Flash fiction: Broken

Today, I sat down on the train after work and started the 10 minute meditation program from Simply Being. And then I wrote a short piece of flash fiction based on Donna B. McNicol's Write 4 Ten prompt "broken".

When the ten minutes were up, I wasn't very happy with the piece - so I reset the meditation program, and started over.

This is the result:

Broken

Elisabeth was crying.

She was lying in bed, had just woken up to turn off the alarm clock - then had crawled back under the covers, curled up, and buried her face in the pillow. 

She cried so hard that it was difficult to breathe. Really bawled, like a child, with total abandon. Her entire body was shaking, and she couldn't focus long enough to relax her muscles and make it stop. Her stomach knotted itself into a ball of stress; warm and tight inside her. It sent a warn wave through her body, followed by an icy one. She felt sick, and kept crying. 

Gradually, the tears stopped, and she felt her breathing slow down. Her muscles relaxed, and she wiped her eyes and nose on the pillow cover. Then she pushed the pillow off the bed onto the floor. 

She didn't know what to do. She knew perfectly well what she wanted - which was to be left alone, and spend the whole day in bed, alone with her thoughts and daydreams. 

She lay in the dark, staring up into the ceiling. Once in a while, a small sob forced its way out of her chest, and she cried a few tears. She didn't want to get up and go to work; and she didn't want to have to explain herself to her boss, or her roommate, or her parents. She just wanted to be alone. 

She turned over in bed, with her back to the alarm clock, pulled the covers over her head, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

---

It's meant to be a small character study of the main character from my NaNoWriMo novel from last year (I'm also testing a renaming; from Isabella to Elisabeth). In that respect, it's not the best piece of flash fiction - but I think it works as a piece of a bigger puzzle.