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Bonus crits for fun and profit: AA: Life Persists I think you have the roots of a good story here, although someone in TD said that good ideas are a dime a dozen. I don't know if that's necessarily true, but there's still something here in the family drama you've sketched out. The characters all have their own voices and feel distinct. I've gotten to understand that writing a protagonist as a receiver of action instead of a doer of action is more difficult to turn into a compelling story. I'm not sure that it works here. The intro and outro portions take away from the impact of the rest of the story. My guess here is that you fleshed them out to fit into the prompt, which is what happens to me when I go story -> prompt instead of prompt -> story. They're a little bland and unremarkable. Not necessarily bad, but just not particularly compelling. Maybe it's because the whole 'genesis of life' thing has been said and resaid in a million different works and it's hard to write in a way that doesn't make it seem tired. I don't think I need to point out the typos individually and usually I don't find them too distracting, but the one that capped off this story ('.a'), the inappropriate comma in the last sentence ('The land had seen war, famine and drought, yet, Life persisted.' should probably be 'The land had seen war, famine, and drought. [And] yet, Life persisted.) and your inconsistent capitalization of 'life' were pretty distracting. Lately I've been pausing for fifteen minutes before submission and then coming back to the story just to review my mechanics. No story changes, it's usually too late at that point anyhow. It's helped, I always find something. SlipUp: Catch Aw, this opens up so cute. I'm a tremendous sucker for culture-soaked slice of life stories and this hits the sweet spot for me in that regard. I thought that papcio pointing out Maz on the field was particularly touching. I thought that the story goes a little off the rails when it jumps into the future. There are details here that work to propel the story forward (your protag's divorce, the cartoons), but there are some that seriously take away from your story. I thought that your description of Dziecko's (the elder, I'll get to that in a sec) job wasn't useful to the overall thrust of the story. It didn't really inform me about his character too much and it muddled your message in a 'passing of the torch' sort of story. I have such a hard time with this when I'm writing, because my slice-of-life stuff just ends up with way too much life in it and most of life is pretty dull (for me, anyhow). There was potential to close the loop on your protagonist's smile, but while the loop opened strong I thought the close was lackluster and a little bit of a throwaway. This was a cute fun little read, but I felt it lacked some substance.
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Mar 10, 2020 18:25
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 07:44 |
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Thranguy posted:Victim of Gravity The Circle Complete 1266 Words No ground beneath me and no sky above, but I know that I am falling. There's a person, a pile of rags and robes, sitting across from me. It taps the top of a black-backed deck of cards with a finger that's at once a clutch of feathers and a single forked nail. Each time it taps, my heart roars. The rags turn a card over and I peer down at it. A man and a woman entwine and disentangle themselves, their fingers in mutual half hitches. Their eyes are locked and mouths agape as they bathe one another in magma spray. The rags' voice is soft and feminine, with a touch of regret. "The Lovers' Quarrel." My world goes grey. *** Parvati's pacing around the living room, speaking half to herself and half to me. She's cleaning in erratic bursts, like a little bird flitting from branch to branch. I'm looking at myself on the couch, just staring. "No. Just no, you're not going out tonight. Mom and Dad are coming tomorrow, the place is a total wreck, and Maya definitely needs to be changed." My tone is acerbic. "I don't think you can tell me 'no'. Look, I've had a real motherfucker of a week, like eighty hours in the office, and I need the night off. Besides, it's Dave's birthday." She stops for a moment. "Uh, the night off? You had a night off yesterday. And on Monday. And tonight you get home, throw your jacket on the floor, toss your bag on the sofa, and smoke a loving joint?" I've moved beyond compromise. She's standing next to the kitchen trash. The garbage can looks fine to me. In her eyes it's overflowing. I'm going to hurt her. "You sound like my mom." I punctuate it with a long plume of skunk smoke. "Yeah, well at least there's one parent in this loving apartment." I get up and start putting on my coat. *** The expanse around us glows a bright orange. The sky staggers along the spectrum, through heliotrope and further down, to murky greens and blues. I look between my feet at the pure black, then back to the table. The woman's face is a featureless hole in rags. She shifts and for a moment I think I see a nose, or a beak, or a lone eye. It vanishes at my glimpse. She speaks. "Turn a card? We are falling here, you know." Her voice is gentle and choral, but firm. The orange outside dims to red, veering toward indigo. "Why should I? I bet you already know the order, what's the point?" She