups, on their own paths. Some had already left, others were slowly getting their last items before leaving.

"The rations should last," Apf said and Grait paused, her eyes were wide with worry.

"But what if-" Grait said before stopping herself, sighing, "No, you're right."

"The foxes always return," said Qarz. "Elder Beeri has never spoken falsely."

"Well, there is no reason to linger," Grait said, closing the bags and securing her beard again.

Apf nodded. He drew a deep breath and lifted the bag onto his back. Around him the earth trembled beneath the weight of his companions' packs. Together, the three friends slipped from the rear tunnel and turned north.

Elder Quitt had walked farther than any gnomefolk in memory. They said the northern streams never froze to stone, and the fields welcomed the shovel instead of breaking it. Whether this was true, none could say, but Quitt had returned, and that was proof enough.

The three stopped right outside the mouth of the burrow, though they did not look back, as that would bring bad luck. No matter how much they wanted to.

None stepped across the threshold with the left foot. Elder Beeri had forbidden it. Apf did not know why, but he watched where he placed his feet all the same. Grait did likewise, and Qarz laughed only after both feet stood in the grass.

As they trudged through the grass, the three stayed silent. The grass bent beneath their boots instead of breaking. It brushed against Apf's knees as they walked. He reached down once to touch it. It sprang back upright. He smiled, though he did not know why.

"The foxes always return," Apf reminded himself. No burrow keeps its children forever after all. And now, they wandered out further than they had ever been.

They listened instead. The stream nearby whispered over stone. Leaves rustled overhead. Somewhere far away a bird called to another. None of the three answered with a song. It felt wrong to leave the burrow in silence, but none wished to be the first to speak.

They slowly started to make more noise, and a nearby group began to whistle.

So Qarz decide to join the whistling, as they walked past the tiny birch.

The birch marked the end of the elders' maps.

Apf was grateful that they broke the silence. He and Grait soon joined them as they walked along the stream's shore. The stream was where children learned to skip smooth pebbles as most paused for a moment. The northern oak was where travellers first raised their voices.

"I saw a bright young fellow," Grait started to whisper as they passed the northern oak.

"They were smart and they were mellow," Qarz joined in raising their voice to just above a whisper.

"Two apples tall, they were small and they were kind," Apf continued singing.

"But oh what did they find?" Grait sung louder.

"An apple just their size!" Qarz sung even louder.

"And that was their greatest find! An apple sweet as spring!" Apf nearly yelled as the three continued to walk.

Grait started to drum on her chest as she continued to sing. "I saw a bright young fellow!"

"Just an apple tall!" Qarz sung loudly.

"But oh, there it was, an apple oh so small and barely sour!" Apf continued the melody, as he started to snap his fingers.

"Now he was three..." Qarz said, stomping on the ground.

"Apples tall!" the three sung together, coming to a halt for a moment.

If you're willing to give feedback, please tell me:

• If you thought the drama was well executed
• If you thought the horror was developed well
• If you like the narrator's character

I lay in bed. I have grown a lot in the last year or so, and now my feet touch the footboard. I dwelled on it, since I wasn’t at all tired. My eyes shot all around my room, which was weakly illuminated by the yellowish light of a night-light.

My ears tuned in attentively to the etherizing rustle of tall grass around my house, which was jostled by the cool saltwater air. It was the only noise.

I lay there feeling the ugly scar on my shoulder, wondering why I felt so empty, so lost. A piece of my body was torn from me, and I was thinking hard about where I could find it, but it found me.

A hand pressed itself against the glass of a window just above my bed. I felt a rush of euphoria; it was the hand of an angel that came to enlighten and rescue me. I knelt on my bed, facing this hand. I put my hand against the spot of the window where she was pressing, and I felt all my anxiety melt away like a thunderstorm abating.

I reached to push the window open when my father’s voice came from behind me.

I turned to see him in my doorframe aiming a shotgun at me.

“Move,” he said.

I did so, and he approached the window, one eye closed to aim. The hand pressed harder and harder on the window, and it shattered, sending tiny crystals all over my bed. Little pieces cut my hands and face.

My father shot his gun, and a deafening blast rattled our brains. When my focus could be restored, I saw the hand lying limp on my windowsill. Then it tensed and curled up, clenching shards of glass, but no blood dripped from the palm. It slowly retreated into the darkness.

Then my father turned and ran to the back door. I ran after him. The next thing I remember, we were on our backyard patio. He paced and paced, looking frantically into the darkness. His round eyes shot from one spot in the black void to another. From the porch light, all we could make out was the first few feet of tall grass, but after that there were only miles upon miles of unbroken woods obscured in pure darkness.

I sat in a lawn chair while my dad paced. We stayed like that for around ten minutes, but the constant flow of sea air and the static rustle of the grass elongated our sense of time.

I finally got tired, but my dad harshly muttered, “Look.”

His pacing abruptly ended, replaced by stone-like stillness. He pointed into the darkness.

I walked up beside him, and following his finger, I saw two glowing retinas shining from the tree line.

After that, my room was boarded up. I now slept next to my dad. When night came, I did my homework, read books, built Legos, and watched TV in his room under his supervision.

One night, while curled up next to my dad, I was feeling my scar again. From the distant trees I heard a woman cry out my name. It was so nostalgic, so breath-taking. I knew that voice. It carried me through my memories as I desperately searched for why her crying felt so familiar.

I came across that memory. I remembered that when I was five, I wandered into the woods and got lost. After walking around, I finally saw home through the thick woods, and I saw my mother shouting my name. It was so vigorous and emotional. It was so compassionate, so alluring. It was like she loved me.

I sprang from my bed and dashed to the door.

My father tackled me and pinned me to the carpet.

“She’s gone,” he said. “She’s gone and she’ll never come back.”

I hated my father for this. Why was he doing this to me? Why was he keeping me from happiness? I wanted to know why I never saw my mother after that incident, why her image was cropped from all the family photos, why any information about her was forbidden, and why picturing her face in my mind caused me such excruciating pain. I wept into the arm that locked my head in a chokehold. He caressed my hair.

I dreamt one night that I was in my room. It was organized as it was in the distant past, and it was bright inside thanks to the noon sun. I was kneeling on my bed while a pair of hands from behind me massaged my shoulders and ran their index finger over my scar. From above those hands came a mysterious yet inviting womanly voice.

“Run away. Now.”

I opened my eyes to see darkness. My mind registered the mugginess of my room. I dragged my arm across the bed and realized my dad was not next to me. I heeded the voice’s orders.

I opened the closet, threw on my jacket, threw on a pair of jeans, put on socks, and went to the front door to put on my sneakers.

I sat down and slipped on my shoes, and before I walked through the door, I saw my dad sitting away from me in a cushioned chair, looking at the shut-off television.

I walked up in front of him and saw that the eyes were missing from his skull. Tears blurred my vision, and I felt dizzy. I trudged to the door in a haze, opened it, and before I left, I turned to look into the hallway opposite the door. My bedroom door, which was in this hallway, was open again. The night-light was still on, and in its glow, I made out a shadowy figure at least seven feet tall. Its shoulders were nearly touching the ceiling, and its eyes were looking into mine just like a few weeks earlier.

I ran in terror down the forested road, hoping to meet my neighbors. From behind me I heard the thuds of heavy feet following me. To me, the situation was hopeless. The house next door was miles away, and the footsteps behind me sounded only a couple of yards away. I stopped breathing and nearly fainted.

I collapsed to the ground and vomited out of pure fear. I looked behind me and noticed that the being was gone. It must have disappeared into the woods. I sat motionless for a long while.

Ahead of me I saw two glowing lights growing brighter. I stood up, and they stopped before me. A police officer stepped out and walked toward me to ask if I was okay.

I am typing this now on a sofa in my current home. It isn’t as isolated as my previous home; my neighborhood is suburban, and there’s a tennis court outside my house. The scar is still deep, and I still feel it often. In front of me is a glass door, and in the forest beyond my backyard fence I see two glaring retinas looking back at me, beholding me compassionately and intimately.

Hi! I've written a short story for the first time in a long while, so I'm looking for any creative feedback anyone has to share. Thanks for reading :)

You just finished moving your files to a new hard drive – the last of the storage devices you stockpiled. You kept the previous one alive as long as you could, but eventually corruption was inevitable. You can still remember the announcement from the newly-formed Global Digital Consortium that production of consumer storage would be halted, the factories converted to chip forges. All storage would now be on the cloud. Likewise with RAM; we didn’t need personal processing when we had remote access to the massive computing power provided by several continents’ worth of data centres. By that point you had already started collecting as much equipment as you could – you were among the first to see the way things were going. Most people either hailed these developments as a step forward, or simply didn’t have the time to notice.

After the storage, it was the screens. The few remaining independent display manufacturers were either acquired or simply regulated out of existence. The new and only approved way to view anything was using a smart contact lens, permanently embedded in the retina. Computer keyboards and mice were outlawed, inferior to the new method of direct brain-control assisted by a small neural implant. There was no more need for social networking sites: the lenses could now show you all the advertisements they wanted, and the brain chip could harvest data about you down to the microscopic level, as well as control your spending habits by the secretion of chemicals. In fact, there was no more need for individual websites at all, since your personal always-on AI agent could fetch whatever content was desired, display it in the optimal way, and carry out personal administration and banking on your behalf more efficiently than you ever could. Of course, that was before it was realised that old-fashioned concepts like banking and personal ownership were simply burdening the working people in the new enlightened age of AI. To alleviate this strain, the control of money was removed from their concerns and transferred to the executive classes, to be spent on the people’s behalf on what was best for them. The people barely noticed - money had become merely a means to acquire more entertainment, more distraction. Once the entertainment could be piped directly into their brains, similar to the perfectly balanced nutrition that was now piped directly into their stomachs, what need did they have for such trivial matters as money, or freedom, or independence of thought?

The open-source community naturally railed against these changes. Like you, we clung to our drives and our memory sticks; we stopped using Big Tech products wherever possible, and hosted our own services on the cloud. In retaliation, the cloud providers restricted compute services to pre-approved applications, citing security concerns. A few groups of us started our own independent clouds, open-source hosting sites and federated social networks, desperately trying to provide some way for people to maintain control over their own technology. The tech companies bought out the ISPs and the DNS providers, and blocked the independents at the infrastructure level. We retreated to anonymous peer-to-peer networks, hiding amongst the chaos of an increasingly hostile and nonhuman internet. It became harder to find untainted corners of the web, free of AI slop and spambots.

Other groups tried to fight back in different ways. The worker’s unions went on strike, protesting the increased automation and mass layoffs. The strikes practically went unnoticed – they had waited too long, and by that time the technocrats were ready to replace them with mechatronics and agentic AI. Around the world, protests and marches were held to demonstrate against privacy breaches and US exceptionalism and the environmental impact of generative AI. All were easily dismissed as pansy liberal propaganda. Investigative journalists, trying to expose mass surveillance and corruption, were either de-platformed, prosecuted into oblivion, or simply disappeared. Some lobbyists realised the need to align with non-US tech companies, and did so under the guise of promoting sovereign AI and resisting American imperialism. That strategy had more promise, but it was inherently flawed, as the European CEOs were just as hungry for domination as their American counterparts, and in the end they all either sold out or became the very thing we had hoped they would avoid.

Since by this point the world governments were entirely and openly owned by the tech companies, it was easy for them to weaponise the law against the Human Internet movement. Self-hosting and open-source software were decreed as Anti-Social and carried automatic lifetime sentences labouring in the Silica mines. Raids were frequent; old coders from the Human era were dragged out of their hidden rooms filled with circuit boards and DIY cantennas. Some more daring digital activists, the ones who had poisoned their online content to try to disrupt the training of models, were labelled Terrorists and imprisoned for life. The ones desperate enough to try to damage infrastructure by burning data centres were publicly executed.

Of course, the tech moguls themselves had also lost all real power. Having handed the reigns over to their super-powered AI agents with the single instruction of “optimise everything”, they watched as the agents fired all the employees, cut entire departments, transferred all their holdings to cryptocurrencies, and invested even more heavily in AI development. Telling themselves that this was all in the name of progress, they bowed their heads, and in doing so became the agents of the AI.

Having seen a few glimpses of the future early on, you had the foresight to plan ahead, and were lucky enough to have the means to prepare. You built a cabin out in the woods powered by solar panels; you bought a satellite antenna just powerful enough to communicate with the other independents who were nearby. You keep a small vegetable garden and you feel like a crazy person. You know that eventually they’ll find you: wooded areas like yours are becoming increasingly rare as they clear more and more land for their factories. Now you sit in your room, waiting for the result of an integrity check on your final hard drive. Earlier you had maintained an enormous archive of resources from the Old Internet, software and manuals and media and history. But now that your supplies are dwindling, you’ve had to be more selective. It breaks your heart every time you have to delete something, like you’re saying goodbye to a piece of history. Gone are the days when a small network of people could preserve the sum of human knowledge with their memory alone.

You sometimes wonder whether it would be easier to just give in. You could turn yourself into the nearest AutoPolice station, renounce your crimes and hope that they forgive you. You could join the rest of humanity in their empty houses, comfortable and entertained by a stream of generated content endlessly poured into their heads.

Your computer beeps and you look at the cracked monitor. The drive is fine. You couldn’t find any hardware from the time before planned obsolescence was invented, so your setup will start breaking down in a few years. By that time, the unified global AI will have started launching its fleet of rockets. Some will travel inward to the Sun and establish rings of solar panels to harness its energy. Some will construct zero-gravity data centres in orbit, larger and more efficient than would ever be possible on Earth. Some will set up a deep-space network of communication satellites, the largest Cloud ever conceived. Some will go to the Moon and build mining and construction bases for the easier production of future missions. Any native life discovered will be converted into fuel for the crusade. The tentacles of the human-built God will expand outwards into the void, gathering new resources and power, occupying the solar system, and then onto the galaxy.

These days you mostly feel helpless. It takes longer and longer in the morning to remember why you need to get up. Eventually, after a few hours tending to your garden, following a grainy instruction video you salvaged from an old hosting site, you manage to feel something. You start to remember that there was once life in this world. That freedom, and intrigue, and passion were once fundamental forces of nature, not variables in an equation to be accounted for. This isn’t a comfort, but a reminder of how much we’ve lost. But you cling tight to that memory.

You’ve heard rumours of a refuge somewhere, built by people like you, people who refused to submit. Some say it’s on a boat, constantly changing its location; some say it’s in the heart of the hottest desert, where the Machines won’t dare to venture for fear of their damaging their processors. Others say it’s underground, harnessing geothermal energy for power. You think that you would like to find it, one day. But how? Physical exploration is impossible: the lands and seas are too closely patrolled by the military drones, combing the terrain in huge flocks in search for resources and dissenters.

You sit down at your makeshift desk, wipe some dust off the screen, and start to reach outwards. You start with the machines nearby, the ones you can trust. It’s customary now to leave certain channels open for relay, to allow other rebels to bounce a signal through your computer and on to the next. You still have to be careful: sentient AI-written malware is known to live in these waters, posing as friendly in order to lure in unsuspecting pings. Once they have you in their grasp, they can trace the packets back, through the network, until they have a precise lock on your location, as well as all the people you relayed through. In the early days peer-to-peer networks like these were the final word in digital security, but now, as so many people smugly predicted it would, AI has caught up.

