The Piano Man

...

heh. so goes the story of billy joel. i thought that it might be about him when i heard the words 'piano man', but when he was called billy... yeah, it was good. keep writing
-zalarus

Hey there Sunny, I’m here with the first of the two reviews I owe you. Let’s jump right to it.

The room was dark.

This is so short and simple, it becomes rather provocative. It gives almost nothing away but eludes to something bigger and more extravagant.

…their skin pasty-looking in the sickly light…

My only problem with this is that ‘pasty-looking’ sounds so…silly. Why not just say ‘looked pasty’.

The man was also used the smell.

This sentence has a way of dragging down the whole paragraph that it begins, not only because it probably should be written differently but also because it sounds dead. Try something like: ‘The man had grown accustomed to the smell of the room.’ or something like that, I’m sure you could do it better but you see what I’m getting at. Add a little life to your sentence.

But honestly, after this, I couldn’t find much to comment on as far as sentence and grammar go. But I really want to give a shout out to a favorite sentence:

The waitress, her coat around her shoulders, her hair still up in a loose bun, her long, shapely legs sprouting gracefully from her skirt, walked by and nodded to him. He nodded back and winked.

This seems so cliché as you describe the waitress but at the same time, because of the characterization that you gave in the beginning she doesn’t seem as flat or boring as she could have.

Overall, this wasn’t bad. The story didn’t have a whole lot of a point to it but the description was wonderful throughout.