Ha ha! Well, nothing is exactly what your word is. Write...nothing! 
I've got one: wings.
I think wings is a pretty word, after you do that one, here's another! :Alone: I'd like to see your writing skills, sir 
Here is a story I wrote for all three of those words. I wanted to get the entire story down in one sitting, so it may feel rushed, and I apologize for that.
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There was a time when I couldn’t spare a thought on the (what I thought of as trivial) happenings surrounding me. Little did I know how much I would change based on adversity; little did I know that my future was not as concrete as I had imagined.
A few days after I had turned nineteen, the northern border was crossed by our enemy. We were almost a thousand miles away. I had nothing to fear at the time; we were raised on the belief that our nation was the strongest in the world, that the will of God was on our side, and that our soldiers and army were the best in the world. We were invincible.
That changed when I heard the first bomb go off in the middle of the night. I awoke my brother who hadn’t heard the distant blast. A few seconds later, my parents came into my room telling us to go down stairs into the basement. I was afraid then, and I quickly escorted my brother downstairs. He hadn’t the slightest idea of what was going on. It was probably nothing, he must of thought.
The night subsided with variable blasts echoing in the distance, but none so loud as to indicate that it was at any distance to do damage to our home or our neighbors. That didn’t stop us from gluing our eyes to the television, checking the Internet for any developments, seeing just how far the invaders had come and how well we were holding up. Just a few days later, an alert was issued ordering those living in a string of cities, including ours, to leave for the south. My mother and father quickly packed their belongings as I packed mine and my brother packed his. As we were zipping up our bags, my mother came into the room and told us that we needed to bring much more than that. She pulled out our large traveling bags from beneath my bed, set it on my blanket, and told me to stuff it with anything that would fit.
That would be the last time I would see my house for a long time.
We arrived at a hotel along the sea after several hours of driving, several hours of listening to the radio and browsing the Internet on our smartphones, several hours of watching army vehicles go to battle in the opposite direction. The crowd was horrendous…this hotel had been fitted as a shelter. I overheard some people talking, something about a boat that was going all the way to Indospha. I followed my parents to the army clerk that was directing people to appropriate settlements. He told us that we would be at a ground level room with four other people, a variable number depending on how many people would show up over the coming days. There, we waited. The cell network was still operational. The television worked; all the channels were broadcasting some sort of news about the invasion. My mother would hug my brother tightly whenever he was scared; my father would converse with our suite mates about the invasion, army strategy, rumors. The war was real, but it seemed so distant…
And then we awoke to a blast. The window had been covered partially with some wood planks, but it was not enough to stop the glass from firing into the room as the heat filled the suite. My parents told us to sleep in the back room of the suite, just in case. Their suspicions were proven right that early morning, just minutes before the sun would rise, for the back room was protected from the window by a door and wall. I quickly got up to see if my brother was okay and then rushed to open the door to the front end of the suite; I quickly closed the door when I saw that the windows had been blown in and that a fire was brewing just outside. We waited in that room until a soldier opened the door, telling us to face the wall and walk out. I didn’t see my parent’s bodies, but I knew they were dead; this was confirmed by a soldier taking role outside.
From then on, I only partially remembered what happened. My mind was wandering between reality and my thoughts to the point where I could not distinguish the two. I had the sanity to keep my brother with me, safe, to get on the boat to Indospha, to live in the poor country in poverty rather than death. I had the will to survive for my brother and for my family. Our memories seemed as distant as the war in the early days, slowly becoming a fantasy, something exciting to see as we kept up with the developments on the Internet and the television, until the war came home. I was starving, scavenging through the garbage to find something for my brother to eat. How quickly we had changed.
I’ll never forget the dream I had before I woke up on that humid day to a foot in my gut. My father, mother, brother, and I had gone shopping in the mall. The walls were white, the stores were shades of red and white, and the merchandise was gold. As my mother and father entered one of the flagship stores, I looked behind me, realizing my brother had gone missing. I ran up to my mother, who didn’t seem to care…she told me he was probably somewhere else. I went to look, but in the back of my head, I knew I was going to get lost, a premonition that would soon come true in my dream. The lights in the mall went dark, and I didn’t know where to go. Everyone had disappeared. Then, my phone rang and the voice on the other side, my father’s, asked me where I was. They were waiting for me at home, with my brother. I was completely and utterly lost, and I didn’t reply back to my father…instead, I just stopped using the phone. I had traveled here by car, and there was no way I could walk home. And then, my vision faded to black as I realized that I was lying on the dirt ground, out of breath and clutching my stomach from the blow I had received to it.