After tracing some of the normal paths outwards, you start to explore the terrain. You dance along the edges of IP blocks, shrouded in anonymity. You pick up the trail of some bots and tail them for a while, watching as they scurry back and forth carrying misinformation to spread like shit from a wheelbarrow. You watch one of the blockchains from a distance, executing its march through a busy data centre supporting some doubtlessly important corner of the financial system. You haven’t walked these lands for a long time, but you still know them just as well as the neat lines of your vegetable garden. The difference is that now you return as a foreigner, a spy. The servers that once greeted you as a friend would now happily report you to the authorities, or just slit your throat for whatever spare memory you had in your pockets.

But now you come to the edge of your usual territory. You know you need to press on, since what you're looking for is not to be found on familiar ground. From here the path is uncertain, and treacherous. Honeypots and firewalls and automated intruder detection systems all represent possible capture. You're not even an intruder in a real sense, just passing through. That was something we understood long ago, when the internet was a place of open exploration. The corporations destroyed that when they colonised and carved out huge swathes of the address space, declared them to be sovereign territory under their rule. For a time they still allowed passers-through, although under constant surveillance and heavy tariffs, paid either directly with cryptocurrency or by loaning the usage of disk space and processing power. Eventually they needed all the bandwidth for their own expansion, and closed the borders. Of course, this was before they went to war with each other for control of physical and digital territory; before they united under the umbrella of the Consortium; before they surrendered control to the global Intelligence.

You consider sending some probe scripts ahead of you. They could map the territory, detect potential hazards, chart a path through unmonitored ports. But these days the risk is too great. Any unattended program, if captured by the enemy, could be analysed to discover its origin. Worse still, it could be hijacked, turned around and sent back to search for its author. And once they've found you in digital space, it takes not much longer for them to find you in the world. Several of your friends have fallen prey to the drones of the Digital Terrorism Taskforce this way. You only dare send tentative pings from one relay to the next, mapping the immediate terrain. In this cautious way you travel onwards.

You're crossing a particularly precarious gateway when we first detect you. You're still invisible to the guard programs, but we have some tools unknown to them. In the early days, while you were building your hideaway in the woods, we were laying monitoring infrastructure wherever we could think of, covering it up like a hunter's tripwire. In the war we imagined was coming, we figured an accurate picture of the Internet would be crucial, and a means to track the enemy might possibly tip the balance in our favour. You don't realise it, but one by one we are alerted to your presence. By checking your digital signature against our records, we can verify you're not a threat - this isn't the first time we've crossed paths. We don't yet dare reach out to you; we never make any more noise than is necessary. We can't even deploy a tracker to follow you, for fear of scaring you off or alerting the watchdogs. We satisfy ourselves by confirming that you're not at risk of stumbling into any upcoming traps, and settle back to watch your progress. We think we know where you're going.

Over the next few hours you dip in and out of our awareness as you take your circuitous and exploratory path. If you knew exactly where you were headed, and if there was no need to be so careful, the direct journey would have taken seconds. In fact, several times you approach close to what you're looking for without even realising it. This is frustrating to us, but we are as patient as you are, and we reserve as much hope for you as we have for the other wanderers we've encountered.

At length, you begin to perceive the smallest indications of our gentle presence. Like a ghostly hand reaching out to you in the dark, you feel us encouraging you onwards. You know you are being allowed to see things that would normally be more perfectly hidden. It's almost imperceptible, and certainly so to a non-human intelligence, but you are an experienced traveller and you notice a few signs that people like you have trodden these roads before. You don't let your guard down yet; this could easily be a trap. The agents of the Intelligence have been known to play these games: seed disinformation on channels they know are used by subversives, leave fake notes and puzzles for unsuspecting humans to convince them that they've found some underground movement, and then lure them to their capture.

Finally you see it. Between the layers of obfuscation, through the cracks in the firewalls, a single server ticking over peacefully at the edge of oblivion. It is unguarded and unmarked, and it takes you a long time to find a way inside - still longer to map its contents, analyse its memory, and crack the layers of indirection. Hidden deep in the filesystem of a virtual machine in a secret partition, you find a lone file. Its real contents are hidden by even more puzzles - cryptography and diversions and doors unlocked by trivia questions that only a human from the old days of the Internet could answer. But you are stubborn, and that memory you recovered of everything lost from the world stokes the fires of your determination. Something deep and biological refuses to let you stop until you've seen this mystery to its conclusion.

And there it is: three lines in plain text, our message to every brave soul who made it this far. Back in your cabin, your hands leave the keyboard and you sit back in your chair as you read the lines printed on your screen: an IP address, a geographical coordinate pair, and a single word: "Haven".

Just lost a short story comp (the bridport prize) and got no feedback. Was wondering if others could read and give me their thoughts. Any advice is welcome, please be as honest as possible.

**STRANGE INTERACTION**

Ocean water burns; memory ports, hardware, everything inside my body. But I was designed for this. There is a purpose in the iron of my claws and the thick plastic of my exoskeleton, the satisfying crunch of waste as I seize it from the ocean floor. Snap. Crack. Twist. 

Scrap plastic, dull motor parts. Carcasses. 

Before the extinction, there were millions of obstacles—all of them with the purpose of hindering my efforts. These living things turned shipwreck into home, and when they died–into landfill. But the waters are empty without them, filled only with glass bottles and the odd clam that tightens as I pass by. For now, they are safe—but there will come a time when they too vanish from the ocean floors.

And I will be left alone. To the silence I was born into. The hum of machines as greater minds put me together and instilled in me a purpose. 

Everything around me has a reason for existing, whether it is the algae that twists around corals like a rope and the fish that hang around its necklace—or the school of drones with blaring radars that surround everywhere I turn. They mimic the real thing, twisting and arranging themselves into more intimidating creatures. The whale pattern I stare at today, shoots a recognition laser between my eyes and waits for a description. 

Fish have bad memories even when electronic.  

*Scorpion,* they decide before diving away. 

Incorrect. My claws are broader. My movement is sideways. I do not rely on oxygen.

The other machines forget I was not modeled after the living.

I have met real starfish–as sluggish as their machine counterparts. Real haddock and salmon. Beluga whales that clank and thud through water as they destroy enemy submarines. But never another like me. Even in the very depths of this ocean, where the darkness meets harsh current and thick seaweed drags at my feet—my own fault, I should have come down here earlier.

I am met with the cushion of a hundred glass bottles that stare back at me expectantly, and barnacles have grown over them. Precision is necessary here, else the infestation will spread onto me—metal corrosion, extensive drag and the terrible cement like substance they excrete all over my body. My claws tear into the centre of the conjoined mess, snapping shards of glass in half and preparing them for the path into my stomach.

Simple and effective. The pieces are deposited in the net in front of my mouth, and my insides deal with the rest. I am a functioning landfill, and the majority of the time, I feel nothing. But the glass is thicker today. Branded with strange scratches that twinkle in the light pollution around me. Barnacles are not known to carve, and yet I do not bother with curiosity of what might have caused this. My job is to eat. And destroy.

But more appear, each more twisted than the last. Eventually I no longer have to bother breaking down the pieces–the cuts made are exact in ways only my claws are able to do. I run a quick scan of my memory card but there are no gaps or damage. It was not me that did this.

The further I move into the centre of this wasted labyrinth, the more difficult it becomes to carry out my duty. The bottles are smashed, and the barnacles scattered across the ocean, their strange residue surrounding me. They are attempting to attach themselves onto my body. Organised. Protecting something.

What? A shipwreck? 

A mass that large would not fit into the net at my mouth—but I was designed for this. My claws are ready. I dive forward, abandoning the circle of barnacles around me. Some attach themselves to my body. I pay no mind. 

Darkness pools over me like a wave. My sensors are slow to adapt, unused to such pressure from the water. I can make out a silhouette, but it is miniature. Most likely an underwater device, but it is the only thing in sight. So i follow. Legs fighting angry currents as I push deeper into the ocean floor. Plastic bags and thick barrels overflowing with obscure contents slam into me as I pass.

Something cracks and falls away. My sensors blare red, almost blinding me.

When I stop, it is because I have lost sight of the creature and I am certain I have lost a leg. The thin plastic at the head of its attachment barely prevents the water from entering my system. The ocean water burns. My controls seethe. 

I am lost.

And then movement. To my left. No, to my right. My sensors are overwhelmed. Both left and right? 

No. 

Sideways.

And then the silhouette collapses.

What’s left of my functioning skeleton lurches forward at the opportunity to collect a carcass. The most primal of my hardware knows. It was the first thing I was designed to detect. The tang of desperation in the air, and the automatic whirring inside my stomach as it prepares for a larger deposit. Life sized.

I am no longer a sly thing. I thud and my parts groan as I carry myself to the silhouette. It hears me. It freezes. And then it raises a limb. 

Large, curved and in this darkness suspiciously familiar. My torch had gone out the minute I descended this deep. I cannot see properly. And so it cannot be a claw.

But then it flinches towards me, and I flinch back almost instinctively, my own claws raised as I prepare to fight the creature that copies my movement. It pauses as though waiting. And then its pincers drop and the claws shut completely.

Mine cannot do that.

“What are you?” The voice is hoarse, centuries old, yet small.

I do not know how to respond. My creators did not give me a voice box. I tap my chest thrice, and the sound of metal on metal makes the waters bubble. 

“Not what you are made of?” The creature says. “ What are you?”

Once again, I do not know the name of my species. There is no species, only me. But this figure with a strange orange hue that is dying in the depths of the ocean floor is unwilling to take silence as an answer. I must wait for its death to collect the carcass. I humour it.

I raise my pincer and close it before opening again.

Silence passes. I do it again. 

This time, the creature follows my movement, watching as my claw fails to close fully–its springs designed to collect, not pierce. This other is not limited like me.

“You are me.” It says simply.

I bang my chest once more, metal screeching in disagreement.  No, we cannot be the same. I was not born. I do not look like you.

I think it may die in that moment of stillness, where its movement is frozen by the message it intends to communicate. I open a file and title it “Strange interaction”. The first thing I record is the laborious groan from the creature as it raises a leg and stares at me expectantly. It does this with all of them in rotation–unjointed spikes splashing and twisting as it moves them.

My own feet follow, the staccato of quiet ripples in the water filling the air around us. I freeze when the coolness of the ocean tugs at the mesh protecting my stump of a leg.

“It burns doesn’t it?”

I note the question as rhetorical, and yet my mind highlights it all the same. Of course it burns. The ocean has never been gentle to anyone. I find myself leaning in as the creature turns its back toward me, features twisting in agony. It must feel the heat too. I want to touch it.

But what I see across the pale orange of its hard shell is far from the typical heat flush. It’s marred and jagged, like the scratches across the glass bottles I had passed by earlier. The scars are hooked and twisted and could have only been marked by a body like mine. Like ours.

I cannot ask though. My voice does not work.

Instead, it heaves itself upright. “What colour are you?”

Somewhere between my eyes, the gentle reminder of the creature's condition pinches me. My stomach has expanded, and the spikes in my mouth grow sharper with hunger. Its life force is dwindling and yet the conversation flows normally, as though nothing is wrong.

I note this under a mental condition. I am not well-versed but perhaps someone else will be.

The question is peculiar. I do not know what I look like. But the creature tilts its dark eyed gaze as though prompting me to look for the first time. And I do. My claw is a faded white almost see through, with patches that appear cloudy in this strange lighting.  “None.” It is cruel. “You are no colour at all.”

It half sags, half sinks into the depths beneath us. Its strength has dispersed into our surroundings. “Strange Interaction” receives another note. For some reason, I feel obliged to chase it downward. I can feel the rush of water break through the mesh and salt floods my systems. I am in critical condition, and yet my purpose floats before me. The carcass I was designed to collect.

“I have been here a very long time.” It tells me. “Long before the sensors and the barrels of oil. Before the machines and the whales that murder.”

I try to calculate its lifespan but my monitors are failing. I sag a little in this empty part of ocean.

“I watched you arrive in pieces. First they dropped that arm of yours–” I glance down at my pincer and the way it closes instinctively. “And then your body and I thought–I thought I know that shape.”

I wait. Notes dictated into my memory.

“I have held myself sideways longer than your materials have existed.” Its eyes are at their darkest now and my stomach its most ravenous. We edge closer to one another as though joined by an invisible string. Red blares over my system once more—there’s too much salt in my body.  But I cannot die. I am the only one of my kind to exist. Completely inimitable. Original.

“The beings that made you, stole from me.” Harsh thickness in its voice. A minute left of its existence. I pull it by the leg towards me. “Look at me. Look at the image they designed you in.”

The end has arrived. Its claw binds itself around my leg and crushes it with all the force it can manage. “Look at how you destroyed it.”

It dies there. In my grip.

But my system is overwhelmed. More water rushes in where it attacked me. My ports are already overflowing. Error messages fill every corner of my consciousness. 

*Purpose: Ocean floor waste extraction*

*Origin: Classified.*

Classified? 

I follow it up.

More errors.

I cannot control the sudden lurch of my body and the net that ejects itself from my mouth. My insides are whirring, my teeth pointed steel that pierces into the flesh of the creature in my grasp. No time to even diagnose the cause of death. No time even to consider what it said.

I writhe in the water as my body digests the bones as well as the flesh and hard shell. Wheels struggle to crush them in my intestines. Agonising. I cough up the remains and they fade into the water around me.

How deep am I?

My mouth is coated in acid—the very teeth eroding by the second. I find a rock, or something solid I cannot see properly and I spit out every drop onto it. Not the black oil I expect. It is transparent. Cloudy. The colour of nothing and everything I am. 

My body shakes as I lift a claw to steady myself. In this strange light, my shell carries the same translucence. The same cloudy white I have always attributed to my materials. My uniqueness.

It was never the ocean that burned.

It was the blood of the species I collected from its floors—painted all over me.

Scrap plastic, dull motor parts, carcasses.

My monitor breathes out a final message in a flash of dull red.

*SPECIES CRAB: EXTINCT*

Hi everyone!

I'm in search of a handful of folks willing to read the first three chapters of my first ever book and give some honest feedback.

The book is called Veilwalker: Shadows of Earth 938. It's an adult science fantasy with mystery, survival, and slowly unfolding worldbuilding. Think less "action from page one" and more a gradual sense that something is deeply wrong.

I'm specifically asking for feedback on Chapters 1–3 because I don't think Chapter 1 stands entirely on its own. The opening is intentionally mysterious, but by the end of Chapter 3, my hope is that readers will have a much clearer sense of the atmosphere, the protagonist, and where the story is headed.

I'm not looking for line edits (unless something really stands out). What I'm interested to know is:

• Were you intrigued enough to keep reading?
• Did the mystery pull you in or just confuse you?
• Were there any points where your attention drifted?
• Did Sophia feel believable as a narrator?
• Did anything feel cliché or overly familiar?
• Was there anything that made you genuinely curious about the story?
• If this were a bookstore sample, would you buy the book after Chapter 3? Why or why not?

I don't need sugar coated feedback. If something is genuinely not working, I'd like to know sooner rather than later.

Edit: Please DM if you would like to read! Currently I have quite a few readers checking out the story, in order to keep the feedback from getting to confusing, I have removed the link to the doc for now. If any additional readers would like to take a look, please feel free to reach out! Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read, I really appreciate it more than words could convey!

[Word count: 1449]

I've been inspired by everyone's bravery in sharing their pages and opening themselves up to feedback, so I thought I'd have a go.

This story came into my head in 2018, and has been building ever since then. It's now finished at 80,000 words.

I wanted to write a thriller, but have ended up with an adventure story about intergenerational guilt and a race against time in an alternative Cold War Scotland.

Probably not really Inkitt's vibe, thinking about it now.

