I'm considering turning this in to my fiction writing class for a workshop, but I'm not totally sure yet. I need to tack on another page and a half-ish if I'm going to workshop it (it's just over four pages now, and I need at least five), so if anyone finds areas I could expand on, that'd be cool. Any critiques at all are definitely welcome and much appreciated though.
So yeah. Here it goes.
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You're the only person I've seen in three days.
You take my hand and pull me across the beach, close enough to the water that the warm mist hits my face. Out in the distance two dogs fight over a dead seal. I wonder what happened to their families. If they were smarter than us and left with all the others, or if they tried, like us, to wait it out.
I cover my nose as we get closer, and you try to wrap an arm around my shoulders, but it's hard to walk that way so you hold my waist instead.
The seal's front flippers are missing, and its tail is shredded to pieces. Soon it won't even look like a seal. Just a hunk of meat.
The dogs snarl at us as we pass.
When my roommate packed up her last bag, she dropped it in the foyer and looked at me, straight at me, for the seventh time that day. "Please come with us," she said. Our friends were outside in the van they had just rented. Last one in the city.
"He said there was time," I told her, because you did. And I've never not believed you.
"But all the crime," she said, stepping once toward me.
"There's always crime here."
"But it's worse now. You know it's worse now. Please."
I've never not believed you.
Our city's dying, out across the dunes. I pull you to a stop so I can watch the red-orange flicker in the dark water. I wonder what it looks like to the animals underneath.
Two days before it happened the birds squawked at each other and fought over trees. They each flew in great big lines, no pattern to any of it that I could make out. No bird ever sat still for long, even after it won a tree. By the next morning, all the birds were gone.
That morning you came to my apartment without anything. My bag was as tall as me.
You wiped your feet on the mat and took your hands out of your pockets and you looked at my bag like you'd never seen luggage before.
"Where's your stuff?" I asked.
And I swear you laughed. You say you only smiled and maybe chuckled a bit, but I swear you laughed and said, "We're not gonna need anything. Me or you."
"What about the fire?"
"It's supposed to rain. They said so."
"But it's a drought." When I stepped on grass, it crunched beneath my shoes.
"I can feel it," you said. "I just . . . I don't know, I just know it's going to rain. Trust me. You don't need all that shit, it'll just be a pain to carry."
You said we'd be coming right back. Two days, tops, and the fire would be out. It wouldn't even have time to reach the city. Everyone who left was just scared of nothing; it'd be fine. We'd be fine.
So I sat my bag in the foyer and followed you outside.
The water's usually see through, a light, sometimes medium blue. Today it's opaque. You say it's because of all the debris washing in. Maybe that's what killed the seal. A charred candy wrapper. It's always the candy wrappers.
"We're the only ones left, aren't we?" I ask you.
When you don't answer, I turn away from the ocean to look up at you.
"You're the only person I've seen in three days."
You pick my hand back up and keep pulling me down the beach.
The lighthouse sits alone a ways down the coast; they never light it up anymore. When it was built, everyone thought it was the best thing in the city. Not red and white stripes like a normal lighthouse, but yellow, a little beacon of hope. Now the yellow paint's chipped off to show the steel underneath, but it couldn't stand the rain and the surf. The metal's rusted red.
While we're walking, there's a shout from inside the lighthouse, and you stop me this time. "Did you hear that?"
The person screams again, louder, "Hey!" and you start walking.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"There's someone else. Em, we're not the last ones." You trot instead. "What if they've got food? I'm starving." You pause, look back at me, and you smile bigger than I've seen since that morning. Since we still thought it might rain. "You said you didn't want to be the only ones. Let's go, so we're not."
So I jog along behind you, and the lighthouse looms closer and closer.
I trip when we make it to the rocks, scrape up my knee on one of them, and you pull me back to my feet without a word. Above us, the lighthouse touches the sky. The door's propped open with a stick; the steps leading up are cracking. You look at me again, then take my hand, and we walk inside.
"Hello?" you ask, but no one answers. "Weird. I know I heard someone. You heard someone too, right?"
I nod. Blood's already spilling down my calf in snaky little rivers.
You whisper, "C'mon."
We spiral up the stairs, clutching each other and the rail, and it surprises me how cold the steel is against my hands and feet.
Halfway to the top, the door clangs shut, and it's pitch black.
For a second we stand there, trying to hear, but there's nothing. I tug at your arm gently and you follow me back down the steps until my feet hit concrete instead of metal. I let go of your hand to feel around on the wall, but when I find the door handle, it won't turn. "It's locked," I tell you, then I hear a match against its box, and light floods the space.
I smile--you're always prepared--and turn to thank you, but you aren't behind me.
The man holding the match is not you.
)
There are some really good points in both, and I'm definitely going to keep them in mind when I go back through and edit this again. Hopefully I can squeeze five pages out of it.