I saw a fallen woman near me…she had tripped on me walking through the crowded city. It was particularly crowded that day. I turned around to wake my brother…
There was nobody there. I turned around. Nothing. The woman had gotten up and walked away, but I didn’t care… I shouted my brother’s name, searching every head in the crowd for him. It was suffocating; my stomach hurt more from the intoxicating anxiety than from the woman’s foot. I shouted and shouted; people gave me weird stares. As I maneuvered through the crowd, I became frustrated and I shouted. I felt a lump in my throat, and then a person shoved me to the side to make way for a never ending stream of people. That’s when I lost it; I turned around and pushed him with all my strength, what little I had left. I wanted all these people to just die. I wanted them all to disappear, go away, something…why were there so many people!? They all looked the same and gave me the same cold stares…they were poor, but not as poor as me.
The man turned around and punched my square in the face. I fell to the ground…I could feel the blood from my nose seep down into my throat, like swimming underwater with your head facing the surface. I got up.
The man who had punched me had meshed in with the crowd. I looked around, tired, starving, bruised, my eyes glazing over. Maybe he had just gone out to look for food, or maybe he had…
I fell into a half sleep from a lack of it…my dream resumed. The mall had changed now to resemble the street of clay buildings that my brother and I had called home. The gold merchandise was still there, the wood supports of the buildings were red. The sky was blue and white. I found my brother (I had disregarded what my parents had said on the phone earlier); There you are!, I said. But now it was a matter of getting home. The ceiling to the mall was gone, and so, I rotated my arm in a circle like fashion, like a softball pitcher. We rose of the ground, my hand clasped onto my brothers, my arm acting like a wing propelling us over the clay buildings. When we rose, there was not another person beside us. However, when I looked down, the street was filled with people. I could fly, and we were going home. I hoped that our parents wouldn’t notice that we were gone, and I was wondering how my life would change now that I could fly. And then I looked down at my brother, who started doing the same thing with his arm. He began to fly, too!
I woke up. The crowd was still there; my brother was not.
I desperately searched the city for him over those next few days. Every day, I would return to the same spot, hoping to see him there. Every time I would leave to search, I would be afraid that he would come back to find me gone. As my search dwindled, my fear overcame me and I decided to stay at that spot, the spot we had slept in for so long, and wait for him.
Days passed.
Days passed.
A man was looking for people to work for him…he offered me rice and a few coins. It had been weeks since I had seen my brother, and by this time, I knew he was….
I didn’t want to believe it…I took the job offer, stepping in a pot of murky dye for hours on end to crush the berries beneath. Days passed. My employer gave me another job to replace this one. Days passed. He sent me back to the street after he himself went broke. Days passed. I starved in the streets and awaited the return of my brother. Days passed. Another man wanted me to work in his factory for food, or at least, what he called a factory. Days passed. He sent me to another man who had bought the workforce of this factory. Days passed. The workforce was sold to a foreign woman who was supervising a large manufacturing lane, where I was the cog that snapped a small L-shaped plastic piece to a small T-shaped plastic piece. If any broke, which they often did because the plastic was so cheap, my pay would be deducted. I didn’t want to lose this job, so I avoided doing what my colleagues were doing: stuffing the broken pieces into their pockets to avoid being caught. Only one person was fired for doing this…the workforce was always plentiful, our manager said. Because of this, I began to do it, too. I was very careful not to make the same mistakes that that one worker made.
I worked at that factory for nine years, making friends, talking aimlessly, watching people get severely injured by the machinery. I was lucky to be healthy during those years; I was lucky to survive. I normally didn’t pay attention to the date, a luxury that I had abandoned so long ago, instead only looking to the hours and minutes of my shifts. My job was simple…snap those two pieces of cheap plastic together, then snap two other pieces of plastic together, then snap two pieces of plastic together to form a hinge, then check to see if other people snapped plastic together correctly and fixing it if they didn’t. But one day, I looked at the calendar, realizing that just a few days before, it had been ten years since the day the bomb landed just outside that hotel by the sea, ten long years that had culminated into my life, being just shy of my thirtieth birthday.
I had saved enough money to go back to my home country long ago…rumor had it that the war had ended and that reconstruction was nearing completion. One day, I didn’t return to my post, leaving the factory for the port where I had scheduled to leave for home a few weeks ago. I looked back at the coast, the grey sky. I kissed my hand, sentimentally regarding it as my brother, and then watched as the smog engulfed the city far off in the distance behind the growing plane of water separating me from my past.
