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Apr 25, 2023 06:12
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Hell of a week for me to toxx in. Currently sitting with my one year old at the hospital.
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Apr 25, 2023 07:18
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I can judge.
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Apr 25, 2023 13:07
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Crits for Week #559 Mrenda - Slither On the Cross: I have a lot to say about this one, but first off: I liked it. It was my second favorite of the week, in fact. I can see why the other judges found it inscrutable or offputting, but this kind of ambitious, deep POV business is my jam. To unpack this, in my reading at least, this is either the internal monolog or an in-world account (and I'll get back to that question later) of a very disturbed individual, suffering from schizophrenia along with severe gender dysmorphia who has recently had a psychotic break during which they castrated themself. It's a bit surprising that they have held it together, almost certainly without therapy or medication, for so long, since the issues seem to have started in childhood and they are now married with at least three children, but I'd wager such things do happen sometimes. I do wish, though, that we had a clearer sign on the question earlier, whether this is something that is being said aloud to someone else, to a doctor, or if it's all internal, because the entire flavor of the ending line shifts on that question: if it is internal, then the speaker's use of a male honorific is innocent, a product of overformalism. But if this is something the speaker has been listening to, especially as a psychiatric professional, well, it comes off as deliberately cruel. I mean, sure, you would want the patient to be a lot more mentally stable before you would start talking specifically about gender identity issues, but there are plenty of big obvious hints in the narrative and it would have been so easy to just leave off the 'Mr' entirely and avoid the issue. Copernic - Old Pavlova: Interesting opening, establishes some character right off. I don't know I'd we're staying with them though. Okay, this was another strong contender, we get a bunch of neat little storied about this sweet little guy, on one level incomplete but serving a solid throughline. There are a lot of stories that are deliberately ambiguous this week, but this one pulls it off: we don't need to solve Lauren's murder or be told why the Altas becomes a cyberpunk Macguffin, it just works. archduke.iago - 7 Seconds: The opening is functional but without much there there. What we have here is a series of vignettes, each viewing the fish through a different but always anthropomorphic lens, but there's no throughline to speak of, only a lazy punchline. derp - a beautiful host: Well, that's certainly an ambitious opening. I'm not sure it works entirely; the word 'fervid' sticks out as vaguely wrong or off, and I doubt this voice can be maintained, but we will see. It doesn't quite reach that level, but stays close enough. Interesting prose, but at the heart you have two characters, one unlikable and the other inscrutable, and little else. Slightly Lions - Jack and the Boxes: Another ambitious pov story, which is setting up early with real confusion or ambiguity over whether Brother is also a dog or not, could clue that up earlier and more clearly, and I'm not sure what Uncle Bob is. Overall, predictable but cute. Beezus - He's Just Spicy: Okay, functional opener that sets up everything we need for a story, good. I like this one, but it doesn't do much more than the sum of its parts, isn't ambitious in a week where the other stories are. Chernobyl Princess - Cheeto: As a structural thing, I generally think that stories should introduce their fantastic element in the first paragraph rather than the second. The excessively mundane first doesn't help the story, being able to describe the packing vividly in terms of syblid anatomy would. Overall this is sort of cute and all, but unlike the turtle story here the incompleteness works against the story. (The cause of the fire, Gleam never showing up again, even the presence of aliens not mattering past the setup, all seem important in a way that the loose ends in Old Pavlova did not.) Antivehicular - Responsibility: Interesting opening. And overall a nice little slice of life kind of story. One that actually pulls off ending just before the thing actually happens. The biggest issue here is the lack of stakes, there being explicitly no reason for the long separation.
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Apr 26, 2023 08:55
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Week 559 Crits (Dicere) You can yell at me on Discord if you think my takes are dumb. Slither on the Cross – Mrenda Friend, I’m going to level with you: I don’t get it. Maybe I’m thick. Maybe there’s not much there. I couldn’t tell you. As I read this I thought about Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. But Benjy told a story. You had to work with him to figure out what he was saying, but there was action. There were characters and events. I couldn’t make any out in this. Perhaps a more apt comparison might be Naked Lunch (which I confess to not totally getting either). Still, I’d say you nailed the voice of someone who can’t distinguish delusion from reality. I don’t know what it is about sex and religion that the less stable in our ranks get such a kick out of, but you got those elements down. Old Pavlova – Copernic They say the worst thing about pets is that they die, but you took it in the direct opposite direction. I found myself pitying poor Atlas. It felt like nobody in the story really appreciated the weight of such a long-lived being – didn’t show the appropriate reverence. And all that tracks with how people act, sadly. You used only a few sentences to do it, but you captured the serene vibe of the turtle. Atlas had a character, and you didn’t have to anthropomorphize them to get there. Of course, the allusion to the “turtles all the way down” story is appropriately there in a meditation on nature watching the passage of human endeavor. If I had any nits to pick: I didn’t get a singular narrative thread across these vignettes. Also, I kind of anticipated a sci-fi cyberpunk future with a heist action scene, though I couldn’t really tell you a better direction to go. Last thought here: I don’t intend to outlive any of my pets, but would surely have something in my estate for them, like Eloise did. But man, the anxiety I would have passing from this life and leaving a companion like that behind. But those are pretty modern sensibilities. I don’t know if someone from the 19th century would feel similarly. 7 Seconds – archduke.iago No fanfic! If I don’t get the write an A-Team episode, you don’t get to write a Kafka story. Thems the rules! That said, you do a good job of capturing the horror and isolation of a fish in a bowl. Cats and dogs can run away or swat or bark, but fish are so very much at our mercy. I hope they’re not smart enough to know or care because, if they are, it would be a living nightmare. Your prose is pretty good. It would be better if it were in service of a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. derp - a beautiful host My first instinct is to say I liked the ride, but you didn’t stick the landing. That’s my second instinct too, but, if I’m being creative, I could see how this ending might have symbolic import. The butterfly was actually dead inside, being gnawed apart by something ugly and predatory. Is this augury? Would this fussy man’s relationship with the bee lady be similar? Did she know about the wasps and this was a communication for him to pick up on? Were the wasps a way of saying, “You’d tear me apart if we got involved?” The story would probably be better if this were clearer. I didn’t care for the writer’s prose, but I’m not going to hold that against this piece. In my own way, I was rooting for him. You definitely captured the thought process of a man who’s so desperate to get some he’ll overlook red flags and every incompatibility. Slightly Lions - Jack and the Boxes This story hosed me up. You might have just caught me on a weird day, but it shook me pretty hard. I definitely emoted more with this story than any other. It feels like dirty pool though. A sad dog who doesn’t understand human strife but is nevertheless its victim – pretty easy to make a person sad over that. It’s a pretty widespread experience. I’m moving out and you get the dogs. God drat that hurts. Jack’s voice, of course, is pretty spot on for how humans think dogs think. I could nitpick and say “that’s not how dogs think!” but how would I know? Beezus - He's Just Spicy Another very common issue. My little angel acts like an idiot and puts a strain on my other relationship that probably means less but provides the unique benefits of sex and shared domestic labor. I can really feel that tension between love and resentment toward the cat, but I think it might be implausible for that tension to be kept up for years. You either accept the pet or you split. That’s a hard road to keep yourself in between those poles for so long. One nitpick (and why let facts get in the way of a good story): In my neck of the woods, if I have to see a doctor for a cat bite or cat scratch, the cat has to, by law, be quarantined for a period of 1-2 weeks. Doctors can get in trouble for not reporting those incidents to animal control. Second nitpick: Weed is toxic to cats, so the ending doesn’t hit as lighthearted as you may have intended. Chernobyl Princess - Cheeto Really liked this one. It suffers somewhat from lack of world building. I guess Fight Song is a timeless classic now? There are no controls on AIs in the classroom? College still looks and feels the same even in the far flung sci-fi future? But you had a word count to deal with and those are just details surrounding the story of a person dealing with a pet that’s a chatbot with emotions. The real strength of this story is in the ending, in my opinion. I wish I could have that kind of talk with an animal – to say I’m sorry in plain English and have it reciprocated in plain English. For that scene alone, I’d say you took the element from your flash rule and really elevated the story with it (instead of just working it in). Antivehicular - Responsibility I don’t know why I accepted so readily that a man would live in an aquarium, but couldn’t get over how a man would be such a complete stranger to his mother. Had I been reading too fast, I might have thought this woman was watching a fish for a co-worker or old college acquaintance. I too had a hard time envisioning this condo and the relative size of the fish (I eventually settled on bowling ball sized). But if we’re doing some careful reading, we can see that this man trusts a fish he clearly loves in the care of his mother with only a one sentence text as guidance. So this is evidently the big opening bid on what we can assume is a continued exchange of trust and information. Your prose is quite good and the ending is too. It’s strange how animals can sometimes be a conduit for affections that otherwise couldn’t be exchanged in a more direct way.
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Apr 27, 2023 07:18
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In, and hope that things are going well for you and your kid, Chili
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Apr 27, 2023 21:50
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All good now, thanks!
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Apr 27, 2023 23:55
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Strange Cares posted:Earnest Brawl Idle Amalgam Vs Pham Nuwen Reminder that this is due MONDAY MONDAY MONDAY BE THERE BE THERE BE THERE
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Apr 28, 2023 00:17
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 to have high-quality (300 words apiece) crits for the dream fite brawl by next Wednesday.
