Nothing and Nowhere

Greetings! This is post 3/3 of the last ten days.

This time, I have a short microfiction I wrote for the theme Nothing and Nowhere. This IS an ECA theme and will be coming up later, but I wrote this for another group. Nonetheless, I hope you enjoy it!

Nothing and Nowhere: Broken

“Quale!” He threw aside the rifle and gathered Qualia’s limp body against his chest. With one hand he ripped off his shirt and pressed it against her stomach, trying desperately to staunch the blood flow.  

“Cis,” Qualia breathed, weakly grasping his hand. Her eyes were already gazing indistinctly past him, and her ragged frame trembled with every shaky breath. He could hear Cristae, the other medic, rushing towards them. She wouldn’t make it in time. He could already feel Qualia’s life force ebbing away—he could tangibly see Qualia’s soul rising out of her broken body. “Keep living,” the ghost wished, then turned to wisps of dust. In a heartbeat, Qualia was gone, blended into the rising smoke. 

He screamed wordlessly into night, but the pain piercing his heart drowned out even that sound. As the tears started to fall, he lowered his head, drenching his hair with the blood of the only girl who had ever touched his wretched heart. 

----->><<----- 

Slowly, he blinked, piecing together the world around him. A table, a chair, a door, a mirror. 

“What happened?” he groaned, stretching aching limbs. He rolled, and sprawled unceremoniously on a wooden floor painted with something sticky and crimson. 

“You tried to kill yourself,” Cristae drawled, half awake herself. “Even after her last words were for you to keep living.” 

He searched blindly around him, spilling a bottle over himself. Just the smell burned the back of his throat. He suddenly had an idea of how he’d tried killing himself. “Give me a gun.” 

Rough, hacking noises escaped Cristae’s throat before she could reply. Half coughing, half groaning, she ground her head against the table to block out the pain. Irritably, she chucked the pistol on her belt at him.“Get out, Cisternae. If you want to die so badly at least don’t do it in front of me. She was my best friend.”

He found bullets under a shirt on the floor and loaded the gun up, sticking a tenth under the canvas of his boot. He squinted at himself in the dirty mirror: disheveled hair, sunken eyes, covered in bruises, a small scar on his chest over where his heart should have been. 

“Where’re you going?”  

He clicked the safety off, and shot the scar, shattering himself into thousands of tiny shards that, like his heart, could never be put back together again. 

“Nowhere,” he replied, his voice broken. “I’ve got nothing left.”

I originally wrote the microfiction in two parts, indicated here by the divider. However, this proved to be more than the 250 word submission word count limit. Since the words from the theme showed up in the second half, I just submitted edited the second half for conciseness and profanity and submitted that half. I ended up liking the filtered version more than the explicit version and thus kept it for the blog submission. If you're curious though:

• "What the hell happened"--> "What happened" 
• "Fuck you, Cisternae"--> "Get out, Cisternae." 
• "If you want to die so damn badly...."--> "If you want to die so badly...."

I did my best to hint at the reason why he tried to commit suicide was because he'd lost his girl, but this didn't get across as clearly as I'd hoped. XD Hopefully the first part clarifies that more. 

I had also written another piece for the theme, but didn't like this one as much. 

“I’m going nowhere,” the boy looked up innocently at the officer. He pulled his pockets out. “I’ve got nothing.” The policeman stared disbelievingly at the boy. But the kid seemed earnest enough. He let him go. And so the kid earnestly wished the officer luck on finding the thief, ran away, and earnestly enjoyed his stolen bread.

“I’m going nowhere,” the teenager drawled coolly, raising his drink to his mouth casually. The girls around him peppered him with questions. He smirked mysteriously and always gave them the same reply. He had an enigmatic reputation to keep up. “I’ve got nothing.”

“I’m going nowhere,” the man cried desperately. He wished his tears could heal—wasn’t this, the only sign of remorse he’d ever shown—enough? But nothing could stay Death’s scythe. He was left alone and unanswered, sobbing into the clothes of a corpse. “I’ve got nothing.”

Unedited. This one was centered around the repetition of the same words Cisternae says in Broken: "I'm going nowhere. I've got nothing." The idea was to show how the words would sound different and mean different nuances of meaning based on the context. 

Finally, we'll be back to ECA updates starting this Friday (09/ 27)! School is starting for me the day before, but I still hope I can keep up a semi-consistent posting schedule. :)

Thanks for reading! 

~Minerva

P.S. Does formatting the writing like this make it easier to read? It's a pain for the formatting, but if it helps space things out I'll continue to do it. :)