Young Writers Society

“The director is a knavish lad, thus to make poor actors mad!” I clutched one hand to my heart while using the other to wave a bottle of moisturizing lotion towards the heavens.

“Larry—”

“Lord, what fools these mortals be, Kira! If they didn't want it to rain on the show, they shouldn't have scheduled it outside in spring.”

“Larry, maybe...”

I glanced past my smeared reflection. She was sitting on the edge of my bed, her hands folded silently in her lap and her back straight. I could see her sitting like that on the plane ride over here, just like she'd sat in our parents' old Cadillac on cross-country trips all those faded lifetimes ago. I couldn't help but smile at the thought.

“Maybe what?” I asked, turning my attention back to the stubborn makeup caking my face.

“Maybe there will be a rainbow.”

“Yeah, and maybe that'll—” When what she'd said finally hit me, my words fell dead on my tongue. I tried to swallow them, but they stuck in my throat.

A rainbow.

Slowly, I swiveled my chair around to face her. From my angle, I couldn't see her face for her hair. Even though it was cropped shorter than I had ever seen it before, it was horribly tangled, and the humidity had only served to make it even frizzier than usual.

Of course, I'd never tell her I thought it looked terrible, but she probably knew anyway. She always knew. I sometimes wondered if my thoughts were like frightened animals in the palm of her hand. She had a way with animals.

What the heck would a rainbow mean to her?

“Larry, if there is a rainbow, will you tell me?”

She turned her face towards me. There was a faint smile sprinkled around the edges of her lips, clinging to her cheekbones, coating her empty eyes. God, I'd forgotten how young—how infinitely younger than me—my twin was. When I flew away, I'd left her behind like a wounded insect, to let childhood turn to amber around her.

“Yeah.” I rolled my chair away from the desk a few feet and leaned back to look through the window. “Yeah, sure, but there isn't one.”

“Not yet,” she said, and turned her face away from me again.

I sat there for a moment, looking at her, before rolling back to the desk and inspecting my face in the mirror. It was a mess. Black and brown and green and specks of orange radiated from my eyes like a child's finger-paintings. The kind of paintings Kira used to make, just for the feeling of the colors between her fingers. (Is that what color was to her? Paste and water and slime, and the smell of soggy paper?)

“I'm gonna hop in the shower to try and get my Puck getup off.” She didn't show any sign of having heard me. “Uh, I'll be right back.”



The walls in the dorm building were notoriously thin, and when I turned the shower off, I could hear Kira singing all the way from the bathroom. Good thing the building's empty.

Kira's voice was just so... weak. She slipped and stumbled through melodies without picking her feet up in between the wobbly notes. Yet there was something about the tone of her voice—a certain clarity that made your heart flutter. Listening to her as I got dressed, flecks of other times leaked through my head; plastic silverware and summer hammocks and caustic, teasing words washed together like sidewalk chalk in the rain. And through them all wound her voice.

Something about her voice had made me never able to tell her to be quiet, no matter how much it aggravated me. Something that made me almost envious of her, with her delicate innocence and her incomprehensible simplicity. What a shame she never could have lessons.

I stopped halfway through putting on a sock.

There was once a time when futures buzzed in both of our ears like mosquitoes. When I went away for highschool, I brought mine with me, and I could feel them biting me with every audition, every curtain call. But Kira's—hers had stayed behind with her, and lay frozen around her in the amber.

As I left the bathroom, I could still hear her singing.

“...skies are blue,
and the dreams that you dare to dream
really do come true.”

Oh, good Lord.

“Hi, Kira. I'm back now.” As if she couldn't hear that I was coming when I was in the hallway. Her hands flipped and twirled, painting her voice onto the air.

“Hello, little Larry, fly
away above the rainbow...”

I pushed the window open, letting in the fresh, metallic footprint that the rain had left on the breeze.

“...why, oh, why can't I?”

I scanned the gray clouds. Scanned them again. Something tugged at the corners of my lips.

“Kira, did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“The rainbow.”

“There's a rainbow?”

“Of course!” I sat down next to her on the bed. “Can't you hear it? Red's the loudest, and its voice is melodic and warm—then there's orange, not quite as rough or energetic as red but with the same sort of operatic charm. Then yellow, the Soprano, the highest of them all—and maybe the sweetest. Yellow is harmonizing with green right now, making that perfect fifth—do you hear it?—green's that one that's soft, but bright, like a boy whose voice hasn't changed yet. And then there's blue, with a quick vibrato and that clear, low tone, and then—”

“And then violet.”

“And then violet.”

“Violet is my favorite,” she said with a small smile.


------

This was a beautiful piece, just what I would expect from you Azila.
You didn't mention it, but I'm guessing Kira is blind?
Anyway, onto the review.
Plot/Storyline
So obviously with a prompt like that events leading up to a meaningful plot are out of the question. Yet you did a great job symbolically integrating the rainbow into your story. This was more a story about feelings than actions. I particularly liked how you described that colours and pigments meant nothing to the blind girl, mere slime on soggy paper. Yet she longs to see a rainbow. Her only outlet is her voice, so she sings. You also left us at a sort of climax: the colour violet. Obviously it is meant to symbolize something, and you leave it up to the reader, so it's a gripping story.