shuffles, irritated. Her voice sharpens. "You're content, in your plummeting dreams, to reach the bottom?" I look out again. The red is gone now, gone to shades of purple and blue. I'm suddenly very nervous. "Okay. Okay. Turn the card." We observe the flip and the face together. A man stands hunched in a jeweled chariot. The wheels strike showers of sparks, stoking a wreath of flame about his eyes and mouth. "The Rider Ablaze." *** I'm years past contrition and muttering under my breath. The invectives come out as little puffs of steam in the freezing night air. I climb into the cab of my eighteen-wheeler and check the rearview. I scroll through my phone, flicking through dating apps without responses. I go to my texts next and send an idle one to Maya, my baby. Not so young anymore, none of us are. I'm scrolling up at more than a year of my messages without her replies, all vacillating between remorse, pleading, anger, penitence. I let out a choked yelp and punch the steering wheel as hard as I can, elbows constrained in the cramped cabin. I turn the key then look at the manifest on the passenger seat. Hauling toxic waste. Almost too on-the-nose. I ease the truck out onto a barren stretch of flatlands highway and take a swig of bad coffee. No ring on my finger, not even an old tanline. She's been gone a long while. *** I can feel the fall more acutely now. We're almost at the bottom. The red is far, far above us, a sliver halo just barely in sight. I'm losing my patience. I'm getting scared. "One card left to turn, shell-less spirit." I withdraw. My voice is weak and faint, a voice of terrified denial. "I don't want to. I don't like this story. This isn't my life." She chitters, but the laugh is not cruel. "Was it ever? Do you remember it, your life?" I think on the cards, on the flickers of a life I thought I'd lived. I see nothing ahead, nothing behind, nothing between the flickers. We're almost at the black. "Turn the card." She flips it and we look down together. "Bad luck, little spirit." A cataract studded with strokes of lightning, each fulmination piercing the cracked pupil and silvered iris, each bolt dragging the lids together in blind finality. "The Tumult in a Closing Eye." *** I'm pacing outside a convenience store. My heart is racing. I feel cold wood and colder metal in my pocket. I look at my hand, willing it to stop trembling. The skin is so thin, so diaphanous that my knuckles might burst through at a careless flex. I take a sharp breath in the cold. The air rushes in too fast, opening scabbed hollows in my throat. I go into a fit of coughing, covering my mouth with my hand. When it stops at last, my palm is coated in saliva streaked with brown ingots of dead flesh. The store clerk looks out the window at me first in concern, then with suspicion. I pace in the parking lot for a few more seconds. I need the money. I'm forecasting desperation, forecasting violence, forecasting a storm that begins and ends me. I reach back into my pocket, not bothering to wipe my hand. The gun isn't reassuring. In that moment I can see the cratered road leading here, stretching back to a bleeding horizon. I grip the gun tight and barrel through the convenience store door. The clerk is already reaching under the counter. *** The seer in rags is silent. The world outside carries the very faintest snatches of murky purple, quickly being swallowed by the yawning black. I try to reach to her, to reach across the table, but I can't. My hands are gone, if they were ever there. My voice is panicked. "This isn't my life. This isn't what I am, this isn't my past." The color in this world is gone to nothing now, imperceptible except as a memory. We're at the bottom. She reaches for the last card and hesitates, then speaks to me. Her voice is a love majestic. "Dear spirit. Dear soul at my table in eternity, there is no past. You learn your tale in the approaching hereafter. You learn your story to come." She pauses and speaks again, her voice soft and reassuring. "I could have turned cards of love, or riches, or victory supreme, or a single card of fledgling life curtailed. But those are not this story for you, beloved soul. I only teach what will pass until the wheel revolves and you return to me." One card left. She turns it. A figure crawls from a shapeless void on hands and knees. The road ahead is winding, fraught with catastrophe and moments sublime, leading in closed circuit to the same black pit from which he rose. "The Life Ahead"
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Mar 16, 2020 06:57
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Quarantine Interprompt There's a run on the store, everyone's walking out grabbing the same thing, and supplies are running low. But that one thing? It's not what most people would expect. 300 words
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Mar 16, 2020 19:08
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In, flash plz
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Mar 17, 2020 14:36
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In
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Mar 25, 2020 20:53
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 07:44 |
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Failed two weeks in a row, gotta get in this time. Flash rule, please.
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Mar 30, 2020 16:27
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