This is a really cool piece, with solemn and grounded prose that carries the mood throughout. I'm not hugely sold on the ending? This piece kinda hooks the reader on a layered mystery that it peels back almost lovingly, one layer at a time, each answer revealing a new question. Once it's clear what they're doing, the next question that came to my mind was "whose ashes are they scattering?" The silence and lack of interaction between the two characters, plus the broad solemnity and subject matter, almost had me thinking this would be a piece about grief, that one of the characters was not literally present and was being let go one part at a time. Perhaps that's on me—the hand "holding a box with a ring inside" line is a line that should have conjured more hope than loss, in hindsight—but I also don't think the dead father's deathbed speech quite gels as well with their ritual as it could, and weakens the sense that the latter is a satisfying response to the former. It's the incongurence between his "attention" being spread vs his remains that doesn't quite feel like it follows—I think that weakens the impact of "until there's nothing left of me", which was a really good line. That plus his threat to still be watching, which hangs over the otherwise quite conclusive and final ending paragraph, leaves the ending feeling less firm than it should, I think. Still, the prose was gorgeous and I loved the story here so much, and I'm a big fan of how much you leave unsaid throughout, particularly in the first half.

Quick retrospective from me just for people reading this after the fact: I really don't like this one at all, but in my defense I thought the deadline was two hours later than it actually ended up being and forced myself to rush to submit something as part of my plan to build a habit of writing again, which explains the frankly nonsensical ending (this was submitted in the last 20 seconds of the grace period. whoops.) Still feel a bit bad for submitting something that really hasn't had any of the care and attention that it should have had, honestly, but I remember telling Monokeras off years ago for apologising about writeoff entries so I'm trying not to feel too bad about it 😅

I do like the core idea I had here, which I'd like to expand on some time, as well as the detail-oriented voice I was at least trying to go for, but... nah, this one's not it, chief. I definitely need to practice some more—it definitely shows that I haven't written much prose, and notably no microfiction, in the last few years! And also that I need to update my calendar event notifications for the original fiction rounds. That would be helpful.