Dora Reads: Nerd Church - Short Story: Everyone Is Born With A Void

Sunday 10 March 2024

Nerd Church - Short Story: Everyone Is Born With A Void

This story was originally published on the Promptly Written publication on Medium, in response to the following prompt from Ravyne Hawke:

Write a story around the following:

— a bottomless pit
— a moment of despair
— a hopeful or hopeless outcome

Warning: this story contains injury imagery, including acid burns, and also centres on mental health issues (depression,) and hopelessness.

Everyone Is Born With A Void

This is Emmeline's.

Everyone is born with a void. An empty space that makes the word hollow feel hollow. A deep and infected despair that grows as you do.

Everyone is born with a void. Some people are able to tame them, wrap them up, fill them healthily or unhealthily — whatever they must do to stop them from growing. Some are even able to shrink them — an old woman in the States, they say, had a void so small she could pop it in a matchbox and only bring it out on special occasions.

Everyone is born with a void. Some people’s grow and grow and grow, becoming a black hole in their spirit that consumes the world around them and turns it into more of itself — more emptiness, more pain, more meaninglessness, more suffering.

Emmeline’s void was all-encompassing by the time she reached 17. By 35, she didn’t know how she was still standing. Her face was a permanent salt-line of escaped tears. Her breathing was muffled by the force of the weight on her chest. She hid away, not wanting her void to stretch the voids of others, not wanting her gravity to pull at their edges. She hid away, not wanting other people to see — to know how much it hurt her.

One day, out of many that seemed just the same as one another, Emmeline grasped her void by the edges, gasping as the acid-sting bit through to the bones in her hands. She did not let go. She held that burning blight until she found she could move it around in her hands, fold it, and turn it, and sew it like silk. If silk were deadly.

Emmeline got to work. She created a form of it which she could live with. She sewed and worked and worked and sewed. It hurt. She kept working. And finally, she created a way to live, and yet let the uncontrollable void do what it must.

Emmeline’s void was untameable. But then, so was Emmeline.

Everyone is born with a void. People stopped noticing Emmeline’s. They assumed her void was small: in her bag, perhaps, or some big pocket of that cloak she always wore. That’s the kind of place where most people — with their moderate, tamed, voids — kept them, after all.

…It was only when they saw the jagged cosmic seams of the cloak itself that they realised — some with awe, some with terror — what she had done.

Everyone is born with a void.

Emmeline fashioned her void into a cloak. She wrapped it around herself, despite the scorch of the cursed fabric. It still hurt her, burned her, ate away at her, as it had before: but it was hers now, not controlled, but contained; portable. Not tamed, but channelled.

Everyone is born with a void. An empty space that makes the word hollow feel hollow. A deep and infected despair that grows as you do.

Everyone is born with a void. Some people are able to tame them, wrap them up, fill them healthily or unhealthily — whatever they must do to stop them from growing. Others — like Emmeline — have to get more creative.

If you’re in the UK or ROI, you can talk to The Samaritans about anything at any time. Check out their contact details here.

If you’re not in the UK or ROI, you can check out this list of international suicide helplines.

Wanna pay the author? You can buy me a coffee here.

So, whatcha think?

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