Original (16 words):

The therapist told me to talk about my feelings.

So I told her.

Now she quit.

100 or less (98 words):

She greeted me the same way everyone does. A nice smile. Eyes full of assumptions. She assumes that I, Indigo Waters, am just another troubled teen. Depression, maybe. Suicidal thoughts? Drugs, maybe? Whatever. It doesn't matter what she says. It won't be accurate. Nothing on earth can describe what I have

She asks how I'm doing, I tell her I'm not.

Pain, fear, remorse, happiness, all of it is out of reach.

It's not something that can be fixed with pills or hugs.

She doesn't know how to handle it. And so, like everyone else, she is gone.

200-600 (263 words):

I inspect my purple nails and refuse to meet her eyes. There is no reason for me to be here. Ms. Karper can't help me. It doesn't matter if she has a nice smile, or eighty fancy degrees lined up on a wall, or Disney posters with empowering messages. My problem isn't emotional. It can't be solved with meds.

"Hi Indigo. Welcome."

"Hi."

"So... what seems to be going on?"

"You can't help me."

"Lots of people say that. I'm sure it'll be okay. Let's start simple: how are you feeling?"

"I'm not."

"Not what?"

"Not feeling. Anything. At all. Not physically, or emotionally. I feel no pain. No happiness. Nothing."

"That can't be right."

"Oh come on. I've tried all the quickies. Nothing works. I don't feel anything. Ever. I don't sleep, but I'm never tired. I eat every once and a while, but I don't taste it. I don't get hungry. I don't feel anything. Period."

"When you say you've tried..."

"Do I need to spell it out? You've seen my record. I've been hospitalized six times, three of them for school fights, once for a suicide attempt, and twice for self-harm. All those times, I didn't feel anything. No pain. No fear. No relief. No nothing. Do you get it yet?"

"I..."

"What're you going to do? Drug me up? Diagnose me with some obscure illness? Try it. It doesn't matter."

And in response, Ms. Karper took her degrees, took her encouraging Disney posters, took her kind smile, and walked out the door.

And I still don't feel a thing.

800-1500 words (1442 words):

I didn't cry.

When I was born, I didn't cry. Amidst the chaos, the blood, the light, and the screams of my mother, I did not cry.

They used to brag about it. "My baby girl was so nice and quiet when she was born."

That was before they knew why.

In third grade, I got in a fight with a fifth grader. He nearly tore my ear off.

He got expelled. As for me, I didn't cry. In fact, I barely even noticed. I was suspended for a week. I guess they were so concerned about punishment and so confused by my apathy that they didn't notice my ear, either.

But when I got home, my parents flipped.

I didn't notice. I didn't regret beating up that kid. He was a jerk.

After that, they stopped bragging about how quiet I was.

My dad experimented. If I didn't feel my ear, what else couldn't I feel?

So he beat me. He cut me. He insulted me. And all of it was like floating in air. I couldn't feel any of it. I was just in the middle of my self-induced sensory deprivation tank.

I heal fast, too. It's as if, without pain, you can move on faster. Bruises healed. Cuts scabbed over and vanished. Insults just rolled off. The ear that almost got ripped off healed, with a few stitches, and in a few months, I could go back to hearing normally.

Eventually Dad gave up. He couldn't make me feel. He wanted a normal girl, he didn't get one.

So, he went to the store to buy milk.

Or something like that.

Mom tolerated it with silence. She was always silent. Sometimes I wondered if she was like me. Unable to feel. But of course, that's stupid. There's no one else like me. But even she had her doubts sometimes. Her fears. Her worries. Moms are like that, you know.

That's how I ended up in Ms. Karper's office.

With a name like "Karper," it's no wonder she ended up in therapy. When some whiny brat is complaining about how their dad won't get them the newest iPhone, she can just say "At least you don't have my last name."

I inspect my purple nails and refuse to meet her eyes. There is no reason for me to be here. Ms. Karper can't help me. It doesn't matter if she has a nice smile, or eighty fancy degrees lined up on a wall, or Disney posters with empowering messages. My problem isn't emotional. It can't be solved with meds.

"Hi Indigo. Welcome."

"Hi."

"So... what seems to be going on?"

"You can't help me."

"Lots of people say that. I'm sure it'll be okay. Let's start simple: how are you feeling?"

"I'm not."

"Not what?"

"Not feeling. Anything. At all. Not physically, or emotionally. I feel no pain. No happiness. Nothing."

"That can't be right."

"Oh come on. I've tried all the quickies. Nothing works. I don't feel anything. Ever. I don't sleep, but I'm never tired. I eat every once and a while, but I don't taste it. I don't get hungry. I don't feel anything. Period."

"When you say you've tried..."

"Do I need to spell it out? You've seen my record. I've been hospitalized six times, three of them for school fights, once for a suicide attempt, and twice for self-harm. All those times, I didn't feel anything. No pain. No fear. No relief. No nothing. Do you get it yet?"