Characters
I definitely picture Larry as the flamboyant, dramatic type. He seems to be slightly cynical towards his sister - What the heck would a rainbow mean to her? - but also appreciative of her talent, and also willing to be her eyes and see the rainbow, even if it isn't there.
His sister isn't really explored in too much depth. Rather she plays the role of the object of the story. I'd like to see her thoughts in the story, but I also think what you've done with her character fits the piece as it is. This was an interesting read.

Azilaz! I think the reason I've never reviewed anything of yours is that I'm so useless with short stories and that you're too good for me to rely on the "You should cut the adverbs" or "Paragraphs should be spaced out" routine. Alas, though, I shall do my best.

I did have to read this story twice for it to make sense. At first, I thought I was just being my typical literary-stuff-goes-way-over-my-head self, but then I realized that it's 11 pm here and I've been up since 5 something and have been running on subpar sleep for the past week. I'd wait until morning, but I've been so bad about reviewing I'm afraid that if I wait I won't review. So ignore my inability to follow the story, because I get it not with perfect clarity and am rambling prematurely.

To start this review off right, I liked this story a lot. It was simple, it was sweet. Going to stay with me forever and ever and ever? Probably not. But you're not trying to make it the short story of world-shattering brilliance, and I thank you for it. What you do here is capture a moment, and in such a beautiful way.

I can't decide if Kira's name is too heavy-handed for me, meaning what it does, especially considering Larry and Laurence don't mean anything of relevance that I can see, also considering that Larry and Kira sound about as far away from each other as two names can get for twins. Now, maybe you were going for something more allegorical or symbolic with these two, in which case just ignore me because my brain long ago made a decision to stop trying to wring excess meaning from stories. If you were going for Kira and Larry to represent more than just themselves, then you could do some fancy wordwork with the names and some other such to provide that meaning.

Or, you could scale back and make it more of a charactery-thing and define Larry and Kira more, but that's hard to do in a flash fiction and then potentially leads the reader to wonder, "Why?" when there's nothing particularly unusual going on stylistically or thematically.

So, I guess you could explore more with Kira and Larry being representatives of being symbols or metaphors unto themselves should you so desire. Then you could perhaps move beyond a good, simple, sweet story and onto something else and all that awesomeness.

Otherwise... I was proud of myself for knowing the Shakespeare, and I was particularly delighted by the way Larry weaved in and out of Shakespeare-Shakespeare, Shakespeare-like speech, and then normal speech. It was very realistic to my ear, and made me smile. Again, though, I'm wondering if all the times he used the word "see" were intentional or not on your part. That seemed very much insensitive for someone who has a blind twin. Then again, if they're both bigger than just a character, anything can go (and anything usually does.)

My last note before I post this (to return on the morrow, I hope) is that you might want to identify Kira as being his sister earlier. It took me a while (but that's perhaps my mental state) to figure out that Kira was his sister/twin and not some random girl down the hall he was crushing on.

With that... gotta go sleep. Let me know if you have any questions, and if you want to discuss something, I shall do my best. This is the most pathetic review I've done in ages, so my many apologies. I hope the "something is better than nothing" applies here.

Rach

From my angle, I couldn't see her face for her hair.

-Hmm. The second part of that sentence sounds odd. I think it's your use of "for".

God, I'd forgotten how young—how infinitely younger than me—my twin was.

-This really threw me off. You're being metaphorical, right? But this really made me think of her (who already seemed young in my mind, because of her relative childishness) as even younger. But it's late at night, so I suggest that you completely ignore this whole note.

Larry strikes me as someone that's unabashedly selfish -- perhaps because he doesn't realize that's exactly what he is. For example,

Mom and Dad could afford to pay for me to board at a private arts highschool, but they couldn't afford singing lessons for Kira? I frowned. No, that wasn't how it was—acting wasn't a hobby for me, it was a passion. And I had talent, too, not just potential.

sounds an awful lot like an excuse. And I get the feeling he knows it. He even seems a bit privileged, as though his parents spoiled him as a child. (I'm saying that because of his thoughts and actions, not because of anything in the quote above.) It doesn't make him repulsive as a character; in fact, I think it really accentuates the difference between him and the seemingly innocent Kira.

Kira seems so... blind (sorry for that, but it's true). Maybe even naive. That's really all I picked up about her.

I liked it. It was a solid story, and the ending left me feeling like a good ending should. Curious. My favorite thing about this story is how real it feels. It seems like I just looked into someone else's life for a brief moment. I like what you did here.

Nice.

LOL, this is going to be a fail.

ZOMG, guess what? I didn't have to read this more than once! I actually understood it after the first read! Hell yeah, Skeensy's getting smart now. And you all thought the day would never come. (Or at least I think I understood it. I could be completely wrong and think that the MC was a pony or something.) You like leaving things up to the reader at the end, don't you? You poo. Um, am I allowed to think that violet resembles... um, resembles the sound of a fart? It's just that it was the first thing that came to my head when you never revealed what the colour violet sounded like.

