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blackbird12 wrote:
"11:58"

Stark red numbers glared at him in the darkness: 11:58. The air conditioner whirred softly, a muscle twitched in his leg. >I would separate this sentence into two, because a comma can't join two independent clauses, and the two pieces of this sentence aren't really on a similar enough subject to use a semicolon. The pillow was thin and limp beneath his head. A bar of moonlight slanted through the blinds, glinting on the empty vodka bottle at the foot of the bed. He ran his tongue along his teeth and felt the fuzz of hard liquor. >I like that as a description; nice job. Also, you've done a good job setting up the scene. Not too descriptive, but doesn't leave me wanting.

He exhaled sharply, fingers kneading his temple. He was drunk, but the memories still clung to him like some sour aftertaste that kept him awake. Intoxication had become routine, and alcohol his bitter beloved. He wanted the blackout, not only to awaken with a splitting hangover, but to feel the slate of his mind wiped blank, with no recollection of his mind’s wanderings. To feel clean again. But tonight, two minutes before midnight, before the emergence of a raw new day, it eluded him.

He flicked on the television with a quick upward chop of the remote. He stared indifferently at rail-thin models clad in crimson lace, bathed in candlelight, wallowing on loveseats while white looping numbers scrolled across the screen. His eyelids fluttered over testaments to community colleges, insistent pleas to call employment agencies. All commercials>I'd say infomercials because daytime does have commercials. aired only in the dead of night--for who else was awake at such an hour but the lonely and directionless?

The screen shuttered to black, and he flung the remote away in disgust. Its buttons glowed a dim yellow on the floor, lonely>gonna get a little nitpicky here. I'd say use a synonym for lonely, since you've already used lonely. But then again, something to think about: the buttons are close together. Would they be lonely? beacons of light.

Coaxing sleep, he buried his face in the mattress. He felt a coarse patch on the sheets, fingered it, then smiled. A semen stain, several days old, the only tangible memento of his lover in the apartment. He pressed his nose to the stain, inhaled the stale scent of love. He thought of him framed naked in the doorway, the scrape of stubble along his jaw, the careless leer that drove him mad. The salty taste of him lingered at the back of his throat, blending with bittersweet blueberry vodka. He swallowed hard, swallowed a tingling need to vomit, a corrosive lust. The urge to masturbate struck him with a hot jolt, but he resisted, restrained by some quick fear. He cursed, sighing into the cotton. >Nice paragraph! It's lewd without being trashy. Well-described. Very good.

He had hoped that liquor would soothe him, that the darkness would anesthetize him. That he would be alone, free to be no one but himself--a role he rarely played. But randomly, cruelly, his mother’s voice cut through his mind, slicing into him as she always did, when he was most exposed.

How come you don’t wanna play ball with the other boys? It’s fun, hangin' out with the guys, innit? Just look at your brother, the whole football team loves him, and he’s got such a nice girlfriend… Why can’t you be more like--

His teeth dug trenches into his bottom lip. The pain silenced the memory. The present could always blot out the chaos of the past, but only temporarily:

Oh my God, get these filthy magazines outta here. Awful! Christ, what would your father think, his little boy gawkin’ at naked men? Throw ‘em out… It’ll be our little secret. Your father won’t know nothin’ about this…unnaturalness.

Unnaturalness. Her voice was like a buzz saw, cleaving his forehead in two. In his mind her features were soft, vaguely defined as in a half-imagined memory--a photograph fading into deep whiteness. But through the years her voice remained the same, serrated as a freshly whetted blade.

He had clawed himself from the closet and dragged himself from the stinking hovel of home. He had fled five thousand miles, living on the edge of poverty and decency to avoid a return. But his mother had stowed away in his memory since the first day of escape, and he could not erase her, nor heal the ragged wounds of youth. They were wounds his lover had understood and assuaged. Somehow another man had found something to love in him, had found a way to caress that frayed edge in him, the one he thought was too fragile to be touched. >Another very good paragraph.

He believed it was love between them, but he had never felt it before--so what was it? Fingering the stain, he wondered why he had no other souvenir of him: no photograph, no trinket, no scar from a lovers’ quarrel. Everything between them was thin and brief, and even this stain would fade, scrubbed away in the fierce swirl of water and detergent. The past was slow and lasting, the present fleet. The thought was like a stab in his gut.

His mother, his lover: the words formed a twisted rhyme in his head. One was pain and one was passion, yet they were intrinsically linked. They were searing reminders of what was wrong and what was right, sometimes both, sometimes neither. He had spent years fleeing from his mother, but she still lurked inside him, closer than ever.>I'd change the period to a comma and lead it into the next sentence. While every day his lover slipped farther and farther through his aching fingers.>Why are the fingers aching? The thoughts swam through his head. Perhaps he deserved no more than the companionship of late-night ads.

His gaze rolled to the clock once more: 12:08. He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut, begging for the dull thudding sleep of the drunk, praying for a ceasefire from the sibilant voices in his mind. The stillness of the air oppressed him. He wanted to sob but told himself that was weak. He wanted to forget the realization that had slipped into him in ten intoxicated minutes: that the past could not be caged, and nor could the present.

It was somehow fitting that when he drank himself into a stupor, when all he wanted was to forget, all he could do was remember.