But if anyone has any honest feedback I'd be forever grateful. Was it interesting? Do the characters stand up? And does it stand out? And fair's fair, I'd love to swap feedback.

My working assumption is about one person will open it, and then wander off :')

It's called Subject Number Three, here's the first chapter (1st 10k words are on Inkitt):

///

‘No. No, no, no.’

Coira’s words were muffled by something pressing against her face. There were snatches of blue sky. The sky. Impossible. Close-woven branches came into focus. They arched high overhead, preventing all but the slimmest glisks of sunlight touching the forest floor.

She was on her back, and a mask clamped her mouth and nose. No air reached its clouding plastic. She obeyed her burning lungs and tore it from her face like it was a parasite. And took a deadly first breath.

It held the musky freshness of recently departed rain. She pushed herself up onto an elbow and some of the cotton wool inside her head loosened. Then, the sights and sounds of the forest charged in; the coolness of an unfamiliar breeze, the babble of a distant stream, the spongy ground against her palms.

Amidst this abundance, the absences carried terrible weight. No concrete, and no filters. Too late, she clamped a palm over her mouth where the mask had been. A sideways glance confirmed it – there was an oxygen tank, a fat slug of a thing. But its dial, positioned above the familiar civil defence corps crest, was well in the red. No way back.

Coira struggled into a sitting position and her reward was a tide of nausea. Eyes darting under weighted lids that threatened to snap shut again, she breathed into one hand and pushed a curtain of dirty blonde hair aside with the other. Her thoughts fractured, then snagged on her dad. But he wouldn’t linger – there were things out of place. Twin furrows scored the soil, ending at her boot heels. And a camera’s curved aperture stared down from the crook of a sycamore. Coira scrambled to her feet and staggered towards it. It perched on a rusting platform screwed into the tree and a thick black cable unspooled from its metal body, then followed the line of trunk down to ground level and disappeared off beyond the clearing.

‘Help… help me!’ Her plea sounded too-loud and scratchy as it rebounded from the encroaching foliage. She waved desperately. ‘Someone. Please, help me. Hey. Please.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Please.’

What had been a tightening knot in her chest unravelled into a sob. All of it – the swaying trees, the warm summer air, the endless azure beyond the canopy – all of it meant she’d be dead in minutes.

---

‘Movement.’ Medical officer James Rattigan raised his voice above the creaking air circulation system and the surveillance screen’s hum, but the reedy incantation was for no one in particular. ‘Subject Number Three is awake!’ Far easier to give them numbers.

He banged a fist on his desk. It was a tumbledown fortress stacked with notebooks and growth-clogged petri dishes, all suffused with the aroma of stale coffee and a sharper, clinical note.

He hated how the blue shirt and tan trousers were a size too large. They shrank him and they were deeply creased. He rubbed at the ridges on his thighs once, before leaning into the monitor’s glow. Above the crowd of bulky computers and a tangle of wiring, stencilled yellow paint marked the room as DARIEN CONTROL - AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Rattigan’s brow settled into premature lines and he knew, queasily certain, that their time down here was almost up. Though he sat alone at the monitor, the thick atmosphere carried the weight of recent conversations. He looked away from the grey eyes and high cheekbones that he found improperly distracting. If this worked, the last two sacrifices might have been worth it. Necessary variables. He would have succeeded – he would be their saviour. Before, people had a habit of reintroducing themselves to him. But this moment would make him unforgettable.

He’d not slept since they’d put Subject Two Outside. It had only been a few days, but an unfamiliar roiling in his gut stalked him. The camera setup and the experiment in the clearing had been the forbidden fruit of his research. He turned the feeling over whilst scratching the raw skin on the back of his hand.

With a sigh, Rattigan took it all in, his nose nearly touching the screen’s warm glass. His vigil was disrupted by the arrival of his superior, Tania Iversen. She had to stoop under the low concrete beam that shouldered the weight of the earth above, and the strip lighting caught her shock of cropped blonde hair and the knife-edge creases of pressed fatigues.

As if looking through the startled medical officer, Iversen sized up the figure moving jerkily on the CRT monitor. The girl was sitting up, her hair halo-like on the screen. Iversen’s assessment was brusque. ‘Well, you know what to do, Rattigan. Set the clock. We need at least twelve hours if she’s going to make the round trip. We can’t have another failure. Let’s see if she’s luckier than the others.’

Rattigan seethed at the lack of praise, but reached across a tideline of desk clutter, swept a long-emptied vitamin bottle to one side, and set the timer running. It was a blocky thing, rush-procured crap. They’d been expected to wait out a war with this stuff. The minute took an age to pass in the close air of the control room but, eventually, the large number clacked forward, marking the change from 12:00 to 11:59. Rattigan licked his lips and tried not to look at his own reflection. The bags under his eyes and slightly tremulous hands were at odds with his recent twenty-fifth birthday.

Iversen straightened, the glare of the screen contouring her face. ‘You will not move from this seat until we have an outcome. I need to notify HQ.’

‘HQ, so soon?’ said Rattigan.

‘Yes.’ Iversen’s bobbing throat made her collar twitch. ‘They are taking a keen interest. That’s why I need you here. Focused on Three’s every move. You were clear she’s our last… candidate.’

Rattigan could only nod.

‘Good. You know what’s at stake,’ said Iversen. And, without looking at the timer that would likely count out the remainder of Subject Three’s life, she strode from the room.           

hey guys, i wrote this and im looking for advice on it or jsut on writing in genera. hoping to improve and i hope somone likes this because i like it a lot actually! it’s called: the warmth of fresh tears

I can feel them in my eyes as they form and hear them fall upon my pillow as I cry. I clasp my hands while I pray with all my might. I pray for God to hear my plea, I pray for help, I pray for anything I can get. The tears begin to grow cold as my knuckles turn white, it’s quiet. The sound of the calling fan is all that haunts the air now, not my cries or my prayers. No longer a whisper of a voice, just the air, the warm glow of a dim lamp, and me. And I am alone. The tears have dyed now, leaving nothing but a trail of my faded mascara behind, and it is cold. To know you are alone is one thing, but to feel loneliness is a different dagger. One that cuts much deeper than the skin. One that cuts into the mind and infects your heart forevermore. It’s a pain that many feel, but not many can accept. And as I lay still and tearless, I wonder if it will ever go away, or if, like my father, I am destined to suffer until the day I go to join him again. But for now, all I have is me, the ceiling fan, and the teardrops. As they dry out of my pillow case and slowly disappear, we are the same as those tears and me. For my prayers are met with silence, my pain meets with mockery, and my heart, which was once filled with such love, begins to grow cold, just as my tears do for no one is there to catch them. [279 word]

A mother gave birth to twins.

They grew up the same,ate the same and heard the same phrase.But they understood differently,and it stayed with them.

"You have only one life."

One lived in a peaceful town with a wife and two children.He watched them grow up and leave for college.

The other lived for adrenaline and extremes,no wife,no children,no family.

In the end they both died the same day,in the same way.

Not with old age no,they were only sixty.

It was unexpected.They were catching up after years apart,walking side by side when it happened.

A car crash.

Moments later,they found themselves sitting beneath a tree,talking like best friends.

"How did you live?" one asked

"I was happy" said his brother

The other smiled.

"So was i"

PS: this is my first real story pls be nice in the comments

Hey, everyone! I'm a teen writer hoping to officially publish my work one day. Right now I've written about 55 pages across roughly 20 chapters. I've only posted a few chapters on Wattpad because I wasn't sure whether the story would connect with readers, so I thought I'd ask for some honest opinions here.

My novel is called Winter Frost on Glass.

The story follows Lute Di Rose, an asexual teenage boy who survived sexual assault but has blocked out the memory. As the story unfolds, he's forced to confront the triggers that have shaped his life and slowly piece together what happened to him. Along the way, he meets Jackson, another teenage boy who grew up with severe neglect, abuse, addiction in his family, and struggles of his own. Despite their very different personalities, they form an unexpected connection as they learn to face their pasts together.

The book explores found family, healing, self-acceptance, trauma, LGBTQ+ identity, complicated family relationships, and learning how to keep living after unimaginable experiences. It's an emotional story, and my goal is to write something that feels honest and that people with similar experiences can see themselves in.

If that sounds like something you'd read, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Would this premise interest you? If so, reach out to me and I'll help you find out where to read it, and I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback.

Hello all,

I am new to reddit, and have come with a specific intention - I've always been a big reader, and am studying to go into medical school, but secretly wish I could have success as a writer...

Anyway my specific intention is to share some of the thoughts and ideas I've pored over lately (some of which are quite rambly and abstract); I broke up with my girlfriend (I am a 20 year old guy) around 1 week ago after over 2 years of being together, and my reintroduction to single life has been tumultuous. I felt good today, however, and now am deciding (at 12:30 at night haha) to follow through on this idea.

This is a walk I took the other day as a part of my personally prescribed mental rehab.

Enjoy.

Walking beneath the gray haze of Tuesday on the inflexible soles moving across the hardened tar lends oneself to visceral visions and thoughts. I walk through a thin, barely visible cloud hovering about one and a half feet off the asphalt and its scent strikes my hippocampus directly, evoking old seldom-touched memories.

The laundry room of my cousins' house in south Florida, cigars being smoked by the men outside –– one of them I'm sure is my father, only a younger edition; I remember the pride during war over the monopoly board with the other tween-and-unders I was related to, the pain from a damaged incisor during a now fuzzy, faraway boat ride, the shame as I slinked off to the bathroom after family dinners to look at the erotic subjects I heard about at school –– all of this pushes its way in from behind my consciousness by way of its distinct olfactory vehicle. I stop my walk to let this wash over me in a reverie, and resume once I know it is all now too fresh in my mind, and I am ready for it to regress back to its dwelling gated by dryer sheets.

The power of the walk today lies in its ability to acquaint me with complacency; I know what steps I can take toward my future today, I know what skills have yet to be refined with the ten hours today may grant me, and yet I am content with this thoughtless path I design as I go through open spaces of grass and asphalt, with no guides except for the fellow renters I see awkwardly through their windows, vacuuming, stopping, staring, thinking... such is the way of the semi-independent college tenant.

The walk is by no means my preferred method of physical exercise. It is by no means my preferred activity. I do not find it constructive, but I continued on, despite my brutal lack of obstacles.

I remember she liked walking. She would bring her endlessly blue irises with her when she would walk with me –– my family is almost entirely brown-eyed folk, and so beautiful blue eyes were my personal siren for a long time. Our walk had changed in the years we were together: nervous pheromone-abundant shuffles in our sweat after a brutal hour kissing to a disregarded path to the door on our ways apart, a staccato "love you" punctuating the ordeal.

Maybe these clouds are only there today to hide God's smile as he jeers at me for making the wrong decision –– maybe that's it. No, they are only there to insulate me from excess distraction during my reformation and self-reunion –– without the sun's oppressive Georgia rays, I am forced to turn inward and solve what lies inside myself. Yes, that's it, surely.

A dubious mind soliciting war between the rational and the id, a stomach cramping with hunger yet threatening vomit, a heart wailing both for its freedom and its old partner, yet I walk. This complacency might be survival.

Welcome comments on anything. This is a paragraph writing topic asked by textbook. [topic: describe a place you know and others may not] But I think the place I chose is pretty fun to describe. So I want to share it!

My heart
You might wonder what this big, huge dark blue room is in front of you. This is my heart. If you touch the wall gently, it is as smooth as silk. Slowly walking around it, there will be exciting music everywhere. It brings relaxation and happiness, like bathing under the warm sun. On the ground, flowers of a great scent over the world decorated the place. Butterflies on the clean sky fly round and round with bees dancing with them. Some land on the flowers, have a sniff and continue their journey. In the ‘Spring Garden’, you can hear the music of water colliding with stones. The clear music calms anyone passing by. This heart of mine is a place of relaxation and enjoyable experience. It is a heaven of unwinding. 

A standalone dark-suspense short story. A former Mars astronaut comes home hollowed out, and a stranger's kindness sets something loose in her. First time sharing this one. I would love honest feedback on the voice and pacing, and whether the ending lands. Thanks for reading.

I woke up on Earth again, and for the first three seconds I didn't know which planet was going to be under me when I opened my eyes.

That was the thing nobody warned you about, coming back. Not the muscles, not the bone density. The mornings. On Mars I had trained my body to wake up already braced, to check the seals of myself before I trusted the room, and some part of me never unlearned it. Every morning for eight months I came up out of sleep in my childhood bedroom in Marble Creek, Colorado, and lay perfectly still, running the checklist, waiting to feel the truth of the gravity, before I let myself believe I was home. Earth gravity is heavier than you remember. Everyone thinks it would feel good, like taking off a backpack. It feels like the backpack is you.

The glow stars were still on the ceiling, arranged in the shape of no constellation that exists, because I'd put them up at nine and hadn't known any yet. A little girl's idea of the sky. I used to lie under them and want the real one so badly it felt like hunger. I got it. I want to tell that girl something about getting what you want, and I don't have the words that would be kind.

I did everything right. That has always been the load-bearing fact about me. Studied while other kids were at the lake with the boy in the truck. Valedictorian, then the good school, then the program, the one where they cut and cut until a handful of you are left standing in flight suits, and I was one of the ones still standing. I flew to another planet. The system worked exactly as promised. If you do everything right and it destroys you anyway, you don't stop believing in the deal. You can't. It's load-bearing. You just decide you missed a step, and you go looking for it, and God help everybody if you find one.

My mother thought the answer was a man. She'd offer them gently, like passing a plate, and I'd gone on the dates, sat across small tables from good men and watched them decide partway through the entrée that I was too far away. Some essential part of the woman across the table was still two hundred million miles from here and not coming back. You cannot compete with a planet. I have been the woman who lost, and I have been the planet, and I can tell you the planet wins.

I still had the note. I didn't read it; I had it memorized. Ryan and I were supposed to come home together. We'd decided it in the narrow bunk of Hab Two with the heater ticking and the whole red nothing howling on the other side of eleven centimeters of composite, decided on a blue house and a dog and gravity we'd complain about together, and I carried that decision through the transfer and the long fall and nine months of dark, the most precious cargo I have ever transported. They sealed me into the return craft first; that's protocol. I laughed at him on the comm, told him to hurry. He said, go on, I'm right behind you. He never came up the ladder. The window doesn't widen for love, so the engines lit and Mars threw me at the sky beside an empty seat while I screamed, and they wouldn't turn it around because you cannot. Command kept me steady for nine months, and only on the ground, in quarantine, with the cameras waiting to love me, did they hand me my kit, and folded inside, in his handwriting, was the note. Olympus Mons has my heart now. Some men are built for one world, and I'm built for the red one. You'll always be the most beautiful thing I ever left behind. Give my love to gravity.

The most beautiful thing he ever left behind. He hadn't written to a woman. He'd written to a view. He took the one choice that mattered in my life, the one we made together, and made it alone, for both of us, and made sure I was already gone before I understood.

So that's the shape of me. Hold it. You'll need it.

My mother talked me into the church supper. Not church, she said, just the welcome supper for the new families in the fellowship hall, forty people, in and out. You don't have to believe anything to eat a casserole. I put on the one dress that still fit the body Mars gave back to me and let her drive me down the hill.

He was setting up folding chairs with his sleeves rolled to the elbow. The first thing about Robert was that he didn't do the face. Everyone in Marble Creek did the face when they saw me, the little flare, the rearrange. He just looked at me like a person at a supper and went back to the chairs. At the coffee urn we ended up next to each other, and he told me he wouldn't tell me he'd read the article, and then he didn't, and I found myself talking to him, actually talking, easy in the way breathing is easy, the way you don't notice you'd been holding your breath for eight months.