And there I was again, back home, but upon closer examination, it wasn’t quite home. I had visited the city where the boat had landed every year back before the war, but this time, it looked different. There were more buildings, and the current ones had been revived with mirrored glass. The billboards were animated, like moving paintings. The soldiers who greeted us as we stepped off from the boat wore slightly different camouflage, and the flag, which had previously been red, white, and gold, was now red, white, and blue. They aimed a strange camera at me, with a lens that looked horizontally elongated, and took a photo. Directing me to a building on the pier, they told me to sign the necessary paperwork to gain access into the country; apparently there were so many refugees returning that the process was simplified. I signed my name on a touch panel with my finger, typing information onto the onscreen keyboard. After I submitted the form, a receptionist gave me a plastic ID card. The picture on the front was a small video screen which displayed an image of my head; rotating the card while holding down my finger on the new seal of our country would rotate the image of the head in 3D. At one time, I would have been amused by this, but I quickly slipped the card into my pocket and went about the next rounds of gaining access to this country.
I was told to give all of my foreign money to the teller so that they could put the corresponding dollar value onto my ID card. It was convenient. After this small transaction, I was free to go.
The city had a train now; it looked more like an airplane than a train. I took a sip from the public fountain and bought a ready-made lunch for the trip, which ten years ago by car took about thirteen hours. I wanted to go back to my city, back to my house, just to see what had become of it. As I sat on the train waiting for it to take off, I noticed the people. Some were from the invaders, some were of my race. All were dressed in clothes that looked…odd. One of them took out what I thought to be a glass plate, until of course the plate turned into a multicolor screen; a smartphone. I looked outside. There were people sitting on the public benches, homeless people sleeping on the public benches, people in rags, people in T-shirts, couples, people in strange clothing with material that resembled satin, people with clothes that illuminated and displayed moving images. There was even a person whose face was animated. But one person stood out in particular: a young girl with a ready-made lunch, standing by a support pylon, waiting for something. Her mother and father came up to here, and the little girl greeted them with smiling face, holding the lunch up to her father. Perhaps she was holding it for him. The mother smiled and rested her hand on her protruding stomach. The little girl put her ear up to it, her brow furrowed, her eyes aware…and then she jumped back and smiled. I couldn’t help but smile as well as the train took off. We accelerated faster. Faster. Faster. I was getting frightened myself, and so I asked the person sitting next to me that we were going a little too fast.
He replied, “Not so much. You’ve never been on the train before? Wait until we hit 500 mph, then you’ll see. Don’t worry.”
A few minutes later, we rounded a turn. I wasn’t aware of it from the g forces…I looked out my window to see the ground from above as the train angled fifty or sixty degrees from the vertical. The person beside me took a sip from their coffee as I stared in amazement at the ground. He chuckled.
So much had changed. So little had changed.
Just a couple hours later, I arrived home. My city had not changed so much over the years, although the scars of war were still evident in some of the buildings. There were cranes everywhere, and army vehicles were present along the roads. The cars all looked a bit different. Two flags were waving on every crane. The streets were black, repaved. The traffic lights were not the circles I had grown up with; they were three bright bars.
I walked on to my house…I was surprised at how my memories were flowing back so effortlessly. An hour later, I rounded the corner of the familiar brick wall to gaze upon the hill where my house effortlessly stood. I was nervous, imagining all of the possibilities. It could be gone. Perhaps rebuilt. It could have been bought by someone else.
My eyes met the familiar house, this time surrounded by an unfamiliar black gate. I walked up to the gate, amazed that just behind this black metal stood my home, untouched by the war. What had happened in ten years?
A few minutes later, a black car drove up the road that led to the house. The car pulled up beside me, and the window rolled down, revealing a woman perhaps in her early forties with white skin and jet black hair. She wore a grey sweater that matched her grey eyes.
“What is it Mommy?” said a high voice from the back of the car. There sat a little girl in a car seat with the same jet black hair, dressed in pink; a cow jumped over the moon endlessly on the front of her shirt, with the moon occasionally smiling.
“Who are you?” asked the woman.
“I’m so sorry that…that I…” I stammered. I didn’t know what to say. This had been my home, but in the back of my mind, I had been preparing for this moment.
“I can give you some money if you want,” she said. “That way you can go buy some food.”
“Mommy, who is he?” asked the little girl. She held onto the paw of a stuffed bear dressed in the uniform of our invaders.
I hesitated, and then smiled.
I told them my name, and where I was from. I told them that at one time, I had lived in this house; that at one time, I couldn’t spare a thought on the (what I thought of as trivial) happenings surrounding me. That I had a family and a brother. I tried not to weep in front of her; she only apologized. I thanked her for her offer in kindness, and then I turned around and walked the other way.
...
