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Of Angels



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Fri Jul 29, 2011 5:15 pm
Azila says...



When we were little, our parents told us to be ware of angels.
They roamed the silver prairies during the day and the velvet mountains at night. We could hear their wings pounding the air in our nightmares—white enough to blind you and so big that if you saw them you would forget there was anything in the world but feathers. And you would be enveloped in those wings and left there to soak in your own guilt and regret until you turned green all the way through like the vegetables pickled in herbs in that jar on the top shelf. The jar that sat in the kitchen like a lazy green cat, full of unrecognizable bloated shapes that, once upon a time, grew from the earth and drank the golden sun.
Our grandparents told us that the deer were messengers of the angels.
They drank you up with big brown eyes and then spat you out again, for the angels to see. During the gray woolly moments when day and night were sisters, the deer came out to guide the migrating angels.
We, too, would migrate during those times. At dawn, we hiked up to our dwellings in the mountains and at dusk we descended again into the prairie-village so as to keep out of the way of angels. Whenever we migrated, we left behind grain for the deer to eat. Foreigners liked to say we revered the deer, but if you want the angels to be kind to you you must be kind to their messengers.
One morning, as I was laying out grain, a deer approached me in the high grass. I kept very still and pretended I was like the mist that clings to the sun as it rises. The grass was up to our chins, the deer and I, and most of what we could see of each other was eyes. The deer's eyes were rounder and browner than anything I had ever seen; browner than the chestnuts in the ceramic bowl in the cupboard.
The sun was rising, and with it the gnats. They swarmed the prairie like spores. I could feel them on my face and in my hair but I dared not move; the deer was so close now. It had not blinked yet and I was determined to blink last.
A gnat was crawling on my lip, in the kind of way that blurs the boundary between lip and brain. I could feel its minuscule toenails scratching my thoughts aside, leaving emotions free to tumble around inside my throat before erupting from my mouth.
The deer paused.
Slowly, it began to rise out of the grass, revealing a slender white neck—a human neck. As the deer rose more I saw that it was in fact not a deer at all, but a creature with the head of a deer and the body of a woman. Hands reached up to the deer's head and lifted it away.
I never saw the woman's face because when the mask was lifted, dark hair cascaded over her face and touched the feathers hanging on strings from around her neck. When she reached to push her hair aside, it occurred to me that I had never seen hair of that color before. We had hair like dried grass and hers was darker than wet wood.
I thought, then, that she must be an angel. She had no wings, but who else but an angel would have such hair? The dawn was almost gone and I knew our brothers and sisters would already be high in the mountains. Who else but an angel would be in the high grasses so late in the morning?
We had been told to be ware of angels.
So I was ware. I was ware before she pushed her hair from her face. I was ware as I ran into the mountains, and I am still ware today, though sometimes I feel as though I am being pickled in my ware-being. Pickled like some long-unidentifiable vegetable in the glass jar that we keep on the windowsill now, next to the bag of grain that we still scatter twice a day for the deer to eat after their migration.

Spoiler! :
Written in ~45 minutes.
  





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Fri Jul 29, 2011 6:53 pm
ChalkyUknome says...



Wow! I love how descriptive you are! And it's even cooler since you wrote that in 45 minutes! I don't really see anything wrong with this at all. But maybe you could change this...

Azila wrote:And you would be enveloped in those wings and left there to soak in your own guilt and regret until you turned green all the way through like the vegetables pickled in herbs in that jar on the top shelf.


to something like this?

"And you would be enveloped in those wings and left there to soak in your own guilt and regret until you turned green all the way through like vegetables pickled in herbs in a jar that lay on a shelf."

Maybe not be so specific with it? I don't know. Either way it's a great piece of writing. It's up to you. Maybe that's just your style and if it works for you stick with it! Keep up the good work! :)
"We are nothing more than the sum of our memories and experiences"
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Fri Jul 29, 2011 9:45 pm
Twit says...



Hai!

This was beautifully written, Gadzila! It was very poetical and there was some lovely imagery and description. It was quite short, so there wasn't much opportunity for character development, but that didn't really hinder this as that wasn't the main focus.

Even though I did really enjoy this, I think it did suffer from the 45 minutes. There wasn't enough here, and the idea of the deer and the angels is such a good, unique one that I wish you'd do more with it. The detail about the hair was a feature of something much larger, and you didn't expand enough on it. I'd like a story with a proper encounter, like a Third Kind encounter that Steven Spielberg could make a film out of.

I think I get the message here, though, about living your life in fear of something that you don't really understand just because someone tells you such and such a thing, and the limitations on life that brings.

So, I love the message and your prose, but I do think this could benefit from an expansion of sorts. Aside from that, I really don't have much constructive to say at all. >_<

-twit
"TV makes sense. It has logic, structure, rules, and likeable leading men. In life, we have this."


#TNT
  





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Sun Jul 31, 2011 5:56 pm
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carbonCore says...