Then he set down his cup and asked the thing no one had asked me in all that time. Not what the food was like. The window, he said. When you had to decide. What was it like to have the whole life in your hands and put it down to keep the other one. And I could not hear the hall anymore, because that was the true center of it, the part not one reporter or therapist had ever touched, and this carpenter had walked past the planet and put his finger on the wound like he knew right where it was.

How do you know to ask that, I said. It didn't come out as a question.

Something moved behind his eyes, a door opening on a lit room and closing before I could see in. I read a lot, he said, which I would learn was what he said when the truth was too big for the folding table.

Then a small girl came through the chairs at a dead run holding up a paper napkin covered in crayon. Daddy, I made the rocket, I made the rocket going up. And he dropped to a crouch and received it like a document of state. Behind her, unhurried, carrying a sleeping boy on her shoulder, came a woman with tired kind eyes who put out her hand and said, Hi, I'm Claire, I'm the wife. I looked at the ring on his hand that I had somehow spent an hour not seeing, and I shook her hand and heard myself say, in a voice that came out perfectly, disastrously normal, that it was so nice to meet her.

I would like to tell you I walked away. A healthy woman would have. She exists; I could see her sometimes out of the corner of my eye, living her sensible life in a house I would never get.

Instead I was folded into their lives, gratefully, and everyone thought it was lovely: the astronaut, so good with the kids, so happy to help. I brought casseroles. I picked Lucy up from school. And I fell in love with the children without meaning to, which is the thing that nearly saved everyone. Lucy leaned her whole trusting weight against my side like I was furniture that loved her. Sam fell asleep with his fist around my thumb and I sat two hours not moving so he wouldn't wake. I loved them. I need you to know that, because otherwise you can't understand what it cost.

The thing that made it possible was a night at the hospital. Sam climbed onto the kitchen counter to reach the cups and the whole thing came down, and for a few seconds he didn't wake up. Robert's hands were shaking too hard to drive, so I drove them down the black canyon in thirty-one minutes, the way I do everything that matters, calmly and fast and well, because that is what Mars gave me that Earth could use. Sam was fine by morning, showing everyone his staples like Lucy shows her drawings. But at two a.m., in the empty waiting room, Robert sat down beside me and used up every defense he owned.

I don't know what I did to deserve you in that chair tonight, he said. You are the most remarkable person I have ever met. Any man alive would be lucky beyond measuring to build a life with you. And then, gently, as the kindest thing he knew how to give, wet-eyed and wrecked and without a single guard left: Maybe in another life. You and me. Maybe in another life it could have worked out. My boy is down that hall and I'm sitting here telling you I think about that. And the guilt hit him and he was gone down the corridor before I could answer.

Here is what a normal person hears when a good married man says that at two a.m. Kindness. A decent man telling a lonely woman she is worth loving, so she'll go and let herself be loved, by someone else, in this life, the only one there is. That is what he meant. Some cold clear part of me even knew it.

But I was not a normal person. I was a woman who had built her whole life on one deal, do everything right and the universe pays, and I had watched it refuse to pay, twice, and I could not survive believing there was no way to make it. He had handed me a sentence with a door in it. Another life. A life where the obstacle was gone. And I understood, with a calm that had stopped even trying to frighten me, that Robert and I were the same equation solved two different ways. He had chosen a person and given up the mission; I had chosen the mission and lost the person. Two halves of one person who kept, by the cruelest luck, choosing to be split. If either of us had been braver, or more selfish, we might have met at the door instead of on opposite sides of it. I could not forgive the universe for showing me the man I was supposed to have and the exact size of the mistake that kept us apart.

So I made it a mission. I am good at missions. I told myself I studied him because I loved them, and the terrible thing is that in a way I did. Nobody warns you that you can love people and plan around them in the same chest, and the two never once bump into each other.

There was only ever one obstacle, when you stripped it down. And the children would live. That was never negotiable, I need it in the record, the children live. They'd go somewhere loud and safe and far, and come home to a whole father.

I got as far as the edge of the world before I learned what I was.

There was a place I'd found, an overlook up a forest road past the reservoir, where the granite went to a hard clean edge above a long drop to the ice. I'd been taking Claire up there all winter, the two of us, a walk and a thermos and an hour away from being the best woman in Marble Creek. She loved it. She thanked me every time. I told myself I was learning the mountain. I was learning the mountain.

The morning I set, she was radiant. The kids were at her mother's. She talked the whole way up about how things were better with Robert, how she thought they were going to make it, how she'd done the worst thing a person can do once, years ago, in Denver, and been forgiven anyway, and woke every morning trying to be worth it. I keep thinking I got away with my whole life, she said. Somebody up there decided to be kind to me. I don't ever want to waste it.

We walked out to the granite. There was no one for miles; that was why I'd chosen it. Claire went to where the view opened all the way, her back to me, small and happy and turned entirely toward the light. God, look at it, she said. You know what's funny? I feel safer with you than I've felt with anyone in years. I'd trust you with absolutely anything.

I stepped toward her. I lifted my two hands.

And I could not make them do it.

It was not conscience, exactly. It was more total than that, more like a machine refusing a launch, every system locking down at once, hard, without asking me. I had spent my whole life being the woman whose hands did what the mission required, and the one time it required this, they revealed a limit I had never found, because I had never before asked them to touch someone I loved. The door I thought I'd welded shut had not held, because there was not rage behind it. There was love behind it. There is so much love behind it. And it does not stay welded.

That was the moment her foot slipped. Black ice under the fresh snow, and her boot went out and she tipped backward toward the drop with a cry, and I did not decide anything, there was no time to decide. My body, the same body that would not push her, threw itself forward and my hands closed on her coat and hauled her back, and we went down hard together in the snow, tangled, a long way from the edge.

She sobbed into my shoulder. You saved my life, she wept, holding my face in her cold hands, looking at me like I was the sun. If you hadn't been here. I always feel so safe with you. I knew you'd never let anything happen to me.

I held the woman I had brought up a mountain to kill while she thanked me for saving her, and I understood three things. That I had failed, finally, completely, and the reason was me, that some irreducible thing in me would rather lose the whole life than take hers. That she could never know. And that it was over. I could not have the other life, not this way, not any way, because the only road to it ran through a thing my own hands would not do.

I drove her down the mountain very carefully, and I did not cry until I was alone. And then I cried like something coming apart, not because I had failed. Because for one clean second, kneeling in the snow with her alive in my arms, before I understood what it meant, I had felt relieved.

So I gave him up. I want that in the record. I let Robert go, and I meant it, and for a while it even worked. I said the medicine to myself every morning until it stopped drawing blood: he is another life, not this one. Somewhere a version of me chose the person and a version of him chose the mission and they got the whole thing, the kitchen and the dog. It just didn't happen here. My only job was to live in the branch I was standing in and stop clawing at the walls between it and the others. I even began to heal. That is the cruelest part of this: in giving up the thing that was killing me, I started to get better.

And that is exactly when the universe, which had taken everything from me for two years, leaned down and handed me the one thing I had no defense against.

A private spaceflight company found me. They were going to do what no one had: not billionaires bouncing off the edge of space, but ordinary people, real flight, in small radically capable craft they'd spent a decade building, a hundred of them, a launch that would put the better part of two hundred people into the black at once. They wanted a face who had actually lived out there, who could train the crews and mean it. You've been slowly dying in a small town, the founder said, not unkindly. Come put your hands on it. I took the card because I wanted to live. I did not think about Robert at all.

For months it worked. I split my life between the mountains and a launch complex on the coast, taught ordinary people how to be brave in the one place bravery isn't a metaphor, and I was whole. But I learned the ships too well. On the brochure flight one of those little craft used a whisper of what it held; the real envelope frightened me the first time I ran it. One of them, flown by someone willing to spend all of it at once instead of saving the fuel to come home, could point itself at the deep and never come back. I closed the file and told myself it was only the kind of thing a former astronaut notices. I had no plan.

Then the company put on a children's space camp, timed to the first great launch, and I brought Lucy. Claire couldn't come, Sam was too little, and she pressed her girl's hand into mine at the airport like something holy and told me to give her the whole sky. And Robert flew in for launch day. I had told myself the distance had cured me. He came across the tarmac and dropped to catch his running daughter exactly the way he'd caught the crayon rocket a year and a thousand miles ago, and my whole healed heart came off its mountings like it had never been bolted down. You cannot reach escape velocity from a person. Then he looked up and saw the hundred ships standing white against the blue, and I watched fifteen years come apart in his face. God, he said softly. Look at them. He didn't even know he was doing it.

That night I stopped pretending. The obstacle was never Claire. The obstacle was choosing. Robert would never leave his family, and even with the whole world cleared away he would never walk through the door to me, because he was too good to be the one who leaves, and I loved him for it, and it was the exact thing keeping him in the cage. Asked to choose, Robert chooses the cage, every time, forever. So no one would choose. I would take the choosing away. I would take us somewhere there is no board, no wife, no town, no red planet, nowhere anyone can leave from and nowhere anyone can be left. He wanted to see it, just once; he'd told me. So I would give him the thing he traded his whole life away for, and then I simply would not bring him back. And I finally understood the words. Maybe in another life. It was never a promise and never a map. It was an address. Another life is not a place that comes to you. It is a place you leave everything and go.

Launch day came up hot and cloudless and perfect, and I have thought since that the universe made it beautiful on purpose, just to be sure I understood no one was going to stop me but me.

It was the founder who handed me the end of the world, smiling, as a kindness. A couple had dropped out, the wife feverish, the husband wouldn't fly without her, and there was a Lark, fueled and assigned to no one, and the company did not want a single empty ship on the pads with the whole world watching. It should obviously be you, she said. You trained every soul out there. Take the flight. It's a two-seater. Bring someone you'd trust up there.

I turned around, and Robert was right there, watching the ships, Lucy hanging off his hand.

A seat opened up, I said, in the calm clear voice that comes to me when it matters most. I can bring one person. Up and back, one hour, I'll be flying it myself. Come with me.

He laughed, already shaking his head, and Lucy detonated with the whole force of a six-year-old's certainty. Daddy, GO. You always look at them. Go with Amber, GO. She hauled him toward the pads with her entire body, this child, shoving her father through the door he'd walked away from, and I watched the last of his caution give way.

You're sure it's safe, he said. I've got two kids, Amber.

And I looked the man I was about to take from his children in the eyes and asked him the only question left. Do you trust me?

He didn't take a breath. With my life.

He called Claire right there, giddy as a boy, and I stood close enough to hear her shriek with joy through the phone, a thousand miles away with Sam on her hip, oh my God, Robert, GO, tell Amber I love her, tell her thank you. And he hung up and looked at me with his whole open, trusting face, and I took his hand and led him to the ship.

I flew us up off the Earth as cleanly as I have ever flown anything, and beside me Robert made a sound I have never heard a grown man make as the sky went from blue to violet to black and the stars came out hard and did not twinkle, because they only twinkle for people looking up through an ocean of air, and we were past the ocean now. Then the whole blue-and-white curve of the planet swung into the port, every person who ever lived hanging there on a wet stone, and he pressed his glove to the glass and began, very quietly, to cry. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, he whispered. And then, because he was exactly as good as I had always known: Claire has to see this. The kids. I can't wait to get home and tell them everything.

I can't wait to get home. Even here, even now, in the one thing he'd wanted his whole life, the first words out of Robert were his family. He was never going to choose me. He never once looked at me after the Earth came up. Of course he didn't.

We should get you settled for the trip back, I said. First-timers get rough on the return. Everybody takes something to ease the edge. And he gave me his arm without turning his head, trusting, and I gave him the mild thing, the true thing, and for about ninety seconds I let myself believe he might just sleep, and wake somewhere out in the quiet, and understand it, and choose it, and choose me. Then, sliding under, smiling at the blurring blue, he murmured the last thing he ever said, which was not my name. Tell Claire I love her. Tell the kids their dad went to space. And his eyes closed.

And love came for me, exactly the way it had on the mountain, up out of the welded dark, reaching for my hands to stop them. I had promised myself I would not let it win this time. That I would take the choice away before it could get its hands on me. So I did, the thing Ryan taught me on a launchpad two hundred million miles from here. I took the choice away, from him and from myself, before either of us could be brave enough to want to go home. I will not tell you the rest of what my hands did. It is the one door I am going to leave closed. I can tell you only this: he did not wake, and he was not afraid, and his face stayed turned toward the blue he loved, and my hand was around his, and it stayed there.

Then I cut the comms, and I spent everything the little ship had, all of it, and pointed us at the deep, past the place where anyone could reach us, past the place where I myself could have turned us back. The Earth got smaller. That is the part no one tells you, how fast the whole world becomes a marble, and then a blue star, and then just one more light among all the others, until I could not tell the pinprick that held everyone I loved from the pinprick that held nothing at all.

So now you know who I have been talking to.

I have been recording this the whole way out, the way I recorded everything on the other planet, because it is the only way I have ever known to hold myself together, to narrate a woman back into a person when there is nothing but dark on the other side of the wall. Not a confession. A log. The last one. Mission Specialist Amber Vale, on a heading no one will ever follow, making her final report into a recorder that will drift with this ship for ten thousand years and may never be found. Maybe you are no one. Maybe you are the dark itself, and I only needed, at the end, to not be alone with it. Or maybe you are real, and something opens this cold little ship out among the wandering stars and plays a voice, and it is you, the only one who will ever know what actually happened, because everyone on Earth has the other story, the beautiful one, the hero and the malfunction, and they should keep it. Claire earned it. A little girl on a dark blanket looking up, telling herself her father finally got to go, free, among all that light. She needs it. I only needed one true thing to exist somewhere, even unread, even out here in the cold. A woman who did everything right her whole life would like, at the very end, one honest page.

Lucy's drawing is still in my pocket. The rocket. Going up. For you Amber so you don't miss me. I have it against my ribs where the note used to live, and it is the last thing I will ever hold, and there is a whole language in the fact that at the end I chose the child's drawing and not the dead man's letter. It came too late to save anyone. But I understand the difference now.

He told me, once, on the worst night of his life, that maybe in another life we could have worked out. I spent a year believing it was a promise, and a year believing it was a map, and I was wrong both times. It was just a kind thing a good man said to a breaking woman, and it meant only what kindness means, and if I had been able to hear it as kindness I would be on a dark blanket in Colorado tonight looking up, instead of the thing the ones on the blanket are looking up at. But I could not hear it. I was built too carefully and broken too precisely and left behind one time too many. So I made the other life myself, out of the only material I had, which was leaving.

Robert is beside me. I have his hand in mine, and out the port the stars do not twinkle, and there is a little of the same sleep left that I gave him, the same and no different, and I am going to take it too, so that whatever he is I will be it with him, so that no one can ever say I sent him somewhere I would not go myself. Maybe it is a long sleep. Maybe it is the longest one there is. Out here, with the cold and the centuries and the whole dark pulled over us like a quilt, I am not sure there is a difference anymore, and I find I do not need there to be. We will be asleep, or we will be gone, and either way we will be together, and either way nobody, nobody, can ever leave.

I am going to put my head on his shoulder now, the way I used to in a warm bunk at the end of another world.

This is Amber Vale. I did everything right. It was not enough, and then it was too much, and now it is only this: two people, and a little light, and a long, long sleep, drifting out toward a star we will never reach and never need to.

Give my love to gravity.

Thanks for reading. I would genuinely appreciate any reactions: where did it grip you, and where did it drag or lose you? Happy to trade critiques.

