Defeated

Story two of the D3 trilogy

Created on Midjourney

Stop!

If you haven’t read part one of the D3 trilogy, follow the link below to read it first.

Dismayed

Dismayed

Defeated

Sofiy had thought the worst had happened when she lost both of her parents on the same night when she was nine, her mom to cancer and her dad in a car accident as he sped to the hospital to say goodbye. She had gone to live with her aunt Olena after that and slowly begun to pick up the pieces of her life.

At thirteen, she had finally started to thrive again. She had friends and was excelling in school. Well, the school part wasn’t new. She had buried herself in books when her parents died. And words, her beloved and hated words. The descriptors through which she viewed her life.

Today, her word was defeated. She had begun to see a pattern in her life. She wasn’t allowed to have anything good. And she was doomed to be the survivor—the witness—to death and destruction.

Putin’s War, they called it. Cancer had taken her mom, and, in a way, her dad as well. He wouldn’t have been rushing to the hospital that night if it hadn’t been for mom’s illness. Putin’s War had now taken her aunt Olena and the home they had shared. Putin’s War was a different sort of cancer. It infected people’s souls. It made them monsters.

Somehow, Sofiy’s bedroom had been mostly spared in the blast when the shell hit their tiny house. Somehow, she still stood. There wasn’t enough of Aunt Olena left to pull from the rubble.

As Sofiy looked out on the devastation she used to call home, something inside her quit. Everyone she loved was dead and the soldiers just kept coming. There was no freedom for her, no life to live. No reason to keep living. She sank to her knees in the rubble and wept the tears she had held at bay for four long years.

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Things have only gotten worse for Sofiy since her parents’ deaths in part one of my D3 trilogy. Stay tuned for the resolution of this story in “Defeared,” publishing next Sunday.

I recognize that Sofiy’s eyes were blue in the first story and are now green. They’ll be blue again next week. I’m ignoring the continuity error, because these are the images I liked best for the stories.

When I started writing the D3 trilogy, Sofiy’s name was Ella-Mae and her aunt was Kate. I had imagined this story took place in Canada or the U.S. But as I began to write “Defeated,” I realized I didn’t need to write a dystopian near-future story. We are witnessing dystopian realities around the world right now. So I reset the stories in Ukraine and changed the names to reflect the location.