The challenge: write a complete story in 500 words or less following these guidelines:

Setting: On the bus

Genre: Dark academia + Speculative

Situation: “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Characters: Elon Musk + a hotshot

POV/tense: 1st person/future tense

The result:

Heart Like a Fortress

One day my heart will surrender its walls. It will break its shell and pierce the world around me. I know this. Until that day I will persevere. I will swallow down my screams and funnel my pain like bullets in my bloodstream and inside those barricades.

Until then I will ride the shuttlebus in my seat assigned not by the proctors of Blessed Musk Institute 67 in the Fourth Sluice of Olympus Mons, but by Damron, he of the titanium fist, he of the night vision eyes, he of the pack that gloats over their fifteen-generation lineage on Mars, their high-grade cybernetics, and their vulgar power.

“You failed advanced chelation,” he whispers in my ear. “Not me,” he purrs. “I aced it.”

That old tingle of shame pricks my limbs and flushes my face. I curse my weakness. “I never wanted to be here,” I whisper.

“Ha!” Damron barks to his pack. They yelp laughter as if on command. “Hear that? The Earthling doesn’t want to be here. Thinks he’s too good for us Redders.”

“I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” I say flatly. Two dead parents on Earth plus one living uncle on Mars equals a one-way trip to another planet, another institute, another mode of being.

“You don’t belong here,” Damron hisses. “Mars will crush you.” He wraps metal fingers around my earlobe. “We will crush you.”

He squeezes. I swallow the pain. I will rise from my seat and tell him: No, you can never crush me! Mars will never crush me! All the proctors and students at the Blessed Musk Institute with their leers and scorn will never crush me!

I tell him none of that. Instead I flinch and I let escape a treasonous “ouch.”

“Heeeah! What a pathetic meatboy you are.” Damron gloats in his victory. He slaps me on the side of the head.

“Don’t!”

I shield myself but it does no good. He batters my skull until I see more stars than the darkest night in the Hellas Planitia.

A girl in the back squeals laughter. “You made meatboy cry again.” My eyes burn. I wish I was invisible. Bullets of shame course through my bloodstream. They coagulate inside the shell of my heart with all the rest trapped there—my hurt and pain, my hopes and dreams, all encapsulated away from me, from the world, for my safety, for theirs, but all the while I am dead inside, without a heart to call my own.

“You’re so pathetic,” Damron whispers. “I bet that’s why your parents killed themselves.”

That’s it. That’s the one last bit of shrapnel to load into the fortress of my heart. My eyes bolt open. “I never failed advanced chelation,” I say. “I am not just a meatsack.”

One day that fortress heart of mine will explode, a bomb of metal mingled with blood, and I will send fragments of my pain into the hearts of all around me. That day is now.

Image: © iStock/nemchinowa