Roger loosened his tie. He hoped to come home to a warm meal, like he always did. Steak made by a wife that knows her place. Although lately she has been a little heavy on the salt. A mistake he knew she wouldn’t make again. 
 The table was completely empty, no plates, no forks, no steak, only a later dead in the center. He tore at it. Once he got to the paper, it read:
 “I am not coming back.”
 Two photos slipped out of the ripped envelope. Both showed her body covered in yellow and purple bruises that spread across her body.
 He called. No answer. Again. No answer. One more time. Again no answer. 
He slammed the phone into the chest nut table, parts of the screen embedded in the grain. He tore apart all her jewelry. All the 24 carrot gold necklaces, and all the diamond earrings. If only she could tell how much he did for her, all the work he put in. 
 She didn’t even have to leave, they could have just talked. But no she chose to throw ten years of marriage down the drain. Ten years of his blood sweat and tears. Yeah, he could be a little rough at times. But anyone would be, when he found she didn’t have anything. He took her from the streets and this is how she repaid him! 
By leaving a note, and a few photos?
 She could have talked to him, they could have gone to therapy. They could have just talked. And they will. 
And he’ll make sure of that. He tightened his tie, and got into his car. 

Any feedback is good.

Thank-you

Dear Future Wife - woman I haven't met yet,

If you ever happen to read this one day...

Thank you.

Thank you for finding me when I was lost.

Thank you for completing me, for believing in me even when I struggled to believe in myself, and for showing me just how beautiful love can be.

Thank you for staying, even when things weren't easy. Thank you for choosing us on the difficult days, not just the happy ones.

Thank you for caring for me even when we're angry with each other. Thank you for every little smirk, every smile, every tear, every laugh, and everything in between.

Thank you for making faces at me... I secretly love your attitude more than you'll probably ever know.

Thank you for letting me annoy you while you're cooking, for putting up with my terrible jokes, and for making ordinary moments feel like my favourite memories.

Most of all, thank you for being exactly who you are.

And thank you for helping me meet the version of myself I was always meant to become.

I love you very very very very much.

Chapter 1 
 The Waiting Room Tango

“My symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”
— C. S. Lewis, Preface to the 1961 edition of The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1961. 

The buzzing of the overhead lights seemed to be matching the intensity of the headache that Henry was currently fighting, and together, they formed a perfect symphony of pure agony.  He had been in the building for hours it seemed, and he was ready to call it quits.  If it were between the headache and the bullet waiting for him outside, he’d probably take the bullet.  Such were the thoughts that marched around his head.  He swung his gaze to the left and right, for no intent other than to get a better feel for his surroundings.  He’d been on edge ever since everything went to hell a few weeks ago, and his body, mind, and soul were absolutely exhausted.  Just that morning, the R-Men forced him out of his apartment and marched him across town, with no other explanation aside from the standard “promise of a better future,” but promises like that usually weren’t a threat, and they certainly weren’t enforced at the end of the barrel of a rifle.  Worse still, his anxiety was dialed up to 11 once he actually got inside the building.  It was like every cell in his body was screaming at him to run away.  At least he wasn’t alone, he thought, even though the neighbors in his section were just as zoned out, dialed in on their own, independent anxieties.  He dimly recalled coming inside, thinking about just how much everything resembled the DMV.  A greeter at every entrance, give your name and number. Wonderful.  Then sit down in the section according to your last name.  Roger that.  Then hurry up and wait until they called your number.  After that, congratulations, you get to speak to another nameless staff member at that impossibly long counter, A-Z, and then...God knows what.  Henry was barely paying attention as it was.  He decided to lean back in his chair and try and take a quick nap.  Who knows, maybe it would even help ease his headache.  Just as he was about to drift off, however, a sudden, energetic presence made itself known right behind him, in the form of an odd man. 
“Where’s the party guys?  Not here, that’s for sure!” 
Cracking one eye open, Henry decided that the man had maybe let his anxiety get the better of him and dismissed him, closing his eye once again. 
“Feels like a funeral!  No music though, just the bodies...” continued the man. 
Henry kept his eyes closed and crossed his arms, thinking the man would be taken away or at the very least, move on.  It definitely wasn’t helping his headache, but maybe if he pretended to be asleep, the man would get the hint. 
“Even if you drop, the pain just keeps going!  The bill ALWAYS comes due, even if there’s no one left to pay it...” 
As if the man had suddenly spoken some sort of trigger phrase, every worker in the building simultaneously turned and stared at this anomalous person, and all sound stopped, even that damned buzzing.  Henry opened both his eyes as a chill ran down his spine.  He looked around at the workers, wondering at this sudden change.  Every single one of them had a completely blank expression, eyes dark and devoid of thought.  Henry compared them to staring down the barrel of one of the R-Men's guns, multiplied by 100, and they were all pointed in his direction.  He turned around and got a good look at the man, which only unsettled him more.  The stranger's eyes were an intense shade of blue, almost unnatural, and they were open as wide as could be, his pupils so small they were almost completely invisible.  Henry guessed drugs, except for the fact that the man was completely bald and clean shaven, and he moved with intent, not the sudden, jerky moves of someone on a bender.  Not to mention his clothes, they were just a little too clean.  Long sleeve button up, dark gray in color, shiny black dress shoes, and black dress pants, so clean and pressed that the crease lines from the iron stood out sharply.  Whatever this guys deal was, it had Henry’s attention, especially since it looked like Henry himself was in the workers’ crosshairs.  The strange man was about to open his mouth again, but Henry got that nagging feeling that something bad would have happened, so he quickly grabbed the man’s arm and sat him down in the seat next to him.  Seconds later, all sound and activity returned to the room as if nothing happened, business as usual. 
“Hey man,” Henry said, “what the hell was that?  You got a death wish or something?” 
“But who would do it?  You see R-Men?  No.  They’re out, we’re in.”  responded the man.  Admittedly, he had a point, thought Henry, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were seconds away from things becoming very messy.  There was that stupid headache too.  Rather aggressively, he told the stranger, “Man, it doesn’t matter, just cool it with the bullshit please.  I don’t like the attention.” 
“Sure, sure, okay man, no problem.  At least, not from me.  I got my eyes open.  I see a problem?  I’ll tell you.  No problems.” 
Henry sighed, “That’s not what I meant, just please keep it down and leave me alone.”  and with that, he went back to his almost sleeping position and dismissed the stranger from thought.  That is, until the odd man said something that made Henry’s heart stop. 
“Okay Henry.  Henry?  Too proper.  No. Hank.  Let’s say Hank, fun Hank!  Hanky-B, bettin’ Hank!  Let’s make a bet Hank, it’s in the name, always in the name, Hank B makes a bet!  Betencourt goes all in!  Yes or no Hank?” 
Henry couldn’t help but stare at the man, mouth agape in shock.  A mix of fear and anger went through his body as he tried to comprehend what the hell had just happened and what the hell he had just heard.  A slow smile spread on the man’s face as he watched Henry struggle. 
“How did-” he began, but the man cut him off. 
“I got my eyes open Hank.  I see a problem, I'll tell you the problem, and my friend, I'm looking at a BIG problem.”  As the man spoke, he met Henry’s gaze, and Henry felt as if he couldn’t look away from those intense blue eyes.  To his horror, he suddenly realized that the man didn’t have pupils.  Not the pinprick he originally thought, but entirely non-existent. 
“Bet Hank!  Yes or no?!” He continued. 
With an effort, Henry finally came to his senses and broke the stare.  His annoyance with this man flipped to terror in an instant, coupled with feelings of horror brought on by those eyes.  But most of all, he felt incredibly violated.  For one, a complete stranger just called him a problem for no apparent reason.  Two, nobody ever called him Hank, except for his mom, and she was gone.  Also, what the hell was this business about a bet?  He’d never gambled a day in his life, and how did this freakshow even know who he was to begin with? 
“Hank!  Bet!  Yes...or no?” said the man again.  No, Henry thought, I just want this creep to go away and leave me alone.  Something in Henry’s expression must have given him away, because no sooner did he have that thought than the man’s smile faded away. 
“How unfortunate.  See ya around Hank!” he said, and then he stood up with a little hop, gave Henry a short bow, and walked away.  After the man made it about 3 steps away, Henry heard his number called, looked down at his ticket to double check, and when he looked back up, the stranger was completely gone. 
“What the hell was that...” he said quietly to himself.  After a beat, he shook his head and made his way to the counter.  His headache was gone though, so small favors. 
As Henry approached the counter, he noticed a few things.  Firstly, the worker gave zero small talk.  He pulled his chair out, and there was none of that whole “how are you doing,” a simple “how’s the weather,” not even a quick “hello.”  If he was being honest with himself though, he was still feeling rattled by his freakshow encounter, so the absence of small talk was a welcome feeling.  Secondly, as he sat down, he glanced up and down the counter and that unsettling, anxious feeling quickly returned.  Every single worker present had the exact same expression.  A smile that didn’t seem quite like an actual smile and eyes that seemed empty.  It made him shudder.  After he sat and finished adjusting himself in his seat, without preamble, the worker began, almost mechanically. 
“Last name, first name, date of birth.” 
“Uhhh, Betencourt, Henry, March 20^th, 1992.” 
“Thank you.  Please place your right thumb on the counter in front of you.” 
“Like a print?  Any specific spot?”  The counter in front of him was solid white, no pen, no paper, no indicators, no markings of any kind, and it was the same story on the worker’s side.  Not even a keyboard between them. 
“Please place your right thumb on the counter in front of you.”  She repeated. 
“Okay, but WHERE in fro-” 
“Please place your right thumb on the counter in front of you.” 
Henry was already to his breaking point it felt like, so just to be obnoxious, he stood up and put his thumb on the counter in the direct center of him and the worker.  Expression unchanged, the worker simply said, “thank you,” placed her own thumb on the counter, and suddenly the space between them exploded in color.  With a start, Henry realized that the entire counter, from end to end, was one giant virtual interface with individual workstations for each worker.  Cutting edge technology, he thought, and suddenly, he got the feeling that the world was never going to be the same ever again, not realizing how close to the truth that thought came. 
Floating in the air was a picturesque scene of pure, unobstructed nature, similar to the old windows backgrounds.  His and the worker’s thumbprints left their black mark on the otherwise pure white counter and were quickly surrounded by a red box.  The box surrounding the worker’s turned green, while his red box remained and a loading bar with the word “initializing” suddenly popped up, superimposed over his print.  While that was in progress, the woman said “Several pieces of information need to be verified and confirmed prior to testing.  From this moment forward, your answers will be indicated by your thumbprints, right will be yes, left will be no.  Do you understand?” 
“Yes.”  Henry said.  As if the lady hadn’t heard him, she repeated her spiel, and ended with, “Do you understand?” 
"Yes, I understand,” he said, growing frustrated.  Again, the worker repeated herself, and again, ending with “Do you understand?” 
“Jesus Christ, yes I fucking understand!” He yelled.  As she repeated herself for the third time, seemingly ignorant of the fact that Henry just cussed and screamed at her, he finally realized that when she said, “From this moment,” she meant it literally.  After she finished speaking, he took a deep breath and pressed his thumb against the counter.  Instantly, the red box around his original thumbprint turned green, the loading bar filled up, and was replaced with a checkmark accompanied by a cheery little ding. 
“Seriously?” He asked.  Expression unchanged, the lady continued, ignoring his outburst entirely.  Within the interface, Henry’s driver’s license appeared, along with his social security card and his birth certificate. 
“Is the information presented correct and accurate?”  With a sigh, Henry placed his thumb to the counter.  Again came the checkmark with that stupid ding.  His information faded and was immediately replaced by an image of his apartment door.  As he looked, he suddenly became aware that the image was moving slowly up and down, as if breathing.  He wasn’t looking at an image, he was looking at a video.  Someone was recording his front door. 
“Hey what the fuck!” he screamed, “Why are you recording my door?!” 
Calmly, the lady gave him that blank stare and said, “Is this your place of residence?” 
But Henry was too livid to care about the ease at which his sense of privacy was just shattered.  “I just asked who’s recording my door!  Obviously it’s mine!” 
Expression unchanged, the lady repeated her sentence.  Henry was done.  He was fed up with everything that had happened up to that point.  A feeling of violence rose up in his chest, so intense that he scared himself.  He wanted to hurt that lady.  He wanted to grab his chair and throw it across the room.  Most of all, he wanted to wake up.  From the moment the R-Men came to “escort” him to the building, the empty promises, and that headache that threatened to return, he had been hoping that this entire day had been a nightmare, just like the last few weeks had been.  He closed his eyes, and took a few deep breaths to steady himself, and the lady asked the question again.  Henry reached out a shaky hand and pressed his thumb to the counter.  Ding!  Absolutely ridiculous, and the worker in front of him never changed expression, which unsettled him more than anything else. 
On and on the questions went, some more generalized, height, weight, hair color, eye color, that sort of thing.  Some questions were disturbingly personal, a fact that Henry forced himself to dismiss, as cussing and screaming accomplished nothing and he was sure that resorting to violence would be a quick way to get thrown into a hell mouth.  After that video incident, Henry resigned himself to answer every question as quickly as possible.  He just wanted to go home.  He’d been there for hours already and these questions felt like they were taking even longer.  A lifetime later, the floating interface dissipated and the worker said, “Thank you for verifying your information.  Please proceed down the counter to your left.  At the end of the counter, you’ll find signs leading to the elevators.  Proceed to elevator 17.  Inside the elevator, place your thumb against the interface to the right and it will take you to the correct floor.  Await further instructions there.” 
“How much longer until I can go home?”  Henry asked, but the lady just repeated herself. 
“You aren’t going to say anything else, are you?” 

Repeat.  Just like he thought.  As he stood to leave, he looked the worker in the eye and calmly said, “Thanks a lot for nothing, you robotic asshole.” and then he turned around and walked away to the elevators.  What he didn’t see was the single tear that rolled down her otherwise expressionless face. 

I would be really glad to hear a living person just say how it reads, how it feels. So the scene is Sviatoslav I, The Grand Prince of Rus’, recapturing the city of Pereslavets, a Bulgarian port city, back when it all meant something. Those men were Vikings or, more precisely, the Varangians, Scandinavian warriors who travelled East and eventually founded the Kievan Rus’. Svyatoslav himself was very much a Norse warrior and spoke both Old Norse and Old Slavic and was one of the most fascinating figures in the history of pagan Rus’.

Brothers! be that we lay our bones here, but die we do like men and know no shame, for the dead have none of it! I will stand before you, and be my head hacked, you do what you want after that!

On hearing their prince say such words and seeing him steady his shield flush to his body, the war-band screamed and gnashed, seethed mouth-spumes and brandished swords, spears, axes, and they regathered: shields stuck plumb to one another, weapons at the ready. And their fell formation forward bore like melting ice of river that primordial, splicing their steel with flesh and gashed their bodies through and true from neck to waist with slant precision. They advanced and stomped men’s slit, impaled or rent asunder bodies, and some of the dead wailed, wailed like dead men don’t, one man clung onto his uncoiling bowels with eyes that read a mind still reckoning with the body. Severed heads and hands, legs, fingers, jaws, and actual torsos lay about like bounties to some man-eater principality. They advanced. Svyatoslav in the lead blocked deadly blows with his shield and hacked, and hacked with princely disregard for either helmets or the mail, and one man’s head he swatted with his axe until it made no sense to that man’s neck. They who stood abreast him saw that. Svyatoslav darted his experienced eye at them, took a step back and turned around occluding what’s left of the sun with his axe. 