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Apr 28, 2023 03:16
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Apr 29, 2023 03:57
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A Lovely Light 997 words Friday, 5:37pm, DFW, heading to O’Hare Flight’s delayed…again. New arrival: 9:48pm – if nothing else goes wrong. Saturday, 8:22am, on the El train Picked Margarita up; no arguing with her mother. Headed downtown now to go to the zoo. Would’ve been easier to drive but it’s such a nice day…ah hell. “Sweetie, don’t put your mouth on that. People’ve been grabbing that bar all day.” “Sorry, Daddy.” Gotta calm myself. That was snippier than needed. Three stops later, we’re off the El and heading for the stairs down from the platform. “Look, there’s peacocks!” “Pigeons, sweetie. I see them.” She stops. “They’re pretty.” “I guess they are, in their own way.” Just then, one of them squirts a blast of white birdshit onto the platform. She laughs. I do too, decorum be damned. I lead her by the hand around the micropuddle and down to the bus stop. She’s still giggling. The #22 pulls up, and we get on. I’m ransacking my pockets trying to find my Ventra card, while she says to the bus driver, “We saw a peacock poop by the train!” He chuckles, then looks at me fumbling and says, “Don’t worry about it, just go on back.” I nod my thanks and lead Margarita to a seat. I point out landmarks as we drive to Lincoln Park Zoo, then I lift her up so she can yank the stop-pull without putting her feet on the bench. We hop off. ### After seeing the animals and eating lunch, we’re back downtown. We stop in a 7-11 to get some water. Margarita sees some gummy worms; I give in. Outside the store is a homeless man. She shakes the package in front of him, showing off her treat. I snatch them out of her hand and throw them in a garbage can, pulling her away with a muttered, “Sorry.” The El ride home starts off silent. She’s sad, near tears. I’m furious with myself. It was a snap decision, jeez, should I have thrown them away? I should’ve given the guy $5 or something. I breathe until I’m calm, then softly talk with her. I apologize, then start to explain why what she did was rude. I’m an idiot. She’s just shy of five. She had no idea he was homeless. She doesn’t even know what homeless means! I navigate the explanation as best I can, apologize once more, and tell her I’ll make it up to her tonight. I think she’s mollified. My boss texts me two stops from my three-flat: “Look at my email.” Ugh. Margarita’s tired, so off to her nap. I am too, but I check the email and pound out the needed answers in an hour, just in time for her to wake up. We play Chutes and Ladders (she doesn’t even count the dice out loud anymore), she rides her balance bike (“Whee!” she shouts), then it’s dinner time. I order Chinese, her favorite. She’s overjoyed, and all would be forgiven if it hadn’t already been forgotten. A couple of classic Spongebobs, which she loves, then bath time, and I’m reading books with her. Her precociousness pleases me. I wonder how well I’d relate to a child who wasn’t gifted. Then, I put the thought out of my head, because I don’t love her for her mind; I love her because she’s my daughter. She gets – and gives – an extra big hug tonight. I work until about ten fixing the other, less-sensitive crises my boss sent me. Then, I pick up my phone to check for Tinder matches, but put it down. What’s my value proposition? “Available Sunday nights, and possibly Friday nights – if my flight’s not late?” I’ll read for about an hour, then off to bed. Sunday, 5:51am Margarita’s shaking me awake. “What’s wrong, sweetie?” I’ve fallen asleep on the couch with the book on my chest. “I had a bad dream!” I hug her. “It’s OK, sweetie. I’m here now. What was it about?” “You and Mommy were yelling at each other and there was screaming and fighting.” “Well, we don’t fight and yell anymore, right?” “…Not much.” Her look shows how weakly-held her answer is. I reassure her some more. Then, because she’s wide awake, I stretch my aching back and decide to get up and make breakfast: eggs and bacon, with frozen English muffins toaster-defrosted, just like every Sunday morning we don’t go out to eat. I slam two double espressos, handle a couple of quick emails, and tromp down the back stairs at a decent hour to wash clothes. We spend some more time together, then head to a matinee about Buzz Lightyear, stopping at Chipotle on the way back, where I refill my Coke twice. I’m running solely on caffeine, and – gently caress – I’ve got to be up at 4:45am to make my flight. We head home. Margarita rides her balance bike again – she’s almost ready for a real one – then we argue about her nap. I finally play the “Because I said so” card, and she stomps off to her room. I finish two more work tasks, then sigh and switch to my personal account. I bang out an email to my ex-wife, almost every word a lie: “Due to shifts in my travel schedule and client demands, I need to change the visitation arrangement. I won’t be able to take Margarita every weekend anymore, and will need to switch to every other weekend. This should be temporary, and hopefully we can agree to this without going to court. We can discuss tonight if needed.” I’m about to hit send when Margarita bursts out of her room. “I had a bad dream! Emperor Zurg wanted to kidnap you and Mommy!” It’s no fake; the tears are real. drat movie. I throw my arms around her, squeezing her tightly. “Go sit on the couch, sweetie. I’ll be right there.” My mouse pointer still hovers over send. I move it and click to close the window.
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Apr 30, 2023 23:47
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talking in the back flerp fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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May 1, 2023 00:20
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Pegasus 753 words I guess being dead isn’t so bad. You’ve got all the toys to play with and all the junk food you could eat. There’s no homework or school, well, not unless you really like school which I don’t. Nobody ever gets hurt or sad. We all just play all day under the watchful eye of a pegasus. Well, I say he’s a pegasus but he’s got wings and a horn on his head. Some girls say he’s a unicorn but unicorns are too girly. Come to think of it, I don’t know if the pegasus is even a guy or girl. I guess it doesn’t really matter. All I know is he watches over me and all the other kids. I got sent to this pegasus land when I was eight years old. I don’t remember much but I was in the hospital and was real sick for what felt like a long time. Lots of kids came to visit me. I wish I could remember their names. I wish I could remember my name. The night I died I saw the pegasus outside my window. Someone started playing a flute but I couldn’t see where they were. I closed my eyes like I was going to sleep and when I woke up I was in here. The pegasus told me I was in a safe place now and I would be eight forever. I believed him when I ate candy from a tree without feeling sick. Candy grows on trees here just like in the Candyland board game or Willy Wonka’s factory. There are rivers full of chocolate and sparkling soda. I eat a bunch of junk food everyday and don’t get cavities or nothing. Some of the other kids here say its cause time doesn’t pass but I don’t think so. The sun rises and sets each day. Then again there’s no calendars here either. I asked the pegasus about calendars and he told me there was no need for one. After all, we weren’t on Earth anymore anyway. A bigger kid once told me that one year on Earth is 365 days long. I don't know how long a year on this place lasts, but I know the sun rises and sets at certain times each day. It's always sunny too yet the grass is always green and the flowers are always blooming. The weather is always warm and the temperature is always perfect. It's like we live in a cartoon or something. There are no birthdays here either cause like I said, everyone’s the same age forever. I remember one of my birthdays well. I had just turned six and my mom had gotten this strawberry shortcake fresh from the bakery. There were lots of candles and everyone sang Happy Birthday. I figured it would be nice to have a moment like that again but everyone can just eat cake forever now. There will never be another special day because every day is the same. We wake up, we play, and when the sun sets we follow the pegasus through the stars as we deliver wishes. Some of the wishes people make are pretty dumb. Some people are like ‘I wish to kiss this girl’. Why would you even want to kiss girls anyway? They are gross and icky. But sometimes people make other wishes too. Those wishes are more like what I wished for. Some kids would love to have another birthday again, one where their moms buy them a cake and they get lots of presents and love. But they saw the pegasus flying by. When you see the pegasus in the real world that means you’re going to die. That’s what the pegasus told me. So we fly across the world collecting wishes from kids that can see the pegasus. Humans can’t see us of course. I figure most grown-ups are too boring to believe anyway. We see the kid and a day or two later they show up in our world. What’s weird was that we were usually healthy before we saw the pegasus. Then we all got sick, or in a car crash and died. Why would he want us to die? Some of the older kids mentioned that they saw the pegasus say that adults must pay the price before they died. Apparently some grown-ups forgot to pay him a long time ago. I remember a similar story about that once. But that was just a fairy tale. It couldn’t be true, right?
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May 1, 2023 04:04
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The Blur (997 words) Ellis’s announcement that he’d have seven consecutive birthdays next week was met with cheers from the class. He’d always been a bit of a loner, but the prospect of bounce houses and balloon animals brought everyone into his pocket. After school, Dad gave a sheepish smile when I brought it up. “Trust me on this one, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said. “It’ll be fun at first, but you can’t really go back on these things.” The first party was scheduled for that Saturday. I hadn’t been super close to Ellis (no one had, really), but apparently didn’t need to worry- he’d invited everyone in our class. Dad dropped me off in front of Ellis’s house, clutching a gift-wrapped mancala set. Ellis’s mother was holding the door open, waving down at the line of kids snaking up her driveway. She was positively glowing with excitement. “Thank you so much for coming!” she beamed at me. “It’s so lively now, isn’t it lovely?” she gushed. I passed the threshold, and gingerly placed my gift at the edge of an already precariously stacked pyramid. “Come on out back,” she said, steering me into the backyard. I could barely make out Ellis through the crush; I only spotted his bright orange hair through the tangle of limbs. I was originally planning to spend the party with my own friends, but Dad had made me promise to thank Ellis for the invitation in person. I pushed my way in, worming, bumping, apologizing, all the way to the core before I could tap Ellis’s shoulder to get his attention. “Happy 12th, Ellis.” I said, “thanks for inviting me.” “Yeah, no problem,” he mumbled. “Thanks for coming, I guess.” I’d always seen him alone at school, but here he looked so small next to everyone else. Seems like he wasn’t used to being the center of attention yet. A boy with dirt on his face was pulling Ellis towards the kickball game. It was the closest I got to him all day. The rest of the afternoon was fun enough. After the cake and presents, one of the Reptile Rangers came to do a show, and showed us through his box filled with snakes and lizards. On the way home, Dad and I went to pick up another gift for the next day. I had originally wanted to get the presents all at once, but he’d pointed out (rightly!) that I’d want to see what was opened so I didn’t double up on anything. By the time Monday rolled around, the classroom was abuzz. He’d grown quickly. Far from a shrinking violet, the new Ellis seemed magnetic. He had an easy laugh that I couldn’t remember hearing before. Instead of blending into the crowd, his head now bobbed above them all- a bright orange sprout, emerging from the soil. “Alright everyone, quiet down!” Our homeroom teacher, Mr. Wardell, smacked the blackboard with a yardstick. “I know you’ve all had an exciting weekend, but I have something important to announce.” He cleared his throat. “I know we’ve all had a lot of fun with Ellis, but I’ve spoken with his parents and today will be his last day with us.” There was an audible gasp, and twenty-two heads turned in unison, eyes converging on one bright orange head. “He’s going to spend three days at Sunset High, and then move to LSU.” Mr. Wardell said somberly. “We’re all very proud of him, and I want you all to make sure to say your goodbyes.” The classroom descended into a flurry of shouts. Even though Ellis had assured us we’d see him again, the party that evening had the atmosphere of a wake. He sat in an armchair in his living room, as a line of guests shuffled past, each paying their respects. A couple of the more excitable kids had skipped afternoon classes, and came back with a big “WE’LL MISS YOU ELLIS” poster. “It’s really cool what you’re doing,” I said when my turn rolled around. He was definitely taller than before. A whisper of hair was visible above his lip. He chuckled dryly. “I thought it was cool too, when we started.” I raised an eyebrow. “This whole thing, it was originally my mom’s idea,” he sighed. “She wanted me to be a star, for people to come from far and wide, just to see me. But that just wasn’t me, until now. It was fun at first, but now I kinda wish I could stay with you guys. It was really nice getting to know you all.” I was taken aback by his confession. “Are you okay with moving on up so quickly?” I stammered. “I dunno. The way I see it, the choice is made for me.” “Can’t you just… stop?” I felt my face getting hot. “Like, if you don’t want to go along with it, you don’t have to, right?” “Nah, we already made arrangements with the teachers and doctors and everything.” There was a pained expression on Ellis’s face. “I’m gonna do seven, I’ll be 18, and I’ll have all the fun I missed out on, all at once.” I felt a solid poke in my ribs. The line was getting inpatient. Ellis smiled weakly. “I’ll see you around,” he managed. The radiance once displayed by Ellis’s mother had been worn down by the strain of organizing so many gatherings. “Why are you putting him through all this?” I asked indignantly. “He’s going to miss out on so much!” “That boy has never been a winner in his life.” Her face was twisted with anguish. “How many happy memories do you think that boy would have after seven years as a pariah? Things are better off this way.” I was stunned into silence. The doorbell rang, signaling the arrival of another group of well-wishers. Ellis’s mother turned to greet the newcomers. “These flowers are gorgeous, really, you shouldn’t have!”
