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.

At first, I felt like this was playing too coy. I'll often bug authors for describing scenery and listing a few things present and then concluding with an anticlimactic use of what's essentially "and other stuff." But as I got further in to see what's actually happening here, it actually works, since none of the particulars are important. It's just important that there are a bunch of different places and circumstances without the specifics mattering.

The only thing it leaves me wishing for is why they bothered honoring his father's wishes. Most people these days would just ignore the father if he was forbidding something they were set on doing. Maybe the guy had a close relationship and he did really want to abide by his words if possible. Maybe the dad just had a really controlling relationship with him or held some kind of leverage over him. But without justifying why the guy feels so obligated, especially after his dad is gone and can't offer resistance anymore, I feel like there's a significant piece missing from understanding everyone's motivations. Even more so, since he feels compelled to, and yet he's disregarding the part where his dad said he'd still be watching after he died, and the guy doesn't care about that, so why did he care about any of it? Though I do gather that maybe he's just relying on a loophole as a means of satisfying the conditions his dad placed on it, in which case he's still feeling compelled to obey.

I'm more confused than anything. Is this something like The Edge of Tomorrow where one person is starting to give in to the hopelessness ot endless time looping when they find out someone else is as well, and they can collaborate to get out of it? Except inverting that, to where the realization of a kindred spirit only makes things worse? It's a nice setup, but I don't know what the payoff is. There's a twist, yes, and an unexpected one at that, but it's not done in a way that I know what conclusion I'm supposed to draw. Other than that, my only critique is that it relies a bit much on directly telling me what emotions the characters have instead of demonstrating them and letting the reader make the interpretation.

Sorry I missed this round while I was away on vacation, but at least I can still leave comments.