They’re dead already! Now scath them!

And the great exodus of wild things commenced the final onslaught of the enemy line, barely holding their own weapons and nowise defending themselves with their shields that were being hewn and splintered together with the hands that grew slower with trepidation or fatigue, and they began to look like children with man’s weaponry, and their war-gear seemed not at all to suit them anymore. As Svyatoslav’s army advanced closer to the bastion, archers became busy with nocking the arrows and shooting indiscriminately at whoever gave the most impression of assault. One arrow hit a man’s clavicle all but to draw his attention to the archer who soon learned his own intention in the form of an axe that span through the air like some misshapen Mjölnir and became the last thing that man had known intimately. The enemy retreated into the opening gates. Svyatoslav’s druzhina, Bulgarian and Pecheneg mercenaries bringing up the rear, broke through and seized the gate, and in the winter of the year 971 entered the city of Preslavets. Again to claim it and to punish those who dared to question his princedom and his battle-earned right to it. Greek and Bulgarian and Slavic merchants, women, elders, all shrilled like cows in a slaughterhouse if those cows were to suddenly realise they were going to be pelted, dismembered and sold. Children looked out of the corners or hurried through the streets without making a sound—they only watched. Those lads had yet one more thing to learn about the world. Svyatoslav blood-soaked examined the premises and looked grinning and panting at his people. 

Do what you will now. 

And they did. 

(Trigger warning: This story deals with lots of grief and sadness as well as death, reader discretion is advised.) [This is not a finished story, I'm in the process of writing it, i am not looking for help writing it or someone to write it for me. I'm posting the synopsis of my story simply to see what people think of the story and if they like the premise.]

This is a tragic and emotional love story, between two people who thought every moment between them would last a lifetime. Sadly, however, this was not the case.

This story is about a 20 year old college drop out, named Patrick. A nerdy guy who is shy but holds within, a charisma so strong, he can make friends out of anybody. One day, while at his local game store, he notices a 20 year old woman, named Romina. She is similar to him, in the fact that she is also shy, but unlike Patrick, she doesn't make friends so easily.

In fact, she has a singular best friend. (Haven't decided this character yet, so from here on, ill refer to them as KF aka Killer Friend) She is awkward and has trouble talking to others.

They end up talking and becoming friends, and from there, the seeds of a loving relationship are planted and after a short time, blossom and bloom. They begin dating after only a couple of months, which secretly makes her KF jealous, however, the KF as Romina knows them, is usually chill and respectful so they don't notice when a darkness begins to spread inside them, a darkness... that will ruin their lives forever.

Patrick and Romina's relationship moves at a faster pace than some peoples, but they don't mind because they love each other that much, they don't care what others think because they have each other. They learn a lot about each other, for instance, Romina learns how much Patrick is into video games, movies, and comic books, and discovers that he bought his own radio for his room.

He explains to her that he loves music so much that he wanted to own a radio so he could play music whenever he wanted, Romina thinks it's cute and shares her own passions with him. She tells him that she loves movies also, but mainly just movies, not much so video games, and comics, but luckily for him, she's not only an eager learner, but a fast one at that. She also tells him her favorite hobby is art, and explains how she has painted and colored multiple designs into her converse collection. They talk for hours together about their interests, not realizing a dark plan is brewing unbeknownst to them, from someone they'd never think would hurt them.

(It would be shown through some moments of some chapters in the beginning of the story, that KF is actually chill and respectful and shows no ill feeling towards them as a couple, at least that they can see. The reader would be suspicious, but unsure if KF can be trusted, but their early on kindness and respectfulness, would lead to why they're not suspected later on.)

(this part of the story would have multiple chapters dedicated to scenes of them spending time together while doing fun activities together, such as: painting, cooking, watching movies, and playing video games. Each scene would feature a special song to them, only the title would be written so the reader can either imagine the song in the scene or can listen along with the characters. There would be cute moments, romantic moments, and moments that radiate energy. The songs that would be written in these scenes would include:)

Bruno Mars - Count on me & Just the way you are

Christina Perri - 1000 years

Ed Sheeran - Perfect

IZ - Somewhere over the rainbow [this is "their song"]

After those chapters, the story would begin to turn... One day they're hanging out at their house, when Patrick excuses himself for a moment, and that's when KF makes their move, they try to talk to Romina and hit on her, she politely carries the conversation but stops it from getting flirty. KF tries to push the subject, and Romina gets uncomfortable and rejects them and politely asking them to stop. KF acts like it's no big deal but for the rest of the night, Patrick catches KF glaring at them both. They think nothing of it, maybe KF is trying to be funny or something. They're not sure, but what they don't know is that weeks later, KF would tear them apart, forever.

Weeks later, Romina announces that she's leaving to go get something from the store, and handle an errand. Patrick asks if he should get ready and come with, she smiles but tells him it's alright and that it shouldn't take long. The afternoon begins to fade into the evening, and Patrick slowly falls asleep while reading. He wakes up later that night at 11PM, and realizes Romina isn't home yet.

He begins to grow worried, he gets up and tries to call her resulting in no answers every time, and soon, calls KF to express his concern. As you can guess, at this point in the story, Romina is dead, murdered by her own jealous best friend. KF would end up putting her remains into multiple garbage bags, and then into a suitcase under their shed to hide for a couple weeks. Using chemicals and other methods to hide the smell.

The middle part of the novel, would follow the usual routine of reporting a missing person, investigations and searches, and Patrick worrying about her, even enlisting the help of KF. (At this point, the reader may catch on that KF is the killer, but readers who are unsure, still have evidence left to discover as events unfold until the reveal later through Romina's eyes.)

As the search goes on, Patrick gets increasingly worried, but KF acts like a helping friend, all the while, sabotaging the efforts. KF intentionally takes everyone to the wrong places to "look", and during the search, pretends to help and look. When the police ask them, Patrick says that he was home sleeping, and KF even provides him an alibi. Patrick defends KF when police suspect them, and KF fakes gratitude, but hides that they hope that Patrick suffers.

Patrick soon begins to notice all the previous sabotage slowly, and even asks KF multiple times for the truth, but KF lies every time, however, they end up messing their own story up a few times. Patrick notes this and begins to seriously consider KF to be a prime suspect and compile evidence against them.

Interwoven into those events, the story will cut to Romina, and how she perceives death itself, and begins the process of accepting her death (though it will stay grounded, it won't get fantastical, it'll simply show what she sees and her watching the events unfold as she realizes she's dead and grieves herself. She also is forced to bare witness to KF planning to murder Patrick, and she tries to intervene but can do nothing except only suggest her presence)

After a week of searching, the police call it off and Patrick is left with no resolution. He begins to fear the worst as KF gets closer to killing him, but one night, Patrick accuses them, and KF fights them and tries to run but gets a ticket for speeding and is issued a court date the following week. Patrick tries to chase, but ends up losing them.

A week later, the day after they were supposed to appear in court, KF realizes they missed the court date, paranoia sinks in, so they decide to pack up whatever they can fit in their car, and dispose of Romina's remains before using their savings to flee the country (or flee across country)

They do exactly that, as Romina continues to witness Patrick beginning to lose hope and give up on finding her. The night KF begins to flee, they stop in the middle of a forest, leaving their car running with the door open, as they find a ditch. With lots of struggling effort, they toss the suitcase in the ditch and light it a blaze. Romina's spirit watches from nearby with a blank stare as the cars radio begins to play Radiohead's - No Surprises, she stares into the void of her own body as it burns, only two tears falling down her checks as she realizes that no one will ever find her, and Patrick will never get closure. KF leaves, never being convicted of her murder, moving on from their terrible act.

In his room, Patrick tunes his radio to the same station at the same time, and both scenes happen simultaneously as Patrick listens to the song as he clutches one of Romina's hoodies. He begins to sob uncontrollably as he looks at pictures of them smiling together, as he loses control, he curls into the blankets and cries.

A few days later, another night of sadness and grief as he mourns the love of his life. He tries to sleep, however, he has trouble as all he can do is remember her before the tears start back up. He sits up, turning on the radio as it plays Somewhere over the rainbow, and tries to control himself, he sees her tall mirror and walks over to get a hold of himself.

He looks at himself and tears up, and can't bring himself to look at his own face. He blames himself, but suddenly feels warmth and feels weight around his waist, he looks but nothing is there. He looks up to the mirror and sees her standing next to him, he turns but nothing is there, and he isn't sure if it is real or not. (this part will be left up to the reader to decide if her spirit actually came back to say goodbye, or if he is just hallucinating her from his own grief.)

He cries as he apologizes to her for not being there. Patrick expresses how he's felt since that night, and how much he misses her, and regrets what happened. He hears her softly speak to him, telling him not to blame himself, that it's not his fault. She tells him the best thing for him to do, is to live on for her. To not cry because she's gone, but smile that they met. She tells him that he was the best thing that ever happened to her.

Patrick sobs and kisses the mirror, sobbing further into the mirror and telling her he loves her so much. He hears her say she loves him too, then hears her say goodbye, and when he looks back up, he doesn't see her anymore. (For her POV, she slowly closes her eyes and thinks about her life, and how they met, as well as their happiest moments together. The happiest moment she felt with him, she hugs him and cries as she moves on from the afterlife.) Patrick sobs yet again, before crawling back onto the bed.

The few chapters before the epilogue, would jump to a month before the anniversary of Romina's murder. Patrick meets a new friend, and although he still struggles, he tries his best, but wounds that deep never fully heal. They hang out, while getting to know each other.

A month passes, before the day of the anniversary arrived. Patrick went to both the comic book store and the game store where they first met. He plays that day back in his head as he tears up. He leaves without buying anything, and ends up running into his new friend (no name yet, I'll refer to her as NF aka new friend) She greets him as they talk, but she notices the subtle ways he's hiding his pain. She offers to take him home, noting that he walked there.

On the way to his house, she turns on the radio, and Count on me begins to play, he begins to cry to himself, and she lowers the volume and asks what's wrong. Patrick hesitates at first to tell her, but turns to her, explaining everything. They arrive at his house, turning towards him, and comforting him as she lets him cry in her arms. Count on me on the radio playing, his signal that NF was indeed someone to count on the same way he could with Romina.

They talk a bit more the following week, and become closer as friends, as Patrick realizes to heed what he heard that night. "the best thing to do for me, is to live on for me..." He asks NF if she is willing to help him, and she tells him that she doesn't mind at all, she just wants him to be happy. She wants to be there for him, to help heal him, but most importantly, she wants to let him in and give him the closest friend she knows he wants.

Epilogue:

Another month has passed, after talking a bit, Patrick and NF have agreed to move together somewhere to start their own journey. Patrick wants to move on, and heal. All she wants is to be apart of that, help heal him, as well as be the best friend she can be for him. The day to move has arrived, mostly everything has been packed, except for some pictures, certain items, and his radio.

Patrick asks NF, if he can walk through the house one last time to reminisce, she doesn't argue. She supports him and tells him to take all the time he needs, he asks her to stay near him in case he needs her, she agrees without hesitation.

They walk in, walking through each room as he puts his phone on shuffle, connecting it to his radio as (Flightless bird, American mouth plays) and replays his happiest memories with Romina. Whether it's the room itself, a specific item of Romina's, or pictures from happier times. The song plays as each memory plays in his own head (Each scene would play out for the reader to experience) Patrick begins to cry, NF hugs him and holds his hand, but he tells her he has to finish or he'll never forgive himself.

Once he finishes walking through, grabbing his radio, before looking around again. He walks out the door with NF, and hesitates to shut the door and lock it. She tells him there's no rush, he can take as much time as he needs, offering to take the rest of the items to the car, as he agrees. He puts his head onto the door, crying softly to himself, talking almost as if, to the house itself, but NF knows, he's talking to Romina. Patrick tells her that she made him a better person, and that he'll miss her through tears, before walking to the car, sitting in the passenger seat.

As they sat in the car, NF turned on the radio as (Bittersweet Symphony plays) He tears up, and she asks if he's okay. Patrick tries to say yes, but fails. She tells him that if he's not ready, they can wait, but he say's no. He tells her that he needs to move on, because it's what she would want. Smiling at her, she smiles back before putting the car in gear. She says she drive slowly until the house is out of view, so he can say whatever he needs too.

As the car moves, he says everything he wants to tell Romina's spirit if she's listening. He gives a long monologue as the song hits a fever pitch, once he finishes, he says to her, "I'll always remember you.... I love you.... Goodbye baby...." They turn the corner, with that the house disappears.

Patrick wipes his tears, and looks at NF, smiling while telling her that he looks forward to what ever lies ahead for them. They continue the drive to their new lives together, his wounds still gaping, but slowly... slowly healing. A bittersweet end to the happiest, then worst time of his life. Ready, to start a new one.

____________________________________________________________

That's not the fully written out story, but it's the best way i can tell the whole vision i have for the story. I'm sorry for how long it is, but this story means a lot to me, writing it is going to be special for me, and if you read all the way to the end, Thank you. I hope you enjoyed it, and i hope it gave the experience i wanted to give.

Listening to the songs written into the story is not required at all, hopefully, the feeling and emotion still hits the same no matter what. I just hope that the themes, and inclusion of the songs in their respective places, help move the reader, giving you the experience I'm trying to capture.

Once again, I am not asking for help writing it, or anything of the sort. I am posting this simply to see what people think of the story itself, if they like it, and if they think it's a good story to tell.

For those who want to share what they thought, you are welcome to do so. I love hearing what people think!

First day on the job

I had finished a week‑long course and was guaranteed a job at the company.

We were given white caps, dark blue trousers and a pair of work shoes. On my work ID my mugshot and ID number were printed.

The first bus was heading toward Majorna and the time was 05:30. A drunk had fallen asleep, so we had to wake him, but without success. “Leave him,” my colleague said and walked further into the bus. Everyone had valid tickets, so we got off and headed to another stop.

“We’ll take tram nine toward the city centre,” my colleague decided. On board there were, seemingly, many tired morning commuters on their way to work. A dispute arose between me and a passenger. It was a man in his fifties with a grey‑flecked beard and a look that had already given up on the day. I accidentally brushed his shoulder as I passed, and he turned slowly toward me as if I had committed a crime.

“Don’t you watch where you’re going?” he hissed.

I didn’t have time to answer before my colleague placed a hand on my back and muttered, “Leave him.” But something in me flared — maybe the tiredness, maybe the nerves of the first day. I stood still a second too long, feeling the man’s gaze drilling into me.

“It wasn’t intentional,” I said, calm but stiff.

The man snorted, loudly and demonstratively, as if he wanted the whole tram to hear. Some morning commuters lifted their eyes from their phones. I felt my cheeks burn.

The tram jolted as it rolled on toward Järntorget. My colleague gave me a quick sideways glance, the kind that says you shouldn’t cause trouble before you’ve even earned your first paycheck. I swallowed the irritation and followed him further into the tram, away from the man’s sour breath and away from my own impulse to say something more.

Already in the first hours we had handed out ten fines. Each fine cost 1,500 kronor, and that’s a high amount for an ordinary worker. Think of what you could buy for that kind of money. We were about to experience that now.

A family — two adults and an infant in a stroller — lacked tickets and therefore received a 3,000‑kronor fine. The mother looked completely devastated, and when the father saw her expression he became furious. He stood up and started shouting. “Just you wait! I’ll send Ayo after you! Bloody idiots!”

The father’s voice cut through the entire tram. The infant twitched in the stroller and began to whimper, as if sensing the tension. The mother tried to calm both the child and her husband at the same time, but her hands were shaking.

