Dismayed

Story one of the D3 trilogy

Created on Midjourney

Dismayed was one word for what Sofiy experienced when her world began to crumble around her. Others might be shaken, shocked, and appalled. But the word that best fit, the one she had learned only last week, was horrified. Yup. Horrified just about summed it up.

Sofiy was only nine, but she had a pretty good grasp of what it meant when her mom got sick with the cancer. She overheard her dad use the word terminal on the phone. She’d had to look that word up. Sometimes she didn’t like words very much. Except, they helped her understand, even if she liked what she understood even less.

As she stood at the side of the road watching the car burn in the drizzling rain, Dad lay beside her, struggling to breathe. He’d barely been able to help her out of the car before it went up in flames. Now they’d never make it to the hospital in time.

The nurse had said Mom didn’t have much time left and they needed to hurry if they wanted to say goodbye. Sofiy crouched down beside her father. She’d called an ambulance on his cell phone. She wasn’t sure that was going to make it in time either.

Only a few weeks ago, she would have cried, but she’d reached the point at which she was too numb to cry. All the tears had been wrung out of her body. As a siren began to wail in the distance, she realized that was another word for dismayed, maybe. Numb. Yup. That’s what she was right now. Numb.

---

I wrote this trilogy to tie together three images I created from single word emotion prompts. As of this writing, all three are complete, so I can tell you to hang in until the end, as dire as things may seem now.

I won’t tell you why just yet, but the image from the final story was the real inspiration for this trilogy. You’ll have to read all three to find out why! Stay tuned. D2, “Defeated,” publishes next Sunday!