If I had to go ahead and describe this work in two words, with all its ups and downs and sideways, the two words would be "like Solstice". Like Solstice, this is a beautiful piece of prose, wrapped in many onion-skin layers of mysticism and myth. Like Solstice, it enjoys a quiet minimalism in terms of plot and description. Like Solstice, characters are built, but they are less characters and more concepts or plot devices. But like Solstice, I really can't pinpoint the voice you're trying to use here, and that's my biggest issue with the work.

It's the whole distinction between saying "this was something that really happened to a friend of a friend" versus "this was related to us by the gods". Once again, you go into detail of what the character is feeling, what they're seeing, and so on and so forth. But the "character" here is awfully introspective about the world -- he ( ? ) relates the myths his parents and grandparents told him, he goes on to describe his people's movements up and down the mountains, which make this story seem more of a parable or fable than anything else. And yet, it goes into much more detail than a fable would usually allow (such as the gnats). While succinct analogies like the jar of pickled vegetables go a long way to illustrate key concepts in the story, the gnats are there for no reason other than to create atmosphere -- and fables, as far as I understand, generally don't have an atmosphere; rather, they have a message they have to convey effectively. I am by no means saying that this isn't an effective story, however-- I am saying that it is difficult to categorize.

It doesn't seem like there's much room to expand here, but at the same time, the story does seem sparse at times. The sparseness is familiar to me from your other stories, almost becoming a signature of your style. You drip little bits of information which make me want to find out more (for instance, why the heck are they going up into those mountains?). I realize the irony of what I'm saying with this, but still, it's what came to my mind.

I also very much appreciate, and can relate to, the actual idea behind the story. Besides what Twit said in her review, it also reminds me of seeing ghosts where there are none -- something out of the ordinary happens and we try to attach a meaning to it, despite that meaning being (possibly) far removed from what the event really was. A very enjoyable, very down-to-earth theme.

Not much else to say, I'm afraid. It's good to read a work of yours again. Come back soon!

Your deer,
cC
_
  





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Sun Jul 31, 2011 10:44 pm
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Sins says...



IMISSYOU.

In reality, this won't be a review because you're too good for, err, your own good, but I just need to comment on this. I have to. It's you. And I miss your face, and your avatars that often scare me, and your ramblings, and your turtelfaceness, and the way you understand me, and your cultured way of life, and your pretty writing, and and the way you inspired me to start using methinks, and your love of Rebecca Black, and YOU. <3

Ahem... anyway. As always with your writing, I thought this was wonderful. I could go on and on about your descriptions until my fingers burn off. They're just so pretty. I love that you've stuck to your usual writing style here 'cause you know how much I love it, and I like the message of the whole thing. What I interpreted as the message, anyway. >.< I'm a big fan of characterisation, and it's really interesting that even though your main focus here (and in a lot of your stories actually) isn't the characterisation, I still really enjoyed it. You got skills, turtleface. Skills.

I hate be all eeeew and repetitive, but the main thing that bothered me here was the, well, I suppose the length of this and the fact that I think you could have done more with this whole concept. I know you like to be vague about things and stuff, but I do think this could do with some expanding. Part of me doesn't want to critique this because like cC said, the whole sparseness thing does just seem like your style. On the other hand, this does seem a bit more sparse than usual, so maybe you could squeeze in some expanding. Except you wouldn't be squeezing because you'd be expanding because squeezing kind of implies making smaller, though it depends on the person themselves and how they interpret it, and I'll shut up now.

My God, I'm not making sense.

And I'm useless.

Don't say I didn't warn you, okay?

Just keep up the good work, I guess. I'm sorry that I was so useless, but I really did love this, and I think it might be one of my favourite things written by you actually. Considering I'm not normally a fan of shorter things, that's awesome, even if reading this has made me miss you more. You'd swear to God I was a perverted stalker. I'm not, by the way. Kinda. Sorta. Not really. I'm as perverted as they get.

Keep writing and come back soon!

xoxo Skins
I didn't know what to put here so I put this.
  





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Sun Jul 31, 2011 11:19 pm
GrayLady says...



Oh my gosh, this was absolutely BEAUTIFUL. I love it so much. The fact that you wrote this in 45 minutes blows my mind. The only thing I'd really say got me was the part about the gnat on the narrator's lip. I didn't quite understand why it was so significant, and the bit about the toenails of gnat...? I don't know. I suppose it was meant to be a metaphor, but it didn't quite reach me. This was SO amazing. Never stop writing.
  





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Wed Oct 26, 2011 5:07 pm
MasterGrieves says...



This was really nice. Admittably, I'm not so much of a fan of stuff about angels, but this was really nice. I liked how you mentioned the deer in one line. It had a very exterior feel to it, like it was all happening outside. Very nicely written, unlike my review which probably won't do justice. Have a good one!
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Fri Jan 20, 2012 1:20 am
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Gadi. says...



Azila.

I love this. Everything about it and more. I feel like a lot of writing that I read--even really famous writing by amazing, amazing authors--isn't able to emote as much of life as I would like it to... if that makes sense. But this does. So many gems. Your thought processes were so careful and yet so rich, and I could relate to all of them:

"A gnat was crawling on my lip, in the kind of way that blurs the boundary between lip and brain. I could feel its minuscule toenails scratching my thoughts