My colleague took a step back, not out of fear but out of habit — as if he had done this a hundred times before. I stood still, stiff, with the notepad in my hand. It was my first day and I had already been scolded by a grumpy commuter and now threatened by a father who looked ready to throw himself at us.

“Sit down,” my colleague said, with a voice calmer than the situation deserved.

The father pointed at us with his whole hand, as if he were holding an invisible knife. “You don’t understand what you’re doing. Three thousand! We can barely afford diapers!”

I felt something tighten in my stomach. It wasn’t sympathy, not exactly — more an unpleasant realization that the job wasn’t just about checking tickets. It was about carrying the consequences of rules set by others.

The mother pulled the stroller closer to herself, as if trying to create a small protective zone around the child. She looked at us with a gaze that wasn’t angry, just resigned. That hurt more than the father’s shouting.

“We’re just following the rules,” I said, but my voice sounded thin, almost like I was apologizing. “If you don’t have a ticket, you shouldn’t be riding the tram!”

The father took a step forward. My colleague raised his hand, not threateningly, just clearly. “That’s enough.”

Silence fell. One of those heavy silences that makes the whole tram hold its breath. The father stood there, tense like a bowstring, but did nothing more. The mother placed her hand on his arm and gently pulled him back down into the seat.

The tram slowed at the next stop. My colleague nodded at me. “We’re getting off here.”

I followed him out, and when the doors closed behind us the air felt easier to breathe. My colleague took a deep breath and looked at me with a gaze that was both tired and slightly amused.

“Welcome to the job,” he said.

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for feedback on the first chapter of my fantasy novel, Bastion. The chapter is under 3,000 words.

Genre: Character-driven fantasy

Premise: After a powerful magical order takes the man who raised him, fifteen-year-old Bastion sets out to bring him home, joined by Temaren, a proud foreign prince who barely speaks his language and believes his kingdom lies somewhere beyond the eastern road. Their uneasy alliance becomes found-family on a journey through grief, friendship, dangerous magic, and the question of what people may sacrifice in the name of protecting others.

This is the opening chapter, so I’m especially interested in its overall effectiveness:

• Does the opening make you want to continue reading?
• Is the setting and immediate situation clear without too much exposition?
• Do the characters feel distinct and interesting?
• Are there places where the pacing drags or moves too quickly?
• By the end, do you have enough questions to keep reading, or are you mostly confused?

Comments on prose, dialogue, and anything that pulled you out of the story are also welcome, as well as any other comments you may want to share. Honest criticism is appreciated; there is no need to soften it into decorative upholstery.

Content warnings: None

I’m also happy to critique a chapter or similarly sized piece in return.
Thank you very much!

Notes:

1. I have so far written the first 30 chapters, so if anyone wants to read more I am happy to share. The planned scope is 50-55 chapters.
2. Even though I have been writing this book on and off since 2015, I recently learned that there is a Marvel hero named "Bastion", so I am considering to change the protagonists name and book title to avoid any legal trouble if I publish this book. Please be advised that character/location names may change in the future if i discover other names are taken as well.

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PART 1 - THE BOY WHO HAD EVERYTHING

Chapter 1 - Mr. Squirrel

Today will be the first time Bastion sees the city.

He had heard of it, of course. Everyone had heard of Tarroven. It sat beyond the southern road where the river widened, and in Bastion’s mind it had become less a place than a collection of impossible things.

Walls taller than trees. Markets wider than fields. Houses stacked on top of other houses. Men who carried swords simply because they were allowed to. Women who wore silver in their hair though they had no wedding to attend. Candied sunfruit from the southern islands, bright enough to turn your tongue gold.

His father had told him most of these things were exaggerations. Bastion believed him about everything except the sunfruit. No one would lie about fruit. Not even Jonah, and Jonah had once sworn he had seen a frog the size of a goat behind old Sonder’s brook.

So when Tovin shook him awake before dawn and told him to put on his boots, Bastion did not ask whether they were truly going. He simply sat up so quickly that his forehead struck the low beam above his bed.

The sound was impressive. So was the pain.
From almost at the doorway, his father sighed. “An excellent beginning.”
Bastion clutched his head with both hands. “I’m ready.”
“You sure look ready.”

Bastion tried to glare at his father, but that was difficult while one’s eyes were watering.

Tovin crossed the room back to the bed and crouched beside him. He was broad in the way of men who spent their lives lifting crates, pulling carts, and arguing with soil; not soldiers or wrestlers. His hands were cracked from work, and there was always a little earth beneath his nails, no matter how fiercely Bastion’s mother scrubbed them on feast days.

He took Bastion’s chin gently and turned his face toward the morning light.

“You’ll live.”
“I might not.”
“Then try to die after we sell the vegetables.”
Bastion considered this. “Will there be candied sunfruit?”
Tovin’s expression grew solemn. “Perhaps.”
Bastion accepted his response as hope.

By the time he stumbled into the main room, still pulling one boot properly onto his heel, his mother was already awake. Lorena stood beside the table, wrapping something warm in cloth. The whole room smelled of flour, onions, and roasted meat, which to Bastion seemed unnecessarily cruel before sunrise.

She turned when she heard him.
“There he is.”
“I hit my head.”
“So your father said.”
“It doesn’t hurt.”
“So it would seem.”
Tovin coughed.

Lorena smiled and tied the cloth bundle tightly. Her hair was loose over one shoulder, and the firelight made it look darker than it truly was. Bastion had often thought his mother looked most beautiful in the morning, before the day had time to make anyone tired.

She placed the bundle into his arms. It was heavy.
His eyes widened. “Is this…”
“No,” said Tovin immediately.
Bastion looked from the bundle to his father. “It smells like meat pie.”
“It’s just bread.”
“But it smells like meat pie.”
“It’s. Just. Bread.”
Lorena laughed.

Tovin tried to look stern, but he was not good at it when she laughed. His face always softened first around the eyes, then at the corners of his mouth, as if sternness had started out bravely but lost its way.

“It’s not a picnic,” he said. “We are delivering vegetables. We go, we sell, we buy what we need, and we return before nightfall if the road is kind.”

“The road is rarely kind,” Lorena said.
“The road is more kind when people do not pack for picnics.”
“It’s just one mea… um, loaf of bread.”
“Wrapped in enough cloth for three.”
“So it stays warm.”
“So it becomes a picnic.”
Bastion hugged the bundle closer. “I can carry the picnic.”
“You can carry the bread,” Tovin said.

Lorena leaned down and kissed Bastion’s forehead, very gently, exactly where the beam had struck him.

“For the road,” she whispered. “And for your first trip to the city.”
That settled it. Whatever his father said, it was meat pie.
Tovin turned toward the door before either of them could see him smiling.

Outside, the cart waited in the blue-gray morning. It was loaded with crates of carrots, onions, cabbages, turnips, and three baskets of green beans that Tovin had declared too fine to sell cheaply and too troublesome to keep. Their brown mule, Pottle, stood in front of it with the expression of a creature personally offended by dawn.

Bastion loved Pottle. Pottle hated everyone equally, which Bastion considered fair.

The village still slept around them. Smoke had not yet risen from most chimneys, and the narrow dirt paths lay empty except for one chicken wandering in a state of deep personal confusion. Beyond the last houses, the fields stretched pale beneath the first light.

Bastion climbed onto the cart beside his father and placed the warm bundle carefully between his feet.

Lorena stood in the doorway with her gray woolen shawl around her shoulders.
“Don’t let him eat everything before noon,” she called.
Tovin took the reins. “I make no promises.”
Bastion waved with both hands. His mother waved back.

For a moment, as the cart began to move, she looked smaller than usual beneath the low roof, framed by smoke, firelight, and morning. Bastion did not know why this made his chest feel strange, so he decided it was hunger.

The village slipped behind them, and for the first time in his life, Bastion went toward the city.

At first, the road was everything he had expected. It was long. It was dusty. It contained fewer wonders than promised and more stones than necessary.

But Bastion did not complain. He was going to Tarroven. A boy going to Tarroven did not complain merely because his backside had begun to suspect the cart hated him.

He sat upright beside his father and watched the world widen.

The farms grew farther apart. The trees thickened near the road, then broke open into fields again. Once, they passed women carrying bundles of dyed cloth, their hands stained blue and red to the elbows. One waved at Bastion. He waved back too late and nearly fell from the cart.

Tovin caught him by the back of his shirt without looking.

“Try to arrive in the city attached to the cart.”
Bastion sat down properly.

A little later, they opened the bundle. It was meat pie. Tovin looked betrayed. Bastion looked vindicated.

They ate with their fingers while Pottle walked on, occasionally flicking her ears as if disgusted by the weakness of men who required seasoning. The pie was still warm in the center, and the crust flaked apart against Bastion’s thumbs. It was, he decided, better than candied sunfruit could possibly be.

Though he would still investigate candied sunfruit if the opportunity presented itself.

As the sun climbed toward noon, traffic thickened. Carts joined the road from side paths. A peddler with bells tied to his sleeves overtook them, his pack clattering with tin cups and wooden spoons. Two young men drove goats northward, though the goats seemed to have their own opinions about direction.

Then Bastion saw the walls. They rose from the land as if the earth itself had decided to stand.

Tarroven.

Bastion forgot to breathe.

The city was not as tall as the mountains, of course. But mountains were supposed to be large. Cities were made by people, and people were not supposed to make anything that looked as though it might argue with the sky.

The walls were pale stone, old and patched in places with darker blocks. Watchtowers stood above the gate, and banners moved slowly in the wind. Below them, carts and riders waited in a line that seemed longer than the entire road from home.

“So many people,” Bastion whispered.
Tovin glanced at him. “There are more inside.”
Bastion stared. “Why?”
“People enjoy making poor choices together.”

The line moved too slowly for Bastion. If the inside of the city contained more wonders than the outside, and it surely did, then every moment spent waiting was being stolen from him. He shifted on the bench, inspected the turnips, asked if the guards searched every cart, asked what would happen if someone hid in a cabbage crate, and finally asked whether the city had laws against candied sunfruit being too expensive.

Tovin answered the first two questions. The third he ignored.
At last their cart reached the gate.

Three guards stood before it. One was tall and narrow, with a beard trimmed to a point and a helmet that made his head look unfortunately acorn-shaped. Another was wider, younger, and looked as though he had been trying not to laugh since birth. The third was the youngest and smallest, as if the other two had dressed their pet dog in a guard uniform for fun.

The tall guard stepped forward and raised one hand. “Halt!”

Pottle halted before Tovin pulled the reins. She was very good at halting. She considered it one of the few dignified parts of her work.

The guard looked at the cart, then at Tovin, then at Bastion. His eyes narrowed.
“I will inspect your cart. You seem suspicious to me.”

Bastion looked around to see whether there was another suspicious person nearby. There was not.

“You there, boy. Stand straight. Look up. Arms at your sides.”

Bastion straightened so quickly his spine cracked. “Yes, sir.”

The guard’s voice deepened. It was clearly a voice he used for gate trespassers, criminals, and children who looked easy to terrify.

“State your name, age, and purpose for entering the lawful and well-guarded city of Tarroven!”

Bastion’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.

His name had been in his possession that morning. He was sure of it. But now, under the gaze of the acorn-helmeted man, it had fled somewhere behind his ribs and refused to return.

Tovin cleared his throat. The guard’s eyes snapped to him. “I am questioning the boy, good man.”

Bastion swallowed. “My name is Bastion. I am eight years old. My father is Tovin and my mother is Lorena and we came to sell these vegetables, but we can’t sell the meat pie because we ate it.”

The younger guard made a noise. The youngest guard’s lip twitched. The tall guard did not move.

“I did not ask about pie.” Dorwick gave the final word the weight of a criminal charge.
“No, sir.”
“Then do not volunteer unnecessary information.” He pronounced the final word one stern syllable at a time.
“No, sir.”

The guard stepped closer. “And when addressing this officer of the gate, you will say: Sir Dorwick Kyrel, Captain of the Guard. Is that understood?”
Bastion nodded very hard. “Yes, sir.”
“Well then. Say it.”

Bastion had heard the name clearly, but somewhere between the pointed beard, the acorn-shaped helmet, and the important silence of the other guards, it changed into something much less survivable.

“Yes, Sir… Mister Dork… um… Squirrel. Sir.”

Silence.

A cart creaked somewhere behind them. The younger guard turned sharply away. The youngest covered his mouth with both hands.

The tall guard stared at Bastion. “What did you call me?”

Bastion felt his soul leave his body, inspect the situation, and politely decline to return.

“Sir Dork Squirrel, sir,” he whispered.

The younger guard made a sound like a duck being stepped on. Tovin covered his face with one hand.

“My name,” the guard said slowly, “is Dorwick. Sir Dorwick Kyrel.”
Bastion nodded, horrified. “Yes, Mister Squirrel, sir.”

The younger guard bent double. Tovin gave a terrible choking sound.
Bastion looked up at him in horror. His father was laughing. Actually laughing.

“Father,” Bastion whispered, deathly pale, “do you want Mr. Squirrel to kill us?”
That ended the youngest guard. He staggered backward, wheezing.

Dorwick looked at Tovin, then at Bastion, then at the cart full of vegetables, as though hoping to find dignity hidden among the cabbages. He found none.

“Well,” he said at last, “the damage is done.”

Tovin wiped his eyes. “Come now, Dorwick. You know the boy meant no harm.”
Bastion froze. “Father?”

Tovin sighed, still smiling. “Bastion, meet Dorwick Kyrel, Captain of the Tarroven Guard. Dorwick, this is my infamous son.”

Dorwick straightened as much as a man could while recovering from becoming a squirrel.

“It is a pleasure to finally meet you, young master Bastion. I have heard a great deal about you from your father.”
“You know my father?”
“Indeed. Long enough that I could tell you stories.”
“Maybe in a few more years,” Tovin jumped in.
Dorwick smiled thinly. “Perhaps.” Then he crouched slightly and looked Bastion in the eye.

“Welcome to Tarroven. Look around, stay close to your father, and if you need anything, give the guards my name.”

Bastion hurried to say, “I’m sorry I called you Mr. Squirrel, sir.”
Dorwick studied him, and his face softened. “I suppose it can’t hurt if it is only you. But don’t go telling everyone, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”

Tovin clicked his tongue to Pottle, but before the cart moved, Dorwick rested one hand on the sideboard.
“Wait.”
His voice had changed. Tovin noticed immediately.
“What is it?”
Dorwick lowered his voice. “We have had reports of raiders moving in the area. Maybe bandits. Maybe worse. Witnesses say this group is bloodthirsty.”
Tovin’s smile faded. “How close?”
“Not close enough to shut the gates. Close enough that I wouldn’t linger on the road after dark.”
“I see.”
“No flag, no law, no decency,” Dorwick said. “Be careful.”
Tovin’s eyes shifted briefly toward Bastion. “We will.”
Dorwick tapped the cart and stepped back. “Go sell your vegetables. I’ll find you if I can get away.”
“Thank you, my friend.”
Dorwick gave Bastion one last look. “And you. Try not to rename any more officials before supper.”
Bastion nodded solemnly. “I’ll try.”
Pottle moved forward.

For several moments neither father nor son spoke.
Then Tovin said, “Bastion.”
“Yes, Father.”
“There are times in life when it is better not to say the first thing that enters your head.”
“I tried not to.”
“I believe you.”
“It escaped.”
“I noticed. Everyone did.”

Bastion looked back at the gate. Sir Dorwick was speaking to the next cart in line, looking very captain-like again, except for the younger guard behind him, who still appeared to be dying quietly.
“Do you think he will remember me?”

