Young Writers Society

The First Dividing Cell in the Primordial Sea

I was so thin-skinned before I knew you. Everything went straight through me; sound, heat, light. They were indistinguishable one from the other, different degrees of jangled nerves. My life in waves.

You'll laugh at me, but I'd dream about the world being like me, round, blue, watery, moving, always moving. What? Is that so far a stretch? The sea was my body then. I used to unfurl my thoughts, sails like blue translucent cheeks, fat with the current. I wanted to reach across the surface of the world, and there, on the other side, I could touch my own skin. Startled, I'd shrink back into myself. I'd make up stories about touching another cell, that in fact, I had just caught one. A twin.

I remember sleeping, just lying on the belly of the ocean, letting it take me. I was tiny and vast all at once.

The tide came in, licking dried salt from the rocks. The reaction is a chilled bloom,the water around becomes thick and giddy, and I'm pulled up, up towards the surface.

My sky was loud with stars.

Look now! You can see it! Light wrenches the spectrum, impaling a soft belly of vacuum, swirled stinging tendrils spinning. O scuttering fizz, belched from the nuclear furnace, kick, spit, grip through the long black nothing that since ate the star that bore you. Thousands upon thousands of years, and there you are, new and wriggling amongst raucous caucus of your kind. O, space, O, quiet death, surrounding suns with boundless oblivion. They will never know flesh, or sound, or company, but their radiant orisons outlive your meagre meter, their flame unquenched by any absolute. The sky is not your catch, but their pursuit.

I was gasping or the current was throbbing. The crests swallows me, swallows me, folded like dough, down down down, into the black. In the afterglow, I heard you.

At first my thoughts were... fuzzy. Not unfocused; bloated, overgrown. Every impulse rebounded, trapped in my skin, faster and faster, from spasm to rattle to hum. I ached with the din of it. I wanted rocks and sand and salt inside me, beyond the muted rose membrane. To taste, to feel, to hurt to feel something concise.

It bounced inside of me, the hum growing higher, higher. The sound of it smoothed, artificial and precise. Guttural overtones purred up from the bass, orbiting about the note, its plush areolae colouring the glassy constant. Some sat, some flickered with a dirty fade. Faster, faster, higher, higher, lush with pitted blows. This is it, I said, this is it. I am going to burst into nothing. My head throbbed and split.

And then there were two.

This is good. It's different, which is always a good thing. =]

I can't wait to read the rest.

Hello! Hawk here for a review.

All right, so this is an interesting start! You've got a wonderful descriptive talent, using a variety of words to make it feel fresh and new and unusual, and I like that. It feels like a poem, put in story form. I do think it could be a potential problem if the rest of your story is continued in such a manner, merely from the fact that most people, especially young ones, have a short attention span and not as much appreciation for long, fancy words as the more poetically inclined. In other words, it's a bit difficult to read, and that can be a turn off for some folks. I'm not saying your narration style is bad; on the contrary, it's lovely. I'm just warning you that it might not be appreciated to its full extent in an environment full of younger readers.

I like the way you're not entirely clear on what exactly it is in the sea; you've got all of this great description, and yet there's still and air of mystery and unclarity about the narrator itself. I suppose I'll have to read on to figure out what exactly is telling this tale.

My last critique is grammatically-based. You seem to switch tenses throughout the story, changing from past to present and back. You want to keep this consistent so it doesn't throw your reader off on what's happening when; that can get pretty frustrating.

All right, that's all I've got to say! I'm off to read the next part.

Cheers!
~Hawk