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May 1, 2023 04:29
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Ollie, Ollie 1003 words Flash:Goodnight, Moon Matilda Herrera was the best at hide and seek, in her whole school and neighborhood. The best seeker, at least. There was one other kid she knew who could do better at the hiding part, Xavier whose last name she didn't know, who lived on the other side of the woods. When Xavier was in the game he was always the last one found, except when he was seeking. And usually not even found but came in running when the kids gave up and shouted 'Ollie Ollie Oxen Free' and he would show up on the other side of the base. Xavier lived in the other side of the woods, which was a different neighborhood entirely that you couldn't get to on bicycles on streets without using the busy roads that no sensible parent would let a kid ride a bike on. And he didn't go to the same school either, even though other kids in that neighborhood did. Connie Falcone said most that he was probably homeschooled, but couldn't rule out the Catholic school named after some Saint nobody could pronounce. Connie was a know-it-all who kept saying it wasn't Ollie but some French word with a 'z' in it, and the last bit was 'outs in free'. "That doesn't make any kind of sense," Matilda said at the time. "There's no zz sound in it, and that would just be a waste of a good 'z' if there's no zz sound. And why would it be half in French and half in English?" She knew how the game was played. Hide and seek, outdoors at least, was not a winter game, so when the snows started to fall people did other stuff. Sledding. Snowball fights, which had to get to an all-out war before Matilda took notice of them, but when she did she was general and commando at once, leading the cause from the front. The sides were drawn, the two sides of the forest. Evenly matched, each with well-defended and stocked forts. Xavier led a daring commando raid, dodging snowballs from Matilda's soldiers. She got him with a big puffy one that exploded into a huge white disk on Xavier's coat, but he just smiled and continued on, tagging kid after kid with stolen snowballs until his hands were empty. Matilda loaded her own arms and gave chase, across the woods. She saw a moment and took aim with a hard-packed ball. She threw. Xavier disappeared and the projectile struck a tree, knocking the snow from high branches, enough of it onto her head to soak through her hat, and Xavier and his comrades were behind her with snowballs to hurl. Wet and sore, she was captured. Which is to say, invited to Xavier's home for hot cocoa and to set fireside a while. Same difference, really. "How do you do it?" Matilda asked. "I saw you, you know. Vanishing." "I could tell you," he said. "Or show you, even. But you'll have to make it worth my while." So the next day Matilda came to Xavier's back yard with a Matchbox formula one car, four old comic books including one where Spider-Man was shrunk down to the size of a real spider and had to wrestle a scorpion and run from a cat, and a bag full of thirteen marbles and one glass eye, which was just a little bit bigger than the others. Xavier looked over the offered treasure and nodded. "So?" asked Matilda. "Where do you go?" "To the moon," he said. He held out his hand. She grabbed it, and a second later they were there. It certainly looked like the moon. "This can't be the moon, though," she said, "Because there's air. We're breathing it." "Oh, I brought my own air," said Xavier, and she had no answer for that. They played, one on one, on the moon. They used a stopwatch to keep score, measuring who took more time to find the other. Xavier won the first five rounds, which was natural since he knew the area already and was more used to running around with so much less gravity, but after that they were close to even, and Matilda won a few rounds running by the end. "Can you teach me to get here?" she asked, before the went back to Earth. "And bring a bunch of air along? And get back?" She felt clever remembering to ask for those last two. She knew how stories worked and had a growing suspicion that she was in one, was in one of those kinds of stories even. "I could, " he said. "But I doubt you could pay the price." "I bet I could," she said. "Name it." Xavier moved mouth close to her ear, but didn't say anything. Matilda imaged what it would be. A million dollars? Her first-born child, which would be easy because she didn't want kids anyway? Xavier whispered. Matilda gasped, then started to shake her head, but nodded instead. Xavier's parents moved west in the middle of next year, gone without warning overnight. Matilda went to their place on the Moon every now and again, but he was never there, even when she left messages, suggested times to meet by tracing in the still moondust, even left a whiteboard and pens, but Xavier was never there, and the moon was boring on her own, and she found she could nor teach others or even go when anyone else was looking. Weeks went by. Then there was a message, when she went to the moon again. "Not today. Not soon. But one day I will hold you to your word." She remembered his breath in the stale lunar air on her ear, remembered the words. "One day, when I am old and cannot dance or sing or even laugh, kill me. Pierce my heart with a stake of holly so that only peace can claim my soul." Matilda did not go to the moon again for a very long time.
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May 1, 2023 07:52
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I have no idea what happened, I thought I submitted but I didn't. My bad, but here's my entry. Someone I Respect 800 Words Rebecca Aranetti 04/28/23 6th Grade, Ms. Helmand Someone I Respect My friend Helena Wiggler wasn’t my first choice for best friend she was probably my last. I was new here this year, and so was she. Mom and Dad are in the army, so they move around a lot, and I go with them. I like making friends who have been where I’m starting for a while. But Helena was just as new as me. She kinda clung to me right away, you know? It creeped me out. I told her that I wouldn’t be here for long, maybe a year, but then that’d be it. She cried when I told her, and we had only just met! I didn’t feel ready to be her friend. She was loud, she burped when she was nervous, and she even had a hard time remembering her left from her right. Helena wasn’t easy to be friends with. But, while I was trying to be friends with everybody else, she kept on staying busy trying to be friends with me. She got in the way. She popped up when I was trying to meet new people and acted like she’d known everyone since kindergarten. She popped up when I was placed in gifted classes and threw a tearful fit until they agreed to let her be with me. She popped up at the dance and dragged me onto the dance floor even though nobody else was on it because the dance only just started. Then one day, when she popped up at the cafeteria, I asked her “What’s with you? Why do you want me to like you so much?” She frowned, looked down at her lunch on her tray, and mumbled: “...because I like you.” I didn’t understand. I asked her why all she could say was, “I just do.” I thought about all the mean ways I acted when she popped up, how I kept giving her so many reasons to walk away, and she just didn’t. And the whole time I was pushing her away, I was trying to do things that I didn’t like with people who didn’t like me. So we became friends. Not like best friends right away, but little by little. She’d come over after school to do homework every now and then, ask the teachers to sit next to me in the classes we were in together, and we’d even lend each other books when we forgot or lost them. One day, when she left, my dad asked me “Why are you friends with her? Can’t you do better?” I was a little surprised, so I asked him what he meant, and he said “You’ve got perfect grades and you’re so smart and talented. You’re wasting your time with her and she doesn’t offer you anything. He told me it was “essential to make friends with people who challenged me.” I stayed up that night thinking about it and when I really did, I kinda realized he was right. What did Helena Wiggler have to offer me? And then I did something that I still hate myself for doing. I asked her that, to her face, the next day at school. But I don’t hate myself because it was wrong or even mean, which I think it probably was. I hate myself for asking it because I was so stupid. Because Helena just looked at me, smiled, and said, “Not much, I’m the lucky one here.” I felt my head fill up with fog and asked her what she meant, and she told me how she singled me out right away, saw that I was smart, and knew that if she stuck with me, the new kid that nobody wanted to be around that I could help her. She said being new and smart made me a ‘safe bet’ for a friend. My stomach twisted in knots, and I ran to the bathroom because I worried I’d start crying in front of everyone. Just like in the movies, she followed me. She found me in the stall. “You know,” she said, “you’re still my best friend.” “But you were using me!” “What were you doing with me? Nobody else would talk to you, so you settled on crazy Helena Wiggler.” I sniffed up the snot dripping down my nose and looked up at her. She had a smile on her face that felt like home to me. “That’s how it all started for us,” she reached down and pulled me off the floor. “But now we get to decide how it finishes. Let’s get you cleaned up.” Helena Wiggler is smart, clever, kind, and loyal. And if my dad can’t see it, he can eat farts.
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May 1, 2023 22:45
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Crits Ah, rolling out of bed to wrangle too many kids. It must be every day. Admiralty Flag / A Lovely Light A sad story that flirts with being saccharine, but never falls entirely over into it. This reads like an affecting reddit post on /r/daddit. Although a meaningful, compassionate view of a post-divorce Dad I wanted more out of it, in that it simply does a good job following a familiar set of story beats. I knew from the start that the daughter bringing up the divorce was coming at the three quarter mark, and it did. 3.5/5. Flerp / Talking In The Back I didn't get much out of this dialogue-based story. Its certainly a believable version of those meandering, inconclusive talks you get with kids, but, also, so what. I get the idea -- the narrator is struggling with his own mixed emotions, correctly observed by the infante. But also, I didn't have much of a reason to care. The niece herself comes across as more of a device than a character, and the dialog itself doesn't spark any real emotion. I don't think there's enough juice to this story where nothing happens. 2/5. Violet_Sky / Pegasus A clever concept that nails the point of view of an 8 year old kid -- "now what?" Yearning for something but without quite enough wit to understand the pathos of their own situation. Just knowing they want that next birthday that will never come. This left me wanting more. Kid heaven is a little too underdescribed. Cake and sunny days. Surely there's more, and I'm curious to hear about it. Too short to do more but briefly describe their situation... I think a brief story arc would've been appreciated. 4/5. archduke.iago / The Blur I was wondering when we'd get a little magical realism. Its a natural fit with the dream-like atmosphere of childhood, and deployed here with considerable acumen. All these stories have a yearning, aching quality to them, but The Blur especially was a ~story~. I wanted to see what would happen, I wanted to know how it'd go. The prose is evocative and brisk. The ending came on me abruptly, and lacked a subtlety I was expecting, but I have no other real complaints. 4.5/5. Thranguy/ Ollie, Ollie Taking a flash only to use 3 words of it. Bold. This takes awhile to settle in. Early on it flirts with run-on sentences, and I was unsure if we were going for "childlike language" or just long discursive sentences. Either way, I didn't think it worked. But once we move to the moon it turns into something evocative and different. A story about kids that isn't afraid to do something big and moving. Very much in the best tradition of fairy tales -- although I didn't think the wink to 'maybe I'm in one!' added anything. The ending didn't hit with me. A little elder horror, I guess? It felt gimmicky. 4/5. Chili / Someone I Respect A simple story that didn't excite me very much. It reads like a parable you would tell a kid about the importance of friendship, and, although it somewhat subverts that, that doesn't make it much more interesting. I think the issue here is that Wiggler herself is so vaguely drawn that her elementary school power play just doesn't have any impact on me. I didn't really find the Dad to be very convincing. Is that a thing Dads say or did he just need to be the antagonist? I did appreciate that this wasn't a sad sack downer story unlike every other entry. 3/5 Winner: archduke.iago. An entire bag of fruit snacks for you. HM: Thranguy DM: None. Loser: None.