"I..."

"What're you going to do? Drug me up? Diagnose me with some obscure illness? Try it. It doesn't matter."

And in response, Ms. Karper took her degrees, took her encouraging Disney posters, took her kind smile, and walked out the door.

And I still don't feel a thing.

Now, Mom's really lost her head. After therapy nosedived, she took me to this place. Some stage musician called "Leah Heart, Empath."

I don't care. Magic can't help me. Science can't help me. Touchy-feely crap can't help me, either.

I'm unfixable. And quite honestly, I don't care. Better to feel nothing than to feel all the pain. When I look back on it, my life is pretty bad. Any normal person would collapse. Child abuse, bullying, neglect. I'm like the poster child for messed up stuff. But it doesn't make any difference to me. I could be living in California in a million dollar mansion with two loving parents and blonde hair and trendy clothes and all the friends in the world, and it wouldn't change a thing.

I'm not broken, because that would imply I was once whole. I'm just defective.

To my surprise, Leah Heart isn't some old woman wearing bead jewelry and thready head scarves. It's a kid my age, a girl. She's wearing a Coldplay sweatshirt and short shorts. The only thing weird about her is that she's not wearing any shoes. Or socks. She's walking around barefoot.

She looks at me and sobs.

I look at my mom, and she nudges me, her message clear: don't be rude.

"Hi, Ms. Heart," Mom says, her voice tight. "We came to see if you can help my daughter."

Suddenly, Leah stands bolt upright and laughs.

Despite myself, I take a step back. One thing I've learned: whether you can feel pain or not, never get in the way of a nutcase.

But she stares at me, her wide blue eyes swimming with emotion.

"You don't feel anything," she says, clasping a dark hand around my wrist. "And I feel everything."

"Uh.. okay," I say, not sure what else to say. "Yeah."

"I think we can help each other," says Leah, straightening and looking at my mom. "But you must leave."

Now it's Mom's turn to look at me. I shrug. She wasn't there for most of my life, too wrapped up in her own shit to care about little old me. No reason for her to be here now. Just because you suddenly start caring doesn't mean you can make up for ignorance.

When she's gone, Leah looks at me and laughs.

I stare at her, and she stops.

"Sorry," she says. "I told you: I feel everything. And apparently a little girl down the street just watched a really funny clip of Mickey Mouse. But... all things aside... I think you can help me."

"How? Aren't you supposed to be helping me?"

"Well... let's say the helping will go both ways. Are you allergic to scented candles?"

"Uh... no?"

"Great. Then follow me."

I follow her into a room that seems much more "mystic" than she is. It's full of candles and runes and one of those bead curtains over the doorway.

In her sweatshirt and shorts, she looks so out of place.

She looks around the room and snorts.

"This is my mom's gig. She makes the place look wacky as heck. No magic in my curse. It just is."

Looking at her, I feel something. In the back of my mind, not quite there, but struggling to be realized.

She, like me, has a curse. Our curses are different. Opposites. But we have something in common, for sure.

And so, for the first time, I feel something resembling understanding.

She looks at me, her misty blue eyes meeting my hazel ones, and I get the feeling she understands me, too.

"Anyway, sit down." I sit down in the only place available— the floor, and she sits across from me.

"Grab my hands," she says. I do. I don't feel fear, or nervousness, or apprehension, so I just do it.

Her hands are cold and sweaty, and ever so often, they twitch. Ever so subtly.

And then, I black out.

We both do.

I don't remember what happened while I was blacked out. It wasn't like fainting, or passing out, it's more like... a gap in my memory. But when the blackout was over, I smiled.

Because I was feeling. Everything. Good and bad. Everything I had missed out on my entire life flooded into my head in one great wave.

And, I guess, all the extra stuff Leah was feeling was gone from her. Both of us were back to the way we were supposed to be.

As I smiled, tears leaked from my eyes, spilling onto the shag carpet below us. Leah was crying too, but it wasn't her hysterical sobbing.

We were both crying real tears. Because we are normal now.

I felt, and she felt, and neither of us said a word, because the silence of normalcy was beautiful. Even my bad feelings.

All of it was beautiful.

(Short)

“Darling!” Milvanda cried as she found him, bleeding out on the floor. She knelt at William’s body and cradled his head, soothing him as he writhed with pain from the twin gunshot wounds on his chest. “Oh, you’re turning blue, you poor thing... whoever did this to you?”

“My wonderful wife,” William coughed. He touched her cheek. “If only... I could find the name. It was... it was...”

Milvanda leaned in, tearful, yet ready for the name of her vengeance...

But all she received was the barrel of his pistol, rising to her shocked face.

“It was you.”

