Three Minute Fiction

Emy hopped from foot to foot, pushing her blue hair back from her pale face. Her anxiety had been building from the minute her hand had slipped, and now she could hardly stand a minute without asking the nurses “Is he ready yet?”

“No, dear,” they would say each time, with a sympathetic smile. But Emy could not be consoled. She was screaming inside, thoughts bouncing wildly off the walls of her mind, and she was sure that it showed in the jittering of her anxious body that wouldn’t let her sit down. She recognized this feeling from before she started therapy. It was heavier than the car she had smashed, more terrifying than any accident...and she couldn’t believe it had come back. It was just an accident, wasn’t it?

She couldn’t stop thinking about Masaki now. Well, she could never stop thinking of him--and of japan. She could imagine it now, him walking her through the green summer gardens, eating homemade miso and sushi with his family, and walking through the bright night streets of Tokyo with wide eyes. Maybe she’d be there soon if she hadn’t ruined everything with a slip of her steering wheel.

Through the corner of her eye, Emy saw a young, blonde nurse enter the room and nod to the others.

“Your patient is ready to visit,” said a brunette nurse, looking towards Emy.

Emy nodded her thanks, biting her lip as she stood up and directed her steps towards the hospital room. It’s okay....it’s okay....

Emy froze upon entering the sterile room. She wasn’t sure if it was okay. Her fingers fidgeted nervously as her eyes swept the darkened bandages that adorned his face and arms, and the large white cut on his leg.

“H-how is he?” she asked quietly, turning her clear blue eyes to toward the tall, male doctor.

“He’s going to be fine,” the brown-eyed man assured her with a warm nod. He pointed to the bandages on Masaki’s face and arms. “Those are only cuts. We’ve stitched them up, so he’ll just need to rest here for the about a day or so, just to let the anesthesia wear off and to rest a bit, and then he’ll be free to go. Allright?”

“All right.” Emy nodded forcefully. But she couldn’t help the overbearing feeling that it was all her fault.

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“You can’t go!” Emy cried. She could feel her voice turning high pitched and frantic, almost a shriek. “It’s not safe!”

Masaki rolled his eyes, pushing his thick black hair away from his face. “It’s fine, Emy. Stop overreacting.” She wasn’t expecting him to leave, but suddenly she saw him standing in the doorway.

“You could control your anxiety, Emy,” he said, looking into her watery blue eyes, “If you could just let it out of your mind, maybe you’d let me back in.”

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Emy opened her eyes to the sulight streaming through her open window. She tried to recall yesterday, and immediately Masaki’s words came back to her. They ran around in her mind with each step, and even as she sat down on her yoga mat. Maybe she could let it go, she thought as she relaxed her body, moving into the first pose. She felt her mind start to work, pushing out more negativity with each movement of her body. Maybe she could.

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Emy looked up, making peace with the heavens as she walked through the tall grasses in the park. She wasn’t sure where her feet would take her...

...but she almost wasn’t suprised when she ended up at Masaki’s door.

Story 1: Anna

Cristina Cass

Anna

            Anna grinned, letting her dirty blonde hair fly behind her through the back of her bicycle helmet. Casually, she lifted her fingers off one of the handlebars to gesture quickly to the other drivers on the road. Turning left.

            She smiled again, humming to herself softly. Turning left meant joining the boulevard. Turning left meant a sunny adventure, travelling with the wind on her back and the entire city beneath the strokes of her pedals.

            She wouldn’t mind getting lost. Amidst the patchwork of open windows studded with yellow cars and painted vans, she thought she wouldn’t mind floating forever in the rippling urban sea. The waves would subside slightly in the calm of red traffic lights, but only for a moment before they broke free, spilling into the road like sunlight warming the city with the hustle and bustle of the day. 

            And indeed, the hustle and bustle of the day would begin for her too, but not on the road. No, for her it would begin when she locked up her little blue bike in the sun and freed her untied hair from the confines of her clean white bike helmet. She would open the glass door of the café and step over the threshold into the dimly lit haven of local art and well-dressed people on their computers, shrouded in the morning aroma of brewing coffee and breakfast pastries. She would smile and politely greet the tired-eyed baristas and the hurried customers in blazers and expensive shoes, who rarely smiled and hardly ever sat down to enjoy their coffees. She thought she much preferred the start of her day to theirs, as she would sit down in the shade of one of the many umbrellas in the outdoor seating. Her day was busy, but it never started until she took a sip of her ice cold mocha and a bite of her delightfully fluffy blueberry muffin and opened up her computer to write.

            As Anna parked her bike on this particular sunny morning, she remembered there was nothing particular about it at all. She remembered Friday’s approaching deadline, but she also remembered the sun that fell lightly on her shoulders like a new silk shirt, and the cool comfort of her summer morning routine. She would have liked a little more allowance in her pocket, but she did not resent her life as she laid her hands on the keys to work on the nearly-finished final draft of her book. And she couldn’t help but feel the little giggly spark that arose in her mind when she thought of her plans for after it was finished. In slightly less than a month, she reminded herself, she would be writing, not with a cup of coffee in sunny Chicago, but with une tasse de café on the banks of the Seine.

            Paris. She relished the thought in her mind, of eating warm croissants with fresh fruit jam for breakfast, of starting new projects with new people, and of seeing the picturesque streets of the charming city from the balcony of her apartment every morning.

            Losing reality in her small reverie as she stood up to adjust the slowly sinking umbrella, she hardly noticed as her backpack swung around, accidentally knocking into the girl behind her.

            “I’m so sorry—“ she started to say, but she had barely caught a glimpse of the other girl’s brown eyes, looking away as Chicago strangers always did, before she realized that she had not been heard.

            “Oh.” She cut herself off softly, pursing her lips uncomfortably as she sat down. In her seat again, she looked back, quietly wondering why she hadn’t called after the girl in her usual friendly fashion, as the stranger faded out of her line of vision, leaving only the image of her monogrammed messenger bag in Anna’s mind as she passed. Anna wasn’t sure why it had caught her eye, but she thought that the blue thread spelling out the name Ivy in neat cursive was quite pretty.

Compassion: A Principle to Keep

     As I wrapped the strips from my worn out t-shirt around his arm, my gaze was drawn to his face. Eyes closed like a sleeping child, shaggy brown hair that hadn't seen a scissor since the sun left the sky. His peaceful smile was a mystery to me, as was the patchwork of tear tracks and grime that covered his face. 

      Dead meat. That had been my first reaction when I found him on the side of the road yesterday. Under the blacked sky, on the ash-gray road, there was nothing I could do for him. Might as well focus on myself.
The dry breeze that cracked the feeble branches and blew my hair must have stirred up the ashes in my heart. I turned around and my gaze came to rest on the boy by the side of the road. His bleeding arm and fading smile seemed to stir up the last human emotion I had left. In ten steps that virtue had led me back to him.

     Compassion was on my mind as I bandaged his wounds and sat quietly, waiting for him to wake up.
As I leaned back against the rough tree bark the holes in my shirt reminded me of that overwhelming connection that kept the gun from my head. Compassion. A principle to live by. 

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For this blog, I decided to focus on the principle of compassion, because I value it highly and I think it is often neglected (by myself too.) I wanted to use fiction do demonstrate this so I've written a Road inspired scenario in which I hope I'd take the actions of my main character. 
In a world where all material things are taken away, I think that compassion would be one of the last principles to keep us alive.