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May 1, 2023 22:55
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Week 561 Lie to me Intrigue, conflict, dramatic irony. Lies add spice to stories without any of the real-life consequences! What stories can we tell if we aren't so consumed with staying truthful? There's plenty to explore: what's worth lying about? What motivates our liar? What's at stake? Find out this week! I'd love to hear your stories involving a lie, and the lying liars who tell them. The sky is the limit: fraudsters, actors, even self-delusion are all in bounds. I'll also accept lies to the reader, if the wider package is coherent. You get 1500 words, if you ask for a flash, I'll give you a specific type of lie to work with, in exchange for 500 bonus words. Signups are due by Friday, May 5, 11:59pm PDT. Submissions are due by Sunday, May 7, 11:59pm PDT. Judges: archduke.iago Entrants: 1. Idle Amalgam [Flashed, white lies] 2. Thranguy [Flashed, scams] 3. flerp 4. Slightly Lions 5. Admiralty Flag archduke.iago fucked around with this message at 20:01 on May 5, 2023 |
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May 2, 2023 03:49
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Strange Cares posted:Earnest Brawl Idle Amalgam Vs Pham Nuwen The Vessel 1,586 Words Harris ran his fingers over his son’s portrait. It was faded now. The toddler beaming up at him from the tiny frame would probably be about 9 or 10. Harris had stopped counting the days since Margaret took the boy to stay with her sister out in El Paso. “Get some help,” she said. “I love you, but you’re losing yourself,” she said. “You’re scaring me,” she said. She was right of course. Harris knew it. She knew it. And although it made Harris’s stomach hurt to think about it, made his eyes start to blur with tears, Junior knew it too. What kind of dad could he be to Junior when apocalyptic visions began to control his life? That was about to be behind him though. After years of searching, he’d finally found them. He’d found the Vessel. However, standing over the unconscious man whom the visions had guided him to, Harris knew he was at a turning point. One which there would be no returning from depending on how the next 24 hours went. He looked down at the man, a 38-year-old real estate agent named Donny Pettigrew, and stowed away the empty syringe of stolen anesthesia. He loaded Donny into the van and felt it must have been his purpose that protected him from being caught. It had guided him here, and no one stood in his way. He assumed it had to be because he had been ordained. As he finished binding Donny, Harris began to have doubts that were promptly refuted when he recalled the visions that haunted him night and day. The man he’d just kidnapped came to him in his dreams and he’d peel back his mask of humanity revealing the insidious creature that hid beneath its illusion. During the solstice eclipse, the gates would once again open to those distant realms of hell, and unchecked legions of cartilaginous, tendrilled horrors would spill forth from the blackened sun, tearing through the sky to destroy the world. The repurposed dead would devour the remaining bastions of humanity within the year, and an entity spawned by chaos would preside over the broken nations of Earth for eternity. Harris gritted his teeth as he willed the visions away. He crawled to the front of the van, sparing the bound man a final glance. He nodded to himself and the two of them drove off into the desert. * * * When Donny came to, Harris sat nearby consulting various manuscripts and tinkering with strange components. Donny was bound in accordance with the rituals revealed to Harris in his visions, but even then, Harris who had come so far as to abandon his whole life in the pursuit of resolving this, found the process to be unorthodox. Donny’s eyes fluttered open, and he was flooded with realization. He was chained to the floor of a dimly lit basement, gagged, and bound. He panicked. “Easy, easy,” Harris said, “I know this must come as a bit of a surprise, but I really do have all our best interests at heart. I promise you.” Donny shot Harris a bewildered look. Harris held up a cautioning hand. “I’m going to untie that gag so you and I can talk, okay?” Donny trembled as he nodded affirmation. Harris carefully removed his gag, and as expected, Donny began to scream for help. Harris sighed and crossed his arms while Donny screamed. “Have you had enough of that?” Harris asked. “Ain’t no one going to find you out here, son.” Donny sobbed. “Now, now, I don’t plan to hurt you. I swear it. I believe we can resolve this peacefully.” “I’ll loving kill you! I swear to God, I’ll loving kill you!” Harris nodded, and Donny raved. He flailed his body as hard as he could at Harris before being yanked back against the concrete. It was in falling though, that he saw his surroundings. There were four rings, each larger than the last, and comprised of varying materials. The inner circle Donny sat atop was coated in a thin layer of ash that had made its way across his body. The first ring was a ring of decay. The putrescent remains of animals, excrement, and moldering filth. After that was a ring of fresh laurel leaves. The next ring was chalked in and adorned with various sigils, and the last was of powdered bones. “What—what is all this?” “In a few hours, the sun will be eclipsed during the solstice event. A happening that occurs once a century. When this happens, a gateway will align and open itself to try and allow a being into our world. The trouble is that the horror needs a host, a vessel, and that vessel is you.” Donny laughed. “You, you’re loving crazy,” Donny said. “I’m not going to hurt you, or rather, I don’t want to hurt you. There are other ways to do this than how it’s traditionally been done.” Harris continued without acknowledging the remark. “What do you mean how it’s traditionally been done?” Donny asked. “I mean, normally the host is killed. I assume every time until now, in truth.” “My god, how many people have you killed?!” Harris chuckled then. “I promise you that I’ve never killed anyone. Heck, I release the spiders that I find crawling around my home. I really don’t delight in the prospect, and fortunately, despite my life unraveling around me, I like to think that I am of a mental fortitude durable enough to keep my wits about myself where someone not as fortunate might have killed you on sight, repercussions be damned. Then probably themselves as the full weight of their actions, the inexplicability of it all, pushed them over the edge. “My name is Harris Vickers. I’m an electrician from Texas. My wife and I are… separated for now. I’ve got a son that I—I haven’t seen in a while, and after this bit of business is taken care of, I’m hoping I can pick up the pieces.” “You’re hosed, you know that right? There’s no ‘bit of business’ to be taken care of. You loving kidnapped me!” Donny exclaimed. “I am the only person on this planet who is trying to save you, you stupid son of a bitch!” Harris snapped, then he pulled a snub-nosed .38 from his waistband. “The alternative is me emptying this revolver into your face, Donny, and I really don’t want to do that. God, I don’t want to do that. So please, please, please, please… please, will you just work with me here. Do you really think I’d do all this for no reason, Donny? I’m not crazy, okay? I’m not. This is happening. Now please, I know you’ve got a family to go back to, right? Do this for them. I truly don’t want this to have to go any other way.” Donny, the vessel, trembled as he nodded in agreement. “Good. Now, I’m willing to undo your bindings. I’m not an animal. If you know what’s at stake here, we can work together. We’ll begin the ritual before the solstice begins, and if there’s no trace of possession after the eclipse has passed. We part our separate ways never to see each other again. I swear it.” Donny just continued to nod, biding time for an opportune moment. He allowed Harris to continue talking, and Harris went on to explain how in each generation a vessel and champion were chosen. Puppets that enacted this cyclical cosmic drama to decide the fate of the earth. Donny didn’t care about any of that though. He waited for Harris to get close. To free him. Harris was relieved to have someone who understood on his side up until the moment Donny, free of his restraints, charged Harris and in the ensuing scuffle seized control of Harris’s revolver. Harris pleaded. “Please, Donny! No, no, no. God no. Don’t do this. Look, if you just—” Harris stepped towards Donny, and Donny shot him. Harris crumpled as he fell against the ground. When he finally realized what he’d done, escape became the only thought in his mind. He ran from the circle of ash, past the first ring of filth, past the leaves and chalk, but when he was about to pass the ring of bones, covered in all the varying materials of the other rings, he found himself confronted with an immense, impassable pressure. Harris gasped from the floor, “My God, it’s real…” and the distraught look of failure that had been etched into his face faded away. He pulled the faded photograph of his son from his shirt pocket and smiled, having completed one last fatherly act no matter how removed from his son’s life the act had left him. Harris bled out and died. Donny continued to throw his body against the open air but found it impossible to exit the circles. The sun went black, and a shadow fell over Donny as he continued to thrash against the invisible barrier. Then he noticed the change taking place in him as the skin of his arms began to ripple. He saw his reflection in Harris’s pooled blood and bore witness to the thing that hung on the precipice of reality, ready to consume him as it made its way into the world. Held back only by a dead man’s obsession, Donny knew what he had to do. He put Harris’s revolver to the side of his head and pulled the trigger.
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May 2, 2023 04:31
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In and FLASH!
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May 2, 2023 04:31
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In and flash.
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May 2, 2023 05:22
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in
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May 2, 2023 06:11
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Thranguy posted:In and flash. Scams! Idle Amalgam posted:In and FLASH! White lies!