BAM.

~~~~~

(Medium)

He saw the assassin waiting in the doorway, out of the corner of his eye from his writing desk. He sighed. The moment had played over and over in his head, yet now that it had arrived, it seemed unreal, like a fever dream.

“Just get it over with,” he told the man, who was obviously trying to conceal a pistol under his bulging blue suit jacket, without turning to make eyes at him. “Don’t bother making it look like an accident, either. We both know why you’re here.”

The assassin’s eyebrows flared in the warm yellow light. “I figured as such. It’s not often a wanted man waits patiently in his office while someone outside is breaking down the door. Tell you what, at first I thought you were with some other lady. Was gonna let you two finish before I took you out.”

William scoffed, so harshly he felt his spit rattle at the back of his throat. “So that’s what she told you, hm? That I’m a cheating man.” He leaned back in his thick red velvet armchair and rolled his golden pen-- For My Darling Wallace, 1994-- between his fingers. “I don’t intend to stop you from carrying out your work, sir. But before you impose yourself upon my hard night’s work, would you at least have the courtesy to hear my side of this sordid little tale?”

The assassin shuffled from foot to foot, confused. It gave William just enough time to clamber very slowly to his feet and get in a nice monologuing position, leaning against his desk like a courtroom lawyer hot into his closing position. At least, it would look like that from the outside. Looking closely you could see he was quivering, muscles weakened with the neurological disease that had collapsed his formerly-muscular frame into a shivering, baggy-suited scarecrow.

“It all started when we first married,” he said, gesturing his arm in a little sneering circle. “Ah, she seemed such a lovely girl in those halcyon days. Beautiful, modest, always singing with that chiming voice of hers. I thought I’d found the love of a thousand lifetimes in that smile, but...”

His fist clenched on the desk. “Soon after we married I felt myself growing ill. At first, oddly enough, I barely minded. I had my angel to look after me in my harshest days, taking me on walks, cooking my meals when I was too weak to stand. So our days passed in leisure, and in spite of my illness I was the happiest man alive. But then I noticed signs. A bottle of rat poison on the counter next to the sugar. The way she would wrap her arms about me, dragging those long scarlet nails about my windpipe. I ignored them. I did not want to add them up into the final equation, the one which would reveal her betrayal once and for all.

“But one day, alas, the equation solved itself. One day while I coughed up blood upon my pillow, I heard her giggling with a man downstairs. ‘Just a bit longer, and we’ll have that sweet life insurance policy his daddy set up,’ her ringing voice chimed through the living room. If only she’d known that it carried up the stairwell as well!”

He paused, to cough into his hand. With the last drops of strength in his frame he stared straight into the assassin’s eyes. “But then, she must have known. So fire, dear boy. She’s outranked me.”

The gunshots rang out. He knew the sound that would come next.

“Darling!” Milvanda cried out...

~~~~

(Long)

The yellow light shone on Miranda Brentworth’s fake jewels as she waited in the wings, watching the penultimate scene of her husband Wallace’s latest masterwork, The Golden Pen, stun an audience of unsuspecting matinee idyll idiots. Iydelldiots, she thought, and a guilty little dimple that no script could glean from her etched its way into her cheek. Then she felt his hot breath on her neck and it vanished into her face, lost in a white eruption of makeup.

“What do you think?” he said, peering out past her into the crowd. “Is this the grand comeback of Wallace Brentworth or what? And in just three minutes, your name will be etched into the history of this stage.”

She was silent. Then he drummed his fingers against her shoulder impatiently, his usual air of condescension condensing in his mouth.

“Of course, it would be nice if you thanked me, just once.”

“Why should I thank you? It’s not as if we’re on Broadway or anything.” Miranda watched the subplot on the stage conclude itself. “And anyway, I think this play drags a bit. Did we really need the bumbling detective to drop the case against the wife? It’s just such blatant manipulation, to make it look like the world’s against William. Because of course high society is just so cruel to those poor innocent creative types who go around cutting off their wife’s bank accounts.”

“It’s called a misdirect. Something I think you would know all about, given all that time you spent with Darren the chiropractor on your so-called visit to your mother’s.”

“Oh, so we want to get into deception?” She folded her arms and stared up into her husband’s face-- gray-browed, moony, creased and folded with the passing years. “Then perhaps we should discuss your little white lies about our fincances that got us here in the first place, hm? Or the way you shot our last play in the foot, tiptoeing around the balconies with the theater patron’s wives.”

“Those were all spur of the moment mistakes, Miranda!” Once again, she was silent, and he fiddled angrily at his rented white suit, clutching his fingers around the prop pistol in his breast pocket. “Let me make one thing clear-- everything I did, I did for us. Sure, the affairs were a mistake, but even those were one-offs! Tactical moves to get us to a better place in the patron’s standings, which would have worked if you hadn’t found out and told them all! Unlike you, my dear, my plans are in the service of two people. Not one.”