I've already warned you about my failure of reviewing you stuff, so I won't repeat myself, but do bear it in mind. I thought this was insanely sweet, and I have no idea why you dislike it so much. I like the whole quirky feel to it. Larry's a really interesting character, so it's great seeing things from his point of view. I could have guessed that he was an actor without you actually saying it, methinks (I'm sounding like you now) because he had that whole dramatic flare to his voice. Very clever, Mz Turtleface. It's interesting as well because I found that Larry had some moments of... arroggance about him, I suppose. When he's thinking about how awesome of an actor he is, for example. Despite that, he clearly cares a lot for his sister and he's very likeable. It's almost like I shouldn't like him so much and think he's a little selfish, but I don't. Basically, GO TURTLEFACE.

Ahhh... and now for the part where you will laugh at my failure. I'll start off by being a sheep and copying something that Rach said. I agree that I thought Larry and Kira were, like, not brother and sister at the beginning, but Larry fancied her or something. It might just be me because I have a tendency to assume everyone are lovers and junk, so I often seem to be big on inbreeding. What I'm thinking is that it may be partly because of the fact Larry's reciting Shakespeare at the beginning and I personally connect Shakespeare with love, so I automatically thought that the Larry had a thing for Kira or something at the beginning. I think it's just a me problem really... Basically, I've just figured out that this nit-pick is pointless and it's just me being a noob. Sorry.

Hmmm... this is awkward. I'll think of something.

I will.

I've just realised I'm one review ahead of you. Wow, weird.

I'll be two reviews ahead of you after this. Even weirder.

I will think of something. Just wait.

Aha, I've got something! (sort of) You thought I was going to give up, didn't you? It's something really minor and probably not even a nit-pick, let alone a critique, but it's something. Okay, so Kira doesn't go to the boarding school with Larry, right? I'd like to know how Larry feels about that. Judging by this piece, I wouldn't really think that her visit meant a lot to him. Okay, he's a bit pissed off at the start because she can't see him perform and she's travelled for three hours to do so, but as a whole, he almost seems to think of her as a burden to me. For example, he acts pretty cynical when she asks him about the rainbow, and it seems like he just wants to, like, do something else. Like have a shower. Which he does. On the other hand, it's made clear throughout the piece that he does care a lot about her, so I'm a little unsure. I think you just need to make Larry's emotions towards his sister visiting him a bit clearer. Either that, or I need to look into things better. I'm hoping it's the first one because I felt smart when I understood this.

And I'm done! I hope this review amused you through pity for me, and I can just imagine you sniggering as you read my failure. Fun, fun, fun! On a more serious note (yes, I can be serious if I want to be), I honestly did really like this. I love the quirkiness of it, I love your characters, the whole idea of the rainbow representing noise to a blind person, the sweetness of the whole thing, and I think you did a good job with what the story generator gave you. Is this for The Random Story Generator (or something like that) contest? I assume it is because it's under 1000 words, plus you used the story generator to write this. If it is for the contest, then GO TURTLEFACE. If you don't place, I will actually eat someone's face in disgust.

I'm rambling way too much now, so I better cut myself short before I make you want to punch me. Awesome job, Turtleface!

Keep writing,

xoxo Skins

I liked the story. I feel like it's the first chapter of a story rather than a stand-alone story, though. I would read the next chapter, if it was. I don't think the title makes that much sense, but that's my opinion. I really like the story.

Hello my Gila Munster! I'm here for a review! *feels intimidated*

This is only the second time I've reviewed something of yours, isn't it? Gosh, that doesn't sound right...but I think I've read a lot of your work and haven't found anything critique worthy. Even this one I was tempted to pass up, but I'd like to at least try to write some kind of review...here goes. >.>

H'okay, so for starters I think I get what you were portraying...though I'm not completely sure. See, you're one of those writers who come up with these beautiful stories and poems that make people like me have to read them a couple (or more) times to really understand the hidden meanings behind the wonderful imagery. You use a lot of symbolism, and when a realist like me comes along, it gets kind of overwhelming and confusing for my poor little brain. But on the upside, the more I read it, the more I like it, and the more I start to understand about the story. Anyway, enough about my confusion.

I think my main issue with the story is the rainbow; what did it mean? I guess it could be interpreted a lot of different ways, and that may be what you're going for. To me, it was the way she sang, and then it was the hope of making her (Kira's) dreams come true. And then I read one of the reviews above me and am wondering if she was blind? And thus the rainbow is an analogy for her singing, even though it's not that great? I just felt like it was pretty vague and kind of a slippery theoretical idea that wasn't quite getting its purpose across...like, I feel that you're trying to symbolize something really beautiful, but to my frustration I can't be sure just what that thing is.

I'd say my only other critique would be the beginning; I didn't feel like the first couple of paragraphs were a really strong hook. You did a great job portraying the actor, but it was difficult to get through, for a beginning. That could just be me, though. >.<

Anyway, sorry this review wasn't much help; your writing's too good. :3 I wish you well in the contest!