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May 2, 2023 12:07
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Earnest Brawl Results Idle Amalgam wins  BY DEFAULT
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May 2, 2023 13:02
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Sleep fight line crits Hid and Sought 1350 words Luce first things first, is this name "Loose," short for "Lucy," or is it "Loo-chay," all Italian-like? Hate note knowing how to pronounce names in stories took a deep breath and dived. Her hands swept the tiled bottom. Lungs burning, she finally felt metal under her fingers. She grabbed the key and shot up to the surface. Her eyes were blurry from the chlorine, making rainbows of the light reflecting off sequined dresses all around the edge of the swimming pool. She blinked, and realised they were wading towards her. Fist clenched around the key Luce waded towards the edge. A woman with iridescent black eyes shoved a drink into her chest. Luce dived. She grabbed at knees like sapling trunks and eeled her way through the forest of legs. With one palm and one clenched fist on the tiled rim she hauled herself from the water. Her sodden jeans muddled her steps as she struggled across the patio. Already this reads as an actual dream, which I appreciate The door was blocked by two women reclining on a mouldering couch. They had kicked off their stilettos and their long toenails clicked against the tiles. They beckoned at Luce-- Now! she told herself. She gripped the key. Now, now, NOW-- Luce leapt onto the couch. The women shrieked. Luce dodged a grasping hand with her left leg and pushed off the couch back with her right. She dived, landed in a forward roll and then was up and running into the darkened hallway and This kind of abrupt transition is good for what youre trying to do here. BUT… Silence. ...I don't think what comes after the abrupt transition is abrupt enough. We get time to catch our breath by *checks notes* literally giving Luce time to catch her breath. True surreality is being one place, then suddenly being in another, and it being perfectly normal, we've always been at point B actually. It wouldn't really bother me as much in a more straightforward story with stuff like "plot" or "characters" but it really seems like your goal here is to just be a dreamy as possible, and this transition didn't *quite* hit the mark. Luce let out her breath in a long sigh. Water drops from the bottom of her jeans plinked against the wooden floor. She turned through an open doorway and found herself in front of a large, in a dream, you dont "find yourself" anywhere, you just are glass-fronted bookcase. Luce could see her reflection in the glass. Her own pitch black eyes stared back at her. Luce felt her lips tighten in a snarl. She closed her eyes, opened them, and forced her focal point beyond the glass. She tilted her head and slid her eyes up and down the titles on the spines. Her eyes widened as she recognised the books. Her books. The spines were creased and the corners bent just so. So this section teases character and backstory, what Luce's life is like outside of the dream, and what the dream is a metaphor for, that these books mean something to her, but…what? It's unclear, and it shouldn't be totally clear, but I do think if you're going to include this, there should be more of an emotional throughline than what we have. For example…what are the books? What kind of books does Luce read? That would be a simple way to tell us a lot about this character. Tears pricked Luce’s eyes. She shook her head, angry with herself. The room was lit only by the fading daylight beyond the closed curtains. Luce jumped as a red light blinked on at the end of the room. Her heart hammered and it took her a moment to identify the growing hiss as the sound of an electric kettle. It was sitting on a cracked formica bench. Next to it the jar of teabags from Luce’s old flat.The stainless steel sink was full of used wine glasses. Why does Luce live in my apartment? The kettle boiled. Luce waited for the cathartic click of its auto shut off. The room began to fill with steam. The sound of boiling water filled Luce’s ears. I like this sentence She was sweating. The room felt like a sauna. Luce reached out. Her hand was halfway to the kettle’s switch when the kitchen door slammed open. Light and sound from the party outside flooded in and clouds of steam billowed out. Luce saw black eyes go wide. Her heart skipped a beat, then began to hammer against her ribs. The woman shrieked. Don't like that she's just referred to as "the woman," as Luce is also a woman, and the ambiguity takes a beat to untangle Luce turned and ran. Something cold splashed on her neck and she ducked, avoiding the cocktail glass that hurtled past her head and smashed against the bookcase. Luce jumped awkwardly over a dining table, slid on her arse across its polished surface and landed in a crouch on the floor beyond. A piano clanged as the woman landed on all fours on top of it. Her long sequinned dress made a hissing sound as it slid across the wood, revealing overlong legs, muscles bunched. The woman pounced. watch out, Luce! It's a Great Gatsby extra! Luce dive rolled, came up on her feet in the doorway, and sprinted down the hall. She skidded to a stop in front of a locked door. Luce’s chest contracted painfully as she noticed the dark patch on the faded wood, left behind by something that had been forcibly removed, screws torn from the wood. It was shaped exactly like the name plate that had adorned her bedroom at home. Luce’s hand shook as she tried the key. It went in. Nails clicked on the hallway floorboards. The key wouldn’t turn. Luce jiggled it, tried to force it left, then right. No dice. The woman was stalking towards her, her dress hissing with each step. She held a glass in each hand, and as she walked she left a spreading stain of spilt liquid behind her. A sob escaped Luce’s fear-dry mouth. Shaking, she pulled the key from the lock, and clenched it back inside her fist. Her lips trembled and she pressed them together, angry. She felt tricked. It wasn’t fair. Anger unfroze Luce’s limbs and she kicked the door. It gave a hollow thud and dust showered down from the frame. Luce heard the woman draw in a sharp breath at the sound, saw her pause her in predator’s approach. Now! thought Luce. She pushed her back against the wall like a wrestler leaning on the ropes. The wall bowed, its paper stretched. Luce willed it not to tear. She felt the fibres expand like elastic. She sank into the wall, stretched it to the point of breaking-- Luce lifted her feet, and fired herself at the door like a stone from a slingshot. She hit the door feet first and it smashed open. Luce slammed it behind her, and heaved a heavy chest of drawers across it. just a cool and good action sequence right there She was in a room full of plants. Luce struggled for breath in the fetid air. Thick roots protruded from cracked pots and burrowed into rotten floorboards. Vines ran up the walls and hung from the ceiling. Something brushed the back of her neck and Luce lashed out with one arm. Her hand sliced through the leaf of a large broad-leafed palm. She looked in horror at her overlong fingernails. No matter how often she cut them… Luce heard a thump against the door and she jumped. She shoved her way past branches and stepped around broken terracotta. The house creaked and groaned. At the end of the room under a casement window was a single bed. The curtains flapped and Luce felt cold night air against her cheek. The window was closed, and it took Luce a moment to realise the air was coming through a hole in the floor. The boards under the bed had rotten away, leaving the bed resting precariously on two remaining beams. She heard a susurrus behind her. Sequins dragging on wood. Fingernails at the door. A heavy thump. Luce sank to her knees. Cold air from the ruined floor rose up to meet her, and she shivered. She had lost. She pressed her lips together but couldn’t stop her chin trembling. She tipped her head back, trying to stop the tears from falling for just a moment longer. There was another thump against the door and this time the chest of drawers tipped and crashed to the floor. Without looking back, Luce leapt onto the bed, braced her legs on the bed, and heaved the sash open. The floor gave. Luce screamed as she found herself suddenly weightless, then falling. Rotten, borer-riddled chunks of timber fell around her as the bed slid off the tilting floor and tipped Luce into the night. She twisted in the air, got one hand on a downpipe. Her toenails raked against the peeling weatherboards and she thought she was safe, then the screws holding the downpipe to the wall ripped from the wood and she fell, landed and rolled on long, wet grass. Broken pieces of wood and glass showered down around her. Luce retreated through the garden. She climbed over a low fence and found herself back out on the road. She stood just outside the circle of light from a single street lamp and listened to her slowing breath. The house hunkered in the dark, silent and empty. Luce gripped the key inside her palm. Slowly, bare feet silent on the cold concrete path, she approached the front door. She slid the key into the lock. … I'm trying to read this story with the idea that there's a deeper meaning behind it, a puzzle. Here's what I came up with: Luce is a recovering alcoholic. The flapper lady that keeps coming after her is herself from her past; this is why they both have overlong nails. The key, is, I dunno, sobriety or some poo poo. Let's go with that. That's all the actual "story" I could really come up with. The rest is just, well, uh exactly what I asked for. Action in a dreamy environment. I gave this the win because it feels more surreal than Seb's story, which went in a little more traditional direction. Still, I would've liked to have seen a version of this where the themes are more pronounced, where we have more of an understanding of who Luce is, and where we care more about whether or not she succeeds. Maxine of the Camellias 1300 words The fake dream air was sharp in my nose – don’t breathe in through your mouth, the guy had said as he was putting me down, slapping the gooey electrodes on to my forehead. It’s really important. He’d said why but I couldn’t remember that bit, just his febrile eyes as he said it, his faint odour of bubblegum vape. I took another sniff, wondering whether I could still smell the sickly scent or whether it was just a memory. I think I was looking for disorienting with this prompt, and this intro is a little too orienting. This whole paragraph is just alerting us to the Inceptioniness of the whole situation, but doesn't really get us accustomed to the dream itself. We know the dream air is sharp (the "fake" is rather redundant) but we don't know why, what kind of dream setting would have sharp air Around me, chaos stretched to the horizon. Her brain really was a mess. I don’t mean psychologically, she was always fairly put together in that sense, at least until recently. I mean it was a pigsty. I couldn’t even see my feet, they were covered in half-read books, weird multi-coloured undergarments with too many legs, potplants. So many potplants. Circling back to that sharp air–why sharp, when you've clearly designed a place that would smell pretty bad? I lifted up one foot, tipping over a succulent and spilling dust-dry soil into the bric-a-brac, then put it down again and crouched to inspect the plant, its smooth pale-green involutions. That’s when the seagull hit me. They’re not scary birds most of the time, but as its blood red razor beak jabbed for my eyes and I sprawled backwards, flailing both hands out to break my fall, I understood that animals only choose to live around us, and that consent could be revoked at any time. It was screaming, claws raking at my face, beak wide. I hurled myself on my side in a frenzy, groping for anything to protect myself. The succulent pot was in my hand, then it was breaking on the dirty white feathers of my assailant, smash Both stories in this brawl do this same sort of cut where a paragraph ends mid-sentence. I like it in theory. The last few paragraphs have done a good job building a dreamscape, but I think it would work better if the protagonist didnt know exactly what was going on, that some of their memories of reality fade when they enter the dream cut to a tea room. Don't think you need to tell us it's a cut, it's not a screenplay, and you don't notice the scene cuts in dreams, even if they do happen. Still feeling overly oriented. Polite chitchat. Maxine was sitting across from me, reading a magazine. Around us were dozens, hundreds of little pots, with flowers. There was a faint odour of poo poo in the air. So she's found the person she was looking for by just sort of