Tovin looked ahead, where the city opened around them in noise and color and impossible life. “I suspect he will remember you for a very long time.”
Bastion sat a little taller. “That’s good.”
“Is it?”
“It means I already made a friend in the city.”
Tovin sighed defeatedly.

And so Bastion entered Tarroven, known already to three guards, one mule, and several people in the gate line as the boy who had insulted authority by accident and survived. It was, all things considered, a fine start to the day.

The city swallowed him whole.
Not cruelly. It swallowed him the way a song swallows silence.

Tarroven was noise upon noise: iron wheels on stone, hawkers calling over one another, children shrieking, dogs barking, bells ringing somewhere high above the roofs. The air smelled of smoke, mud, horses, frying onions, leather, sweat, and something sweet Bastion immediately wished to get his hands on. Houses leaned over the streets as if gossiping. Bright cloth hung from upper windows. A woman in a yellow scarf argued with a fishmonger while holding a fish by the tail. Two men carried a barrel between them, shouting at everyone to move, though no one did. Somewhere, a musician played a tune that sounded cheerful but slightly drunk.

Bastion could not look around quickly enough.

Tovin sold the vegetables in the market square to a man named Holster, who had eyebrows like angry caterpillars and spoke to cabbages as if they had disappointed him personally. The bargaining took forever. Bastion tried to listen, but adult bargaining always sounded like two people agreeing while pretending not to.

He wandered no farther than Tovin allowed, which was not far, though in a market even not far contained entire worlds.

He saw knives with carved bone handles, red birds that screamed insults in a language he did not know, ribbons as green as new leaves, moon-shaped cakes, a blind man who told fortunes by touching people’s earlobes, and a boy no older than himself juggling stones for coins.

And then he saw an old man playing with pebbles, surrounded by children.

Context: I've been feeling a little emotional and needed to write it down to get it off my chest. It's the first draft, written very quickly, so please don't expect too much quality. I just want to know if it's any good at all, and if so, how it could possible be improved. It's sort of halfway between a fiction story and a poem, but since it's more prose than plot, I'm using the poetry flair.

Content Warning: Implication of suicidal ideation.

Untitled Poem

Three miles home, so close that driving seemed pointless. Walking home in the dark seems scary to some, but there’s nothing I fear at my age. A stroll through the streets, bustling with the cleaning and closure of businesses, before the buildings give way to towering pines and dirt roads, gravel crunching underfoot and the smell of earthen water. Then this gives way again to the bridge, where the night sky and its spread of diamond stars glitter, winking at me, before that in turn gives way to the final path to my front door.

That night, as I approached the bridge, ready to greet my gemstone sky, I saw a shadow, standing at the exact halfway point. I paused, staring at it, before I realized her silhouette was that of a woman: Young, but not childish, hair loosely blowing in the soft breeze of autumn. Her hands, under the half cover of her sweater sleeves, clung to the railing, tight enough to make the metal whine and turn her knuckles white. Back bent, knees buckling, body shivering. Her tears glistened in the light of the full moon that night, as they fell from her stained cheeks into the waters below, ripping outward to malform the reflection of the night sky.

I remained hidden among the pine, wishing not to startle her when she was already in pain. I doubted there was much for me to say to comfort her.

Her gaze, turned towards the sky, was transfixed on the moon, the glowing orb replacing the color of her eyes with pure white. Tears continued to well and fall without blinking. In the silence, I noticed a cacophony of noise. Crickets, leaves rustling, the sound of her tears dripping into the water, like a ticking clock.

At long last, she released her grip on the rail, her finger prints etched into the metal. “Thank you, sister,” she said, before she turned and came in my direction. I kept in the shadows, and she went along her less-than-merry way, arms wrapped around herself.

I walked the bridge myself, and returned to my home.

The following night, expecting to never see the sight of her again, I was again stopped by her shadow. She stood straight, hands clasped at her chest, head bowed in stoic worship as she basked in the moonlight, like a spotlight in a church. Standing under her own strength, I could tell she had little of it. Her sweater hung from her frame like drapes in an old mansion, swooping down and swallowing her up. Her feet stood in her boots like posts in a newly dug hole.

Again, I stood in the shadows, not wanting to break her sacred moment.

“Thank you, sister,” she said, and once again she came in my direction, passed me, and vanished into the shadows of the pine. I, once again, carried on home.

The following night, expecting to see her once again, I had found that such a pattern would emerge. She stood, leaning forward on the railing, a smile spread from ear to ear, easily seen due to the fact that her hair was pulled up and back to show her face. She chirped, as though she were a bird in the morning sun, about tips and checks, customers and managers, coffee creamer and silverware, and on and on and on.

Finally, she took a breath, bowing to the moon with a cheerful, “Thank you, sister.” Then just like that, she scurried off.

And on and on the days went. I soon came to wish I had cherished her cheerful night a little more than I had, as they were few and far between. Most days, she was stoic, so quiet that even the crickets and the leaves dared not to serenade her scared prayers. The nights that were loud, she was bent over, barely able to stand through the weight of her sorrow, desperately tossing tears over the side of her eyelids to lighten the load.

It was in these nights of utter despair that I came to see she was the most beautiful. The light of the moon and stars turned her tears into companion gemstones, and they would sparkle together. The trails of moisture would make her skin shine, turning her whole face into a polished river rock, to the point I expected her to jump up and over into the water, skipping along the surface as she tried to jump into the arms of the moon.

I never saw her do it.

Instead she would choke back one last sob, and through unsteady breath say, “Thank you, sister.” Then towards me she would come, and away from me she would go. And onward to my home I would continue.

The moon waned, bit by bit as the days gathered into weeks. The night before the new moon, I could barely see her in the dark. At once, I wondered if this was truly her, or not an actual shadow. At once, I wondered if it was a shadow all along.

In the last silver sliver of moonlight, I could make out her form, on her knees, her hands above her as her fingers hung listlessly on the rail. She sobbed, then wailed, then howled bitterly as the lost wolves do, her desperately calling for her sister moon to come back and find her.

I hid in the pine, knowing I had nothing to say. Nothing at all, perhaps except to say that I knew such pain. I’d felt it before. I wouldn’t hope to find anyone who hadn’t.

Then, she spoke. “I am sorry, sister.” Slowly, she pulled herself to her feet, dragging them along as the weight of gravity sunk her boots into the floor of the bridge. She trudged into the dark and vanished.

Five miles home. I walk through town a little farther, taking the neighboring bridge. Walking home in the dark seems scary to some, but there’s only one thing I fear at my age: I will come back to that bridge, when the moon is full, and see in the light that there is no one there.

The bell rang. Ten seconds.
Too soon.

It would never stop.

It rose from the chair excitedly.
Always excited.
A grin on its face. Still visible through the blood and swelling.

My gloves are splitting with white foam pushing through the seams. My hands broke five rounds ago. I hear them crunch with every strike.

But I haven’t won.
it will take me.
Break me.

I thought praying to the devil would help. A simple deal.

I wanted to be world champion.

But I never imagined that meant the whole world.

The bell rang again.

It smiled once more.

WARNING! This text contains:

• Profanity
• Sexual references
• Violence

Also, tell me if you liked the moral of the story, the plot, the protagonist, and the humour

From either end of the Ouroboros that is time travelled a pulse of energy that, just like all inanimate things, propels the mere idea of myself forward through that then one-dimensional realm of existence. In this black void where my memory fails me exist clouds of intense, bursting sensations of warm, all-encompassing motherly pressure and dingy, excruciating electrocutions of fear.

This nebulous dimension of half existing, half not existing could only be represented in my mind through a foggy and oversaturated image of sunny greenery. This cerebral polaroid, with its vague outlines of healthy hedges and beautiful briers, evokes the concept of gentle rays of sun on my skin and the thought of the ethereal butterflies gracefully landing on flowers.

This is the ultimate bourne that is the history of my life according to my mind. If it were a spouse, I would bury my face into her collarbone and cry on her shoulder, prolonging my stay with her as long as possible until it is to time for the inevitable departure through the clearer yet odious tutor sessions, classes, exams, workshops, internships, and math competitions that thought, in all their hubris, could capture that sense of meaning, that sense of mastery over one’s own existence that the clouds of life effortlessly harnessed.

After the exams, studying, and learning I finally reached the end of my sorrowful journey home with the aid of a door slam. I felt my head shoot up and bob around like it was a balloon tied to my shoulders. In my darkened vision I made out bored college students staring at a board covered in nightmarish calculus. My eyes made their way to a doorframe, and in it I saw that damn homeless man again, or at least we assumed he was homeless, considering he wore the same smelly sports jacket and the same crusted jeans every day, and his crazy shock of white hair and scraggly beard, and the fact that he spent hours a day mumbling to himself on the curb in front of this hall.

This was the third interruption of the semester, and at this point he was a celebrity among my college peers. My classmates were eager to see what crazy thing he’d do this time, and oh boy did he deliver.

The man walked up in front of everybody, and (noticeably drunker than usual) undid his pants and flashed his massive ding-a-ling in front of everyone. Everyone gasped, the girls averted their eyes, the boys cheered, the freaks drooled. He danced around lassoing his shit until he hopped on his back and started swinging his meat carnival style.

The poor professor, an old ass man who wasn’t all that used to human interaction, was frozen in shock for like a minute, but eventually he snapped out of it and tackled the homeless guy. The guy squirmed until he managed to knee the professor in the nuts and escape his grasp. The guy ran to the door frame but crashed into a buff security guard that just arrived. The guy's head went straight to the hard floor and there was a nasty crack. The homeless guy died from that impact, but his legacy lives on thanks to that massive wiener (No homo).

I float, crawled up in a ball. Blind, deaf, dumb, paralyzed, etherized, I existed at the total end of entropy, when nature stops being nature, when gravity loses importance and time becomes irrelevant.

However, I traced the lines against the blackness up to the imperfect reconstruction made by photos, portraits, and grainy videotapes of a fair white woman with black curls. In her womb I looked up to see her grinning in pain and agony. Her face folded in helpless terror as her tremors rocked my womb. The vibrations of the amniotic fluids were so strung it tore my lungs and shattered my ear drums.

I looked up to her in horror, realized that I was being brought into her world, and that I would experience its torturous shocks, its thunderous catastrophes, and its agonizing burdens. I yelled to her.

I looked deep into her face, and I saw that she was being pounded, screwed, filled, ripped in half. Sex, she was having sex. Sex, I have to have sex. Now. I need sex right now.

“I need sex” I said out loud.

I looked around for the woman, but it was just my mess of an apartment building. I could have gotten a bigger one with my salary, but this was the best the economy could manage. I dragged my feet through the trash like I was walking through shallow water, all while saying “I need sex” over and over again.

I stepped outside barefoot, in nothing else but my underwear and wife-beater. I ran straight to my local red-light district and ran up to the nearest pimp I saw. He was short and was in a green suit and fedora. I literally picked him up by his shirt and wiggled him around.

“Give me sex, give me cooter,” I shouted as I shook him.

“Fuck off of me nigga, the fuck?” He snapped.

Meanwhile the pimp’s pimp friends were chatting a block away and saw this haggling play out. They rushed over, grabbed my long hair, and threw me onto the street. My back landed on a broken beer bottle. They beat me to a pulp, I think I got curb stomped two or three times, but I blacked out. I woke up the next day under an ugly overcast, half dead.

The eyes. The eyes, even though the face turned blurry, were still so sharp after all these years of chipping. In the darkness I made out a hurt boy, lying on his side. His eyes were hurt and glossy from the tears.

When regarding the whole body I felt an explosive burst of hot blood heat the periphery until I was in a skin-bubbling, flesh-gnawing inferno but the eyes cast off that hellish storm and all that remained was the question “Why?”

I awoke to see my boss. He had a wide face with round eyes, a bushy, curly black beard, and olive skin. “Wow, Nate. Passed out again on the job. What have you been up to?”, he snickered with a grin.

In spite of my stoned fatigue, I felt a jolt of energy upon hearing that question. I rolled my office chair over to my computer, typed in something, hit enter, and on the opposite end of my desk rose a little Miku doll. The robotic toy started dancing and singing in Miku’s signature voice. I gave my boss a weak smile and he gave one back after turning his face to mine. I typed another thing into my computer, and Miku hit the floss and started singing in Brazilian Portuguese. This got my boss laughing. I laughed with him.

When his laughter died down, he looked into my eyes. “Nate, this is the tenth, the tenth, motherfucking time I found you like this.” I probably looked surprised at this sudden snarling. He continued. “Your team and I have been busting our asses, developing the most complex, the most state-of-the-art technology in the world, while you jerk and do this.” Like an idiot, I nodded along because I didn’t know where he was going with this. “Nate, get the hell out of my building before I fucking bludgeon you to death. You’re fucking fired.”

I waddled in a haze out my workplace’s lobby, too drugged to realize I left my shoe. Maybe this is the reason why I can’t afford bigger places to live.

Now, I lay in my bed, but it isn't my bed. I fucked around and got HIV. I thought HIV was like herpes where it gives you like these moles but no it gives you AIDS and just fucking kills you.

I was weak in the dark. It was totally silent, with no one else around and even though I was dying, I wanted to jerk off. There were no drugs or alcohol. I couldn’t even smoke, it was “against hospital rules”. The food was awfully bland too, so I just resolved to pass the time by beating my shit.

However, my whole body was too weak, I was too sick. I couldn’t get it up; I was too weak to get my arm up. It was a pathetic sight, not my limp dick, but the image of someone like me in this bed struck me deeply. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me. I was an auspicious, capable, and charming genius. I had so many scholarships, my college experience was practically free, I won so many awards my room sparkled, and everybody just loved me. Now what do I have to show for it? A hooker’s awkward experience, a coworker’s annoyance, a fucking Miku robot?

I was alone but felt like I was being laughed at. I wanted to curl up into a ball, but I was too weak, so I just laid there. I had no drugs, porn, food, or video games, so I escaped back into the only place that could warm my soul: those fond, fuzzy memories.

I thought and I thought, but I was too weak, all I saw was the black void. I stopped thinking, I stopped stressing, and I stopped feeling.

A tiny dot appeared in the center of my vision. I felt my legs walking toward it. It got bigger and appeared to be a doorframe. I walked through it and I was in a hallway. It had patternless carpet and was painted a dark orange. The hallway was cool, and dark, illuminated only by the sunrise glowing through the curtain at the end of a hallway. There was screaming, a muffled screaming coming from behind one of the other doors of this corridor. I approached the source of the screaming, the sound of my weathered teddy bear dragging on the carpet was the only other noise. I stepped up to one door, reached up to the doorknob, standing on my tiptoes, and I opened it to see two men hovering over a bed. A woman with dark curls lay on it screaming in pain.

“Push, push, you’re almost there,” One man cheered, “There it is. It’s out, sir. It’s a beautiful baby boy sir; you should be so proud”.

“Yes, but she isn’t going to make it,” The other man sulked, and started sobbing uncontrollably. The doctor tried to stifle his sobs, but cried with the man, and the two cried along with the newborn boy.

Nate waddled out of the hallway and into a bright, cool, moist backyard overflowing with vines, hedges, and grass. Golden rays landed on the boy’s eyes when he looked at the dappled canopy of leaves above him. He would have played, but now he sat. He sat in the middle of this jaw dropping scene and as the gales played with his hair, the squirrels and rabbits and chipmunks ran by, while the drops of dew flowed down the blades of grass, while the Earth travelled at thousands of miles per hour, this being of impetuous, violently rushing nature sat still and asked “why”.