“Always so good with words.” Miranda sighed, and pulled at the fingers on her long red gloves. “But so blind to the big picture. I never did anything as part of a plan, Wallace. That was all you. All you...”

To that moment she had stayed calm and collected, something which she was very proud of herself for. But then he drove in an unexpected, whispered blow, just as the detective on stage performed some pratfalls that sent the whole audiuence into a cacophany of laughter:

“You’ve been out for yourself ever since you bought me that pen.”

To anyone else who may have been listening it would have seemed a trivial comment. But in the tight warming curtain space backstage, the yellow lights above burning into her head, it was so shocking that Miranda could not bring herself to make any expression at all.

“Don’t be coy. You remember...”

“Our first fight.” She turned away from him towards backstage, squeezing her eyes shut to stop her tears from smudging her mascara. “It was such a silly mistake, Wallace. I didn’t know it was so expensive...”

“Five hundred dollars of our own money. On our first anniversery, when it could have bought me a writing desk.” He pulled the dreaded object out of his pocket and twirled it like a baton in front of her nose. “And you couldn’t even get the year of our wedding right.”

“Why can’t you ever let things go?” Her voice was a bare whisper, vanishing into the fading lights above. It was almost time for the scene’s transition and in her mind she wished that he would leave right then. But the stagehands needed to move the chairs and tables, and she was left with him, in that little curtained row next to the stage, imprisoned. “I loved you then, and I thought it would please you.”

“Because I know you,” he said, dreadfully plain in that writerly way. “Always getting in the way of our dreams.”

She forced herself to glare at him as the stagehands rushed past them, and he whirled around in his jacket (it was a size too big and still had the tag on the inside) and took off in the opposite direction, anger shaking his whole body. He sat down in his desk, adjusted the “gun” in his pocket, and in the little moment in time where the lights shifted became William Brandington, the wealthy but put-upon businessman targeted by his shrew of a wife and her hired hand.

Miranda turned away from him and peered out into the backstage, where the stage hands, kids in black t-shirts, were all high-fiving and hugging each other for their job well done. A few were sneaking pizzas and boxed wine in through the stage door, which was propped open with a wooden wedge and had posters for the Three Blind Mice elementary school play emblazoned across it. The night outside was bright and starry, and spotlit by a romantic little street lamp like the ones they used to walk under. A long time ago, before they were even married. Before the score-keeping started.

She could walk out, she thought, just walk out in her rhinestone jewels and her stage-costume fairy princess dress and there was nothing he could do about it. It would be just what he deserved.

But then she turned to him, weak and sickly in his imaginary rage, and still rolling that pen in her hand as he spoke to the “assassin” she’d supposedly sent after him. What would it hurt to just finish the play? All of these rubes wanted to know how the story ended, and hell, she would give them a show. She would not be remembered as another poorly resolved plot thread in the life of Wallace Brentworth. She was an actress, and if she had to pretend to be invested in him just one last time, she would do it. For the audience. Not for him.

The gunshot sound went off. She grinned at the sound, a goofy pop that some high school kid had sampled from a video game, and transformed into Mrs. Milvanda Brandington as she rushed into the yellow lights.

“Darling!” Miranda cried out as she rushed to him, bleeding ketchup out on the floor. She knelt at Wallace’s sprawled-out body and cradled his head, soothing him as he writhed with pain from the imagined twin gunshot wounds on his chest. “Oh, you’re turning blue, you poor thing... whoever did this to you?”

“My wonderful wife,” William coughed, taking in the moment. He ran his finger across her cheek, and she summoned her last remaining bits of love for him into an expression of pained sorrow that the kids in the back could see. “If only... I could find the name. It was... it was...”

Milvanda leaned in. Yes, go ahead, say it was me. Let out all that anger in your heart once and for all, so we can get out of this silly show once and for all.

But then she saw the pistol emerge from her husband’s pocket. And she knew, in a single moment of horror, that she would not emerge into the starry street. He was ending this story for her... and there was no door to pin her hopes to this time.

“It was you.” His face was dead as he pulled the trigger.

BAM.

The crowd went wild with shock. No one could believe it. How real the gunshot had sounded as it echoed across the auditorium! How vivid the shower of blood that she collapsed into! It was as if the whole budget had gone into ending the show with a bang, one which would be etched into their memories forever.

The crowd erupted into thundrous applause as the curtain fell. And only those in front, the shorter ones closer to the stage’s bottom, would have noticed that the blood gushing from Milvanda’s chest was more viscouous and profuse than that of her husband’s, that her expression was far too ghoulish and pained even for an accomplished ex-professional actress such as herself. It wasn’t until the second shot went off that the stagehands saw what had happened. And by then, it was too late. Miranda and Wallace Brentworth lay bleeding out on the floor, the golden pen For My Darling Wallace lying stained in their mingled blood.