This is a draft of a story I had to write for school, please be critical as its far from finished and I could do with some advice on how to improve it. Also some Ideas for a title would be great! Thanks!
I stood alone, at the end of the narrow hallway that they called the waiting room. The grey light of January falling lightly through the expansive and elegant window. Rain drizzled down the outside of the glass making tracks as the droplets chased each other to the ledge.
I hated this place, the bad memories from over the years hovered like a ghosts, lingering like a bad smell even though they weren’t mine. The whole place reeked of misery. The morgue had never been a place where people went voluntarily.
My finger tingled as I dragged it across the smooth glass in a large curve, tracing a smile. I added the eyes and smiled back at the beaming face, the wide mouth continued to grin like a Cheshire cat as water dripped from the perfectly circular eyes, falling down the glassy face and pulling the corner of the mouth into a twisted grimace.
I jumped at the small sound of footsteps. I couldn’t help but imagine Damien strolling down the hall, running in and hugging me and everything being better. A thin, balding man shouldered open the door, carrying with him a small pile of files. He saw me, glanced down at the files, and walked over, his footsteps echoing off the high walls. His footsteps, not Damien’s. I missed him.
“Are you Miss Blakeman?” asked the man, his voice was a low and dreary monotone. The light blue plastic name tag on his jacket told me that his name was Joseph Crawhall. I nodded in reply.
“This way please,” he said, turning sharply and loping off down another long corridor that looked identical to the one he had arrived through, his too-short trousers flapping against his skeletal ankles with me trotting behind to keep up.
The wooden floorboards creaked in the old building as the waiting room disappeared around a corner. After a short and silent walk the corridor eventually came to a long metal staircase, where the modern morgue beneath the ancient house was protected from the heat of the day. The white doors looked uninviting and like the sterile doors of a hospital wing.
The lanky, stooped Joseph Crawhall held the door open for me and then followed me into the freezing, tunnel-like, white plastered passageway that was totally cut off from any day light. The florescent lights stretched into the corridor and another door, white and hospital styled like the one through which we had just entered, stood facing us at the end of it.
I waited for Joseph to lead the way, even though there was only one, and followed him hesitantly into the morgue.
The chilly and chemical filled air made me shiver as I was introduced briefly to Dr. René Gordon, A short and pale middle aged woman with huge hair that even in the florescent dim light of the morgue, seemed to be burning it was so red and bright. She shook my hand vigorously and beamed at me with open friendliness. She glanced down at her own pile of files and ran her finger across the words until she found what must have been my name.
“Ah! Eve Blakeman,” she said enthusiastically
“Yes, that’s me,” I said, my voice echoing strangely across the large room.
” you’re here for……….” she ran her finger across the file again. “Damien Woods? Is that right?” She asked without waiting for a reply.
“Can I ask your connection to the deceased?” she probed casually.
“Fiancé,” I replied, feeling my silver ring on my finger. I hadn’t taken it off.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Said René uniformly and sincerely. And despite that she had probably said those words more times than most people, her face filled with sympathy. I was led over to a large steel table, with a white sheet lightly draped over the silhouette of a body. René delicately pulled the sheet down to the man’s shoulders and looked up at me.
“I need you to confirm that this is Damien Woods,” she said, gesturing to the body. The once healthily tanned skin was pasty, the bruises along the side of his head were purple, but the deep cuts on his left cheek had been stitched up. I didn’t want to look anymore. After three months of wanting to see him again, all I could do was pull the sheet back over his limp dark hair.
I saw it all again, Damien sprawled across the ground beside me, the slow red river trickling down onto the concrete pavement, the crumbling city ruined in front of us in a few seconds.
I had crawled over to him and pulled him onto my lap and rocked him like he was a baby again, sitting stiffly on the hard ground with my eyes shut, hunched and whispering reassurances into Damien’s cold ear, telling him it would be alright. I couldn’t move, or think. oblivious to the growing pool of blood surrounding us, agony and terror ripping through me as I refused to accept what was happening.
My thoughts spinning out of control. Miguel’s voice, but it sounded distant and unfamiliar through the ringing in my ears. Eventually his words formed into language in my head.
“Eve?” I'd barley recognised my own name, “Eve, you have to let go of his body,” his body, it had sounded so strange, this wasn’t Damien anymore. He was gone. I squeezed my eyes until my temples hurt.
“Eve, we have to go,” Miguel’s voice registered in my mind and I looked up into his reassuring expression, but I saw the panic in his eyes, and as more screams and shouts echoed down the street fear flickered across his face.
“You have to let him go,” gently, he tried to take Damien from me. But I only clutched him closer and shook my head, like a stubborn child. The shouting and screaming was getting closer now, gun shots rang out as well.
“Eve, please?! We have to leave. Now!” there were frightened tears now streaming down Miguel’s cheeks as he attempted to lift Damien’s body from my arms. Again I resisted, and hugged his limp form closer.
“I promised I would stay with him,” I whispered,
“And you did, but he’s gone now,”
For the first time I looked down at Damien’s face. For those few seconds that seemed to last an eternity, I surveyed his empty and expressionless face. My heart was in my throat as I turned his head towards mine, hoping for some response. But he stared blankly through me; his bright eyes now hollow as they sightlessly gazed into the sky. He did not look at peace. He was too still, and too pale. He was somehow smaller too. There were bruises and cuts along the side of his head. I felt my face twist as I choked on tears. I remember stoking his cheek, numb with disbelief, I had wanted to say sorry to Damien, But I have no idea why.
“Do you need a moment?” it sounded more like a suggestion that a query. I shook my head.
“It’s him, I’m sure,” I angrily felt tears stinging in my eyes, and swelling over onto my cheeks. I thought that I was done with this part; the days on end of crying, balled up on my sofa at home, our sofa.
“I’d like to leave, please,” my voice was shaking as I stumbled back down the faceless, white corridors, almost tripping up on the stairs and back into the grey light of the waiting room. The rain was still cascading down the window, in sync with my tears. The fading smudges of my smiling face now just a small puddle on the window ledge.
I held a vivid image in my head of the mortuary the entire time and could almost see the colorless lighting and feel the death in the atmosphere. So, that's brownie points right there. Considering the circumstances of this piece, the predominant feeling I get from the narrator is of course sad, but that being said, I don't feel much else coming from her. I know that times I've been in funeral homes and places like that, it wasn't always just sadness that preoccupied my mind. Sometimes anger, sometimes irritation, even sometimes boredom creep in amidst the melancholy, and the only point I felt hinted at the spectrum emotions I imagine she is feeling is when she draws the smiling face in the condensation. Besides that, I thought your MC's responses were believable and not overly dramatic as death scenes can often be. I thought the part where she is holding Damien in her arms was appropriately poignant despite how little we currently know about the characters mentioned. And then, besides some grammatical errors I thought your diction was mostly spot on and the writing flowed fairly well.