showing up where she was. It's simultaneously too convenient and weirdly not convenient enough…why was she not transported directly to Maxine as soon as she entered the dream? Since she wasn't, I think it would have been better for the protag to have to do something to find her. “They’ve worked out how to fix lies,” said Maxine. She turned a page, eyes top left. “Oh, it’s a stem cell thing.” “I thought you couldn’t read in a dream,” I said, and took a sip of my tea. It didn’t taste of anything. “I thought I told you to be quiet?” She said it calmly but with an icy edge. “Max, you need to wake up. Please. It’s been months. Please.” “I have three things to say to you, Samantha.” She put down her magazine, which was now smouldering in an autumnal burnt leaves way. I waited for her to continue, then realised the tea room was in an arena, a stadium. Good transition, I appreciate how matter-of-fact and casual this bizarre realisation is. Around us banked rows of bleachers rose up to the bright horizon. She was growing too, her neat jacket expanding around her as she swelled up, towering above me. In her hand was a spoon. Its edge gleamed razorlike in a tight spotlight from above. “I don’t want to fight,” I said. “I don’t want to fight.” “I dOn’T waNt to FiGhT” she said back, making her voice absurd in mimicry I understabd you sort of had to explain the tone, but i think the alternating capitals and lowercases couldve stood on their own, then threw her huge spoon right at me. It hit me in the face, sent me sprawling and spinning through the black and white lino squares on the floor, which had inexplicably I dont think you need to explain the inxpicability of it shattered into hundreds of independently rotating diamonds that whirled around me. One of them clipped my top lip and drew blood, drat thing was razor sharp. I clamped my mouth shut against the trickle and lunged for Maxine, who was rotating in her own cloud of black and white diamonds, a few meters away. She gasped and flailed at me with the magazine, slapping at my face, but I had her arms and I pulled her close in. Her dream body was taut and hot against mine. I kissed her, smearing blood across her thin lips. “You need to wake up. They’ve got you hooked up to tubes and everything but it’s failing, please. Please Max.” Her eyes were so much darker than usual. Her face was a cool Noh mask, the smear of blood like a flower that had grown there. Planted by me. Slowly she lifted the magazine, now a set of perfect glossy naked 8”x10” photographs of me, and, what was her name. I didn’t think it was a good idea to remember that right now. I lifted my hand to push it aside, but she lifted her own hand at the same way, a mirror image. Our palms were pressed flat together, a little sweaty. I was looking into her eyes, looking at the dot of light that was at the centre of each pupil. The dots were growing. I looked at her face, her dream face. It didn’t look like her, but I knew it was really. It reminded me of someone. Who was it? Just then her sweaty, slippery, slimy palm slipped down my hand and onto my wrist, took a grip, and flipped me round and down onto a hot hard surface with shattering force. She was on top of me, pummeling my face with a sharp-knuckled fist. “Filthy, lying, loving, loving, loving,” she said, calmly, as she hit me. I took it as my due. The wood under me was rocking back and forth with each impact and it took me a little longer than four blows to realise it was a boat, I was on a boat, we were on a boat. There were seagulls high above, circling. Oh no. I wriggled out from under her and saw a smooth brown figure, lying naked in the sun, lounging, lolling. I couldn’t look at her. I didn’t look at her, I didn’t even know who she was. Instead I took three steps, grabbed Maxine, Max of the Camellias, my love, my angry bride, and yeeted good use of zoomer slang us both off the side and into the fathomless deep. The water was cold and blue and everywhere, up my nostrils, in my clothes, under my skin. Max was struggling in my arms as we sunk but I held tight. I couldn’t breathe because my mouth was closed so I opened it to explain that I loved her and I’d made a terrible mistake, and that if only she would wake up and be angry at me properly it would be so good and we could look at each other and I could explain, and I felt her thrashing limbs grow ever more uncontrolled as the water sank into each one of my cells and made them heavy with moisture and sleep, and, then, I woke up. There was a beeping and monitors were doing things and outside I could hear footsteps. The ceiling was a flat white and I looked at it wondering what it represented for a moment before I remembered I was awake. I turned my head to the left, on my sweaty pillow, and saw Max there on the hospital bed next to me, camellias in the vase beside her. She was all wired up and a tube ran up her nose, and her eyes were surrounded by hollow sockets of shadowed skin, but as I watched I saw her eyelids twitch, and open, just a fraction. … There's a lot to like here, and the result is very, very close. One consistent thing that works is the jarring mid-fight transitions, they feel dreamlike in their mundane casualness. I would've liked to have seen more raw emotionality; I wish I knew more about this relationship, why the protagonist is in love with Maxine, and why (and how) Maxine chose to sleep forever. How aware Maxine that she's dreaming. The story's just a little too straightforward, an off-the-shelf inception. I wish I had seen more dreaminess in the tone, rather than just the content. Overall, I would've given this the win if I had been in a slightly different mood.
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May 2, 2023 22:49
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May 5, 2023 04:33
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May 5, 2023 19:01
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a forest is trees growing on the roots of the ones before it flerp fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Jan 2, 2024 |
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May 7, 2023 22:56
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Two Feet From the Mirror 1277 words The phone by my bed buzzed away insistently, hauling me out of sleep. I pawed at the touch screen until it stopped, then rolled on my back and stared at the ceiling. The cracked, off-white stucco stared back. I hated that loving ceiling. I’d been looking at it every morning for a month now, and it didn’t get any less bland or ugly even as the weather warmed up. I looked out the window at the scrap of lawn and it’s one old tree bathed in early morning sunlight. The air was clear as blown glass and limned in soft gold. I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. Some time later I pushed myself out of bed, the aging twin mattress creaking under me in a symphony of springs. I missed my old bed. It was quieter, more comfortable; less lonely. Bird song filtered through the open window, carrying the scent of newly opened flowers. I shut it. I went to the bathroom and ran cold water over my face, letting the shock of it blast away the last cobwebs and scrub off the rime of night-sweat. I stared at my face in the mirror. The haggard puffiness had been scoured away by the wash. Quick work with comb and razor smoothed out the roughness of a few days’ stubble and tangled hair. If I didn’t know better I’d say I was looking at a real, live human being. I threw on my old jacket as I ran out the door to my borrowed car. It was a therapy day and I was dreading it. Not that I have anything against Dr. Greg, quite the opposite. He’s a great guy, very positive, very kind. And that’s good most of the time, when what I need is a life coach to keep me on track with things and affirm my progress. It’s less easy to talk to such a relentlessly upbeat person when everything is crumbling beneath me. He ran his practice from a home office, an old all-weather porch stuffed with psych texts, both academic and pop, kitschy knick-knacks and antiques, and Pratchett novels. He sat in an old overstuffed armchair while I lounged on a reasonable approximation of the classic therapy couch, picking at the threadbare edge of my jacket sleeve. “How are you feeling today?” he asked. He looked at me expectantly. A lot of people had been asking me that question, looking at me like that. And I always said I’m fine. That I’m dealing with it. That I’ll be ok. “I’m not ok,” I told him. “I’m tired all the time. I can’t go to sleep properly and I can’t wake up properly. Something always, always hurts. I can’t focus on work or on pleasure. Everything feels harder than it should, like I’m pushing through molasses to accomplish anything. Nothing excites me more than it exhausts me. And I know what this means, I know why it’s happening, I get it. And all this knowing doesn’t help at all. “I had to see her on Sunday to sign the last bits of paperwork. I thought it would hurt more, I think I wanted it to hurt more. But it was just the same gray morass as every other part of my day. And I can’t envision a better future anymore. My health is deteriorating, I live far away from my friends, and the most important relationship in my life just disintegrated. I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know if there is anywhere to go from here. I’m tired, Greg. I’m so tired.” Dr. Greg looked nonplussed. He hadn’t expected that. We finished out the hour with some discussions on coping mechanisms. He wanted me to try a new medication “just for now” and see if it’ll blunt the worst effects. I told him I would. “This is only temporary,” he told me, “I know it feels insurmountable now, but you’ve just suffered a terrible shock and are hurting. You’ll bounce back, with time.” I turned away from him, looking at a faint reflection of my face on the window by my head. I saw the man Dr. Greg expects to see. Struggling, but put together. Working through it. The good patient who always makes it through the worst and comes out the other side. A success story. Right then I hated that man. “Yeah,” I told Dr. Greg, “I’ll be alright.” I left my car at the train station and took the light rail into the city center. I went to the outlet mall downtown, a new construction of brushed steel, glass, and faux-marble sitting among the red brick and brownstones like an abscess. Hideous loving thing, but they had great deals. I’d decided, in the office, that I needed a new jacket. Something lighter weight for the coming spring. Something not falling apart on my back. Something that didn’t make me think of her. I picked out an off-white linen number, and got some new shoes while I was at it. I needed a haircut, too, and isn’t it amazing what they’ll pack into a mall these days? I changed in the food court bathroom, then sat by the window with a smoothie that tasted like $9. I tried to decide if I felt any better. A lot of people swear by retail therapy. I’ve never really been one of them. I looked at myself on the surface of the burnished table. I looked different, more together, sharper. I decided that had to be enough. It didn’t last. I walked around the city center, trying to let the sunlight warm me through, the shopping bag with my old clothes in it slapping my leg with every other step. I made a mental note to drop them at Goodwill, knowing I wouldn’t. I sat on a bench and looked over the park at the center of town. I wished I had a cigarette, or a joint, but I wasn’t supposed to have either. Mess with the meds I’m on. I wished I had a drink, but I wasn’t supposed to do that, either. Everything I loved was being taken from me, bit by bit. I wondered what would be left of me when all my vices and indulgences disappeared. I let the thought go as I stood up and brushed pollen from the seat of my pants. It was almost five and I was supposed to meet Kate for an early dinner at Grove Street. Kate’s one of my dearest friends, the kind that no one deserves. I stayed with her and her husband for a few days, right after I had to move out of the old place (it helped to think of it as just ‘the old place’) and they’d been insistent on checking up on me ever since. It was so nice of them that I never let on that it rankled at me. I met her outside and we sat down at a two top in the corner. She ordered a glass of wine, I got a mocktail that I hoped would be good enough to justify charging that much for various syrups and juices. She caught me up on her husband, on their dog’s antics (with pictures of course) and complimented my new jacket. When the drinks came she put her hand on mine and looked me in the eye. “Hey Chuck,” she asked, “how are you doing? I mean, really?” I opened my mouth and paused at her earnest expression. I checked my smile in the reflective surface of her glasses, made sure it was appropriately nonchalant. “I’m doing fine.”
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May 8, 2023 03:43
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Moment of Glory 1486 words This…this was a forlorn hope. The pilot barked, “Tactical analysis, Jiminy.” The AI’s voice filled the fighter’s cockpit. “Inbound wave of twenty small enemy craft. Fuzzy scans, but there’s a cloud of signatures behind them. Odds are we’re looking at agility fighters tasked to destroy our combat air patrol, then scrub point defenses off the Resolute. Second group would be torpedo boats waiting for their fighter jocks to finish.” “Reinforcements?” “CIC is flashing that the main fighter group is engaged and too far away to arrive in time. But there’s some good news, Thunder. Reserves are on deck on Ready Five status.” Thunder looked at the scope, saw the swarm of red blips. “That’ll be a long five minutes.” The leader of the combat air patrol – a mere four fighters – had already given the order to disperse and engage with the intent to delay. “Jiminy, I want to bracket the nearest two tangos with two missiles each when they get into optimal range. At the least, we can break up their formation.” “I’m computing our odds for survival to be very low.” Thunder’s palms were sweating in his gloves. “Jiminy, we’ve flown together for a long time. I trust you. I hope you trust me. We can do this.” The ghost of a pause. “I trust you. To clarify mission parameters: is the utmost priority the preservation of the Resolute?” “Affirmative. Lots of pilots planning on landing there today with nowhere else to go.” “Then I suggest you engage overrides 1A through 4C. The final condition of our fighter won’t matter – either we’ll have completed our mission, in which case we’ll be rescued, or we’ll be shot down. And with five-to-one odds, we’re going to need every edge we can wring out of this craft.” Thunder answered by flipping three rows of switches. “All breakers and safeties off. You’ll take care of me?” “I promise I will. About to enter engagement range. Prepare for high-g maneuvering. Injecting cocktail.” At this, air bladders inflated to keep blood from pooling in Thunder’s legs and feet while needles pierced his skin and the cold flood of drugs plunged into his bloodstream. He gasped. The AI said, “They’ve launched their missiles, too early for positive hits, but I’m going to engage neural link and direct retinal projection as you’re going to have to get aggressive with the controls.” Thunder pulled the stick back and looped away from the enemy wing of five fighters as an opaque visor lowered and a tactical schematic appeared in his vision. A heavy weight pressed on his chest as several Gs of acceleration kicked in. A minute later, he had outfoxed or outrun all the missiles, and he turned back toward the wing. Already queasy. Bad sign. Launching missiles, the AI voice said, now inside Thunder’s head. His weapons tracked his targets, each flanked by two missiles approaching on oblique courses. Both tangos turned sharply away as he screamed toward the others. He had to take down those three before the other two came back. He veered in, turned ninety degrees left and down, and hit the thrusters for a high burn, again squashing himself into his seat. His opponent misread his intent and missed turning to an intercept vector. Thunder roared off, then flipped his fighter and rocketed in from an oblique angle for a deflection shot. The two pulse cannons on either side of his cockpit fired and fired again. The other pilot panicked and attempted to fly directly away – just as Thunder hoped. He walked the bursts into the engine of the easily-tracked enemy, and within seconds his target was dead in space. His stomach went into his throat as the fighter rolled and looped. Nice shooting, Thunder, but I had to take over for a second. His buddies almost had you lined up. Returning manual control, but you’ve got two off your starboard rear quarter. Also, status report: one of the tangos outran both of our missiles, but the other was apparently damaged by one of them. “Well, drat, we might just be able to pull this off, Jiminy. Have you analyzed their approach pattern?” They are— The voice of the AI was cut off as the fighter rocked. There was a shock in Thunder’s skull. Stand by— “Jesus, Jiminy, report!” An eternity passed in five seconds as he rolled, looped, and swerved his craft. The pain in his chest increased as the Gs weighed on him. He was straining himself; the maneuvering was taking a toll on him – much earlier than usual. Apologies, we took a hit, which knocked some of my core systems offline momentarily. Thunder, to get these two in front of us, we’ll have to perform a Rorsim maneuver. “All yours, buddy. Take care of me during my nap.” Thunder barely felt the fighter shuddering as maneuvering jets flared at full along with the thruster, pivoting almost in place, then everything was black. Several explosions rocking the ship woke him as they flew near an expanding fireball off the port quarter. Thunder could barely pull the stick for weakness. Gs were tough today. “Status, Jiminy?” You were unconscious for approximately twenty seconds. I’ve pumped you full of stims. We took some deflection fire from the wingman before I went erratic, but you can see his buddy gradually filling space. “I’m going to circle back and get the wingman now.” Belay that plan, Thunder. The one that ran from the missile is coming into engagement range. Turn to seventy-five mark forty and prepare to close the circle on him. “Got him, just need a little more time. Kicking throttle to full.” An elephant was now standing on Thunder’s chest. He was having trouble keeping the stick straight…but straight enough to finish this bastard. “…Firing.” Pulses of coruscating energy flew from the fighter and stitched across the enemy, until the schematic view in Thunder’s eyes showed an ejection. Cannons running red-hot, Thunder. Keep firing, and we might blow them out. “We don’t keep firing, and we’re dead anyway.” Acknowledged. Thunder looped, turned into a dive directly toward the remaining fighter, and almost vomited from the maneuver. “Jiminy, more antiemetics!” Drugs flushed into his veins. His opponent pulled its nose up toward him and let loose with bursts of coherent particle packets, shaking his craft with their explosions, but Thunder only had to endure a few seconds of that violent gauntlet before he blew his target to pieces with a shout of joy. As he pointed the fighter’s nose toward the other patrol fighters to assist his comrades, Jiminy’s voice jumped into his head. Thunder, I can’t believe this, but their torpedo boats are starting attack runs. “That’s suicide!” True, but some will get through if we don’t stop them. “Engage an intercept vector. I’m still woozy from the gravity hammer KO you hit me with on the Rorsim maneuver. I need a moment, and this approach is going to take something out of me.” Thunder laid back and closed his eyes until Jiminy announced the fighter had reached the torpedo boats and a schematic view of their formation filled his sight. Wracked by exhaustion and pain, he took back the controls as he slammed into the flotilla. Falling among them as an angel of death, he spread blasts and exploded torpedoes in their tubes. At long last, craft after ruined craft in his wake, his finger clicked on a firing stud that did nothing. Cannons have burnt out, Thunder. “That’s OK… Jiminy, I’m not doing well after all that maneuvering.” Rest, Thunder. I’ll get you back to the Resolute. I promised I’d take care of you. “That you did. Just need a nap…” ### The Commander (Air Group) commed the Search and Rescue shuttle. “What’s the status? Thunder still alive in there?” “Can’t get close enough to tell, sir. Too much radiation. It’s reading 780 kiloretts on the fighter’s surface. We can see him in the cockpit, but he’s got to be cooked alive. Must’ve overridden the safeties on the reactor for performance’s sake.” “I’ll assume that means no salvage either. OK, move on to the next fighter.” The CAG switched off the communicator and turned to the captain. “No way was he pulling off some of those maneuvers by himself. The Gs would have knocked him out, especially with radiation sickness. In fact, his AI must’ve been fighting the last part of that battle for him given his condition. Still, he – they – got all five fighters he was tasked with, better than the rest. Never seen flying like that.” The captain nodded. “It was all a damned close thing. If those torpedo boats had decided to attack, it would have cost them dearly, but they might have had our number.” The CAG barely heard the captain. “I knew Thunder was good, but this…what do you think goes through someone’s mind when they’re fighting like that?”
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May 8, 2023 04:09
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The Oldest One in the Book 1348 words There's a briefcase loaded with cash, another loaded with cut up newspaper, and a third full of C4 rigged to blow. Identical except for the little scuff, and everyone in this story knows how Three Card Monte works, knows the scuff isn't where they saw it first. The way it's supposed to work is that I walk away with the ransom, the undercover detective winds up with the worthless paper, and the kidnapper gets the bomb. But nothing ever works quite according to plan. Do you know what separates man from beast? What we can do that nothing else can? Most of the obvious answers are wrong. Ants build cities. Corvids and dolphins gossip. Chimps do war crimes. Rats cast spells. What we do, what only we do, is throw things with decent distance and accuracy. I may be old, but I can still chuck, and the time is coming soon when I might well need to launch my briefcase somewhere. As high in the air as I can manage, if it comes to that. If I don't find a bitter target. So, what good is this projectile prodigy, to early man? We're not talking about major league pitchers. Nobody could do much more than make an animal mad if you hit them. And this was about a thousand years before anyone came up with spears balanced enough to throw. But what we could do, is we could throw a rock into the brush and make the vegetation wiggle and make noise, and when the animal goes to check if that's a particularly clumsy rabbit or squirrel, we come up behind and bash its skull open. Misdirection. The oldest trick in the book. Older than books by a lot. Still works like a charm. Guy bends over to pick up a five dollar bill on the ground and another one walks away with his wallet. All the best scams are two person jobs. The front and the follow, the hawker and the shill. Same thing here. It's not the oldest one in the book, but it's pretty darn ancient. Rich man's kid falls for someone unsuitable, disowning level unsuitable. Daddy won't pay a dowry or give walking away money, but he would pay a ransom. So you fake a kidnapping. If you're really hard core, which Gina Lovett here absolutely was, you send dad a pinky just to let them know you're serious. Old days you could sometimes use someone else's finger, but these days they have DNA and prints. You make the demand, get the cash, and either fake her death or have her run off and meet him later. Now, if you can see any of the dozen places where one of these cats can betray the other, congratulations. You've been paying attention. People like Gina and Dez, they're people who've been near money enough to sniff it. Once it's in their hands the difference between a small fortune and half a small fortune starts to feel bigger than a mountain. The oldest spell in the book is the one that starts a fire, and it wasn't ten years later that some fool figures out how to do it with a stick and some twine. And that's the way it's gone with magic, again and again. The last to go was healing. A good surgeon does it better, but if there isn't one around, magic will do. Beyond that, there's really only two spells in the book worth using. One of them makes it so you barely age, can get to a hundred and still look and feel fifty. The other one, you could say, is the oldest trick in my book. A simple exchange. A body for a body. Someone young gets into way more trouble than they can get out of. Wounded and near death, maybe. Or facing the hangman in the morning. They get to live out a good ten years or so as a free old man, and I get to start over young, after getting out of their trouble. I'm very good at getting out of trouble. Dez was in a great deal of trouble when he managed to get in touch with me. A whole lot of trouble. A falling out with Gina that left a kitchen knife buried in her gut, and a corrupt cop turned private investigator sniffing around the ransom exchange, which was looking dodgy, apt to fall completely apart if daddy demanded one more proof of life conversation before dropping off the cash. "Get out of here," I said. "Go to the drop. I'll handle the phone." "I thought you were going to, you know," said Dez. "Not yet," I said. I told him where to meet. Three briefcases, identical. I specified the brand and model and combination in the last ransom call. It's always best to make strange demands at the last minute. Throw off the opposition's plans. Dez had an annoying voice, but one that was easy to do after hearing it for a few minutes. Gina was tougher. She was making noise, but pained gut wounded moans and curses wasn't much to go on. But she stopped before the call, and I was able to manage. Three briefcases. Daddy's, with the money, and the other two I brought. After the drop, I opened and switched the combination on number one before Dez came by, picked up number two, with the newspaper, took two steps, and got held up by Jared the investigator. If Jared had been honest things would have gone another way. But people like that rarely are. Jared popped Dez in the face, grabbed the case and left him with a broken nose on the floor. He wasn't going to be able to open it up without tools and time. So Dez picked himself up and went back to the drop, for the actual case, number one, except I had swapped that out for number three. Which was the one that goes boom. Just in case Dez changed his mind and thought he could make it on the run on a murder rap with that much money. But Dez wasn't quite that kind of dumb. He made our meeting. He gave his full consent, because this kind of magic takes complete consent on both ends, and just like that I was a gangly teenager with bad habits in the blood. He grabbed for the case with my old hands. I shook my head. "Part of the price, kid," I said. "There's enough to get by in my bank accounts." I gave him the PINs to the cards in my wallet. He growled, but wasn't up for a second rear end-whupping of the day. So I walked away. Toward the river, and used my new throwing arms to huck it right in, where nobody would try and open it. In about an hour the timer would trigger it. So then I went back to where I stashed the briefcase one, with the cash. I opened it up and looked at my prize. A thin layer of twenties and a heavy load of newsprint. I put it all together, eventually. It starts with Gina coming after Dez with a prop knife, knowing just how he would react, take it from her go right for one of the blood packs. The real stuff, too, collected in advance. Pigs blood might have fooled Dez, but wouldn't have done it for me. The middle is her trailing me and swapping out cases. And the end is her fishing a case full of money out of the river. Distraction. The oldest trick in the book. I may have to find her, have a little talk. I don't need the money. I have stashes and numbered accounts. But I have to admire her game, and I can offer what she saw in Dez, and a much better personality. I might have a shot. After all, anyone with her sense of self-preservation could tell I'm much more dangerous than Jared, and she could have left me with the bomb instead.
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May 8, 2023 08:01
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Crits for Week 561: Winner: a forest is trees growing on the roots of the ones before it, by flerp I really liked this! We got a glimpse into the motivations of MC and Hulm, and the both the motivations and stakes were easy to follow. I also liked that both characters had something of an arc, which is especially impressive given the word count. I will say that the dialogue could be better woven into the exposition, and some sentences here and there were a bit jarring flow-wise, but otherwise good job! HM: The Oldest One in the Book, by Thranguy I loved the intro, it was a super efficient setting of character, place, motivation, and window into MC's personality, all-in-one. The voice really comes through. I think the introduction of magic muddles things though, especially towards the end. It was tricky keeping track of what was going on, and I feel like the action and worldbuilding could have been streamlined more. Moment of Glory, by Admiralty Flag My intention with the prompt was to motivate character studies: a dogfight is a challenging environment to do this in, since so much emphasis has to be placed on the action sequences. THe primary dynamic feels like it wants to be the relationship between Jiminy and Thunder, but there's not quite enough underneath all the shooting. I wonder if making the co-pilot a human would help things: the AI nature didn't seem to be a critical story element, and the conversations between the two *feel* human enough that I actually got a bit lost in some of the opening dialogue, since neither participant had the voice of an AI. Loss: Two Feet From the Mirror, by Slightly Lions While the punchline highlights the relationship between Chuck and Kate, she's not present enough for the impacts of his lie to really land. We know from the beginning that Chuck is having a rough time, and we're told this explicitly during the scene with Dr. Greg. Chuck's lie follows as being consistent, rather than unexpected, and we don't get to see the aftermath or implications (ex: Chuck telling the truth to Dr. Greg but not to his daughter/mother/etc.) It almost seems like the primary conflict is between Greg and himself: whether or not *he* believes that he is better, but that doesn't really seem to be explored enough. Side note: The first person narration doesn't quite mesh with the descriptions during the waking-up scene: I don't buy that Chuck would describe the air as "clean as blown glass," so who is saying it? Congratulations flerp!
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May 8, 2023 23:07
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week 500 and something idk: so... do you post here often? whats up thunderdome. i feel like we havent really had the opportunity to get to know each other over the uhhhhhh actually lets not count how many years ive been here. anyways, lets do some icebreakers. its pretty easy. you sign up and in that post, you talk about one of your favorite things. it can be a book, a movie, a video game, or just something you like. doesnt matter what, just so long as you love it and want to talk about it. you can gush about it or you can just say "i like dogs" or whatever, but the more the better because i like to read about things people are passionate about. then i will respond with one of my favorite things. those two things (your post and mine) are now your prompt! have fun with both of them, interpret freely and wildly, and try to capture that joy you have when you think about your favorite things. also dont feel overly attached to either prompt, im not docking any points if you choose to ignore what i say hopefully thats clear. ask me any questions if youre confused but in short, post about something you like, ill give you something i like, and then you write based off of those two things. word count: 2000 sign up deadline: this friday 1159 pm pdt submission deadline: monday when i wake pdt (probably like 9am) my favorite writers: derp (books/Silent Hill 2) rohan (Australian Magpie/cherries) Chernobyl Princess (gardening/raccoons) Azza Bamboo (engineering/fighting games) Slightly Lions (action movies/summer) Thranguy (railroad boardgames/Charlotte) judges: me my favorite person my actual favorite person dont tell the other judge flerp fucked around with this message at 08:02 on May 12, 2023 |
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May 8, 2023 23:42
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hello. my favorite thing is BOOKS i like to read books, and hope to someday write books. but not just any books, in fact, if you take books as a whole, i actually hate books and they make me want to puke. but i love Real Books and i walk around with my nose in the air while reading them in a holier than though attitude all day long. come to the book barn and look in the Real Books thread and get called a baby because you read childrens books. then read a Real Book and never go back. thx. edit: that means im in if it wasnt clear
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May 8, 2023 23:50
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hello thunderdome one of my favourite things is the australian magpie. they’re distinct from the British magpie that is their namesake in that they’re not actually corvids, but they’re still frighteningly clever and fiercely territorial, especially in spring when they’re nesting. I have many fond childhood memories of riding my bike through a park and hearing the telltale swoop of an incoming magpie. their warbling birdsong is a delight to listen to in the morning and informs their name in many of the indigenous Australian languages, such as “coolbardie” in the noongar language. I’m lucky enough to have a family of magpies living in my backyard and they often visit us on the railing of our back deck; after a few generations of watching their young grow up in our garden they’ve come to accept us as part of their family. rohan fucked around with this message at 00:28 on May 9, 2023 |
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May 9, 2023 00:20
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derp posted:hello. my favorite thing is BOOKS im actually not much of a book reader which im trying to remedy with audiobooks during my commute but ill assume my books are too fun and enjoyable to be Real Books. but lets talk about Real Games, about my favorite video game Silent Hill 2. the greatest game ever made that is a goddamn mess of bad controls, stiff dialogue, and awful combat. it is surprisingly deep and complex and tells a story so well through its medium that i have yet to find anything quite like it. i can gush on it for hours, but i love the way its logic twists and turns and the relationship between James and the town itself, like the town in its own perverse way is trying to help James (and the others). i wont bore you too much and i dont want to spoil a like twenty year old game for some reason, but you can look it up for more details if youre interested  rohan posted:hello thunderdome i love birds but im also deeply stupid and know nothing about them but i love seeing them hop around the ground whenever i go outside. i dont think i could name any bird off the top of my head except for like a blue jay which woke me up a ton when i was kid. but that also reminds me of my favorite fruit as a kid, cherries! my brother had a friend whose family ran a farm and they would get us giant boxes of cherries and i would just smack on them all summer long. sometimes we went to their u-pick orchards and pick them too, but nowadays our town is really popular for them so theyre way too packed for us to do that. but to me, cherries will always be nostalgic and we had tons of different varieties. i cant remember their names but i do remember some yellow ones that were delicious.
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May 9, 2023 01:55
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In. One of my favorite things is gardening. I love digging around in the dirt, I love convincing plants to grow, and I really really love cooking food from the things I grow. I like berries especially. I've got raspberries, wineberries, chokeberries, blueberries, and bush cherries growing right now, none of which are likely to set fruit this year, but eventually. It's just really pleasant to have your hand in every stage of making something.
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May 9, 2023 12:17
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I love grand engineering projects: Power plants; rail lines; rockets to space —anything big with a lot of moving parts. It's not just the installation I find fascinating, it's the project itself: it's the problems they solved during construction, and the limitations they had to work around. In writing, as in engineering, there's nothing quite like a project to help you learn: That's why I am in.
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May 9, 2023 12:55
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Chernobyl Princess posted:In. ive never been much of a gardener, mostly because i never quite liked plants all that much. i like looking at them but caring for them isnt something i can really do, but i also do appreciate the people do and am always impressed whenever somebody grows their own food. anyways, what i love is raccoons! honestly, i love most animals like raccoons, which are those little guys that coexist within human spaces, like pigeons and squirrels and the like. theyre not quite domesticated, but there's that little natural contract between humans and raccoons where you know theyre not going to hurt you. when I went to university, I would walk around campus at night often and the raccoons were everywhere and it was so great. the little guys scampering around and you would walk past them without a care in the world. Azza Bamboo posted:I love grand engineering projects: Power plants; rail lines; rockets to space —anything big with a lot of moving parts. It's not just the installation I find fascinating, it's the project itself: it's the problems they solved during construction, and the limitations they had to work around. In writing, as in engineering, there's nothing quite like a project to help you learn: That's why I am in. there's something great about the collaboration between people when it comes to creating something huge. its easy to look at a bridge and just a bridge, but to think about all the work it took. not just the actual process of making the bridge, but all the previous knowledge people had found and built on for generations, the foundations of understanding physics and engineering, that makes those things so impressive. anyways, i love fighting games! i really like them not just because theyre fun video games, but because they challenge me in ways that few things do. theyve made me realize that i enjoy the process of learning and improving and getting better at a skill. its sort of like writing, but they involve a lot of struggling, self reflection, and honest effort if you want to genuinely improve. but fighting games have led to me find an awesome community and often fighting games to me are just about having fun and hanging out with friends as they are a thing to learn and practice and improve at.
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May 9, 2023 18:21
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I love action movies. They're often denigrated as "low art," relegated to summer popcorn fare, but I think some of the best films ever made are in the action genre. Die Hard is a masterclass in pacing and character, Hero balances historical context with otherworldly visuals, and John Wick has some of the most interesting and effortless world building and cinematography of the 21st century. I love the balletic quality of good choreography and the efficiency of plotting and character exposition a good, tight action movie requires. There's a level of craft required at every level of the film-making that I think gets unfortunately overlooked when your Drunken Masters and Speed's get lumped in with Transformers and the like.
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May 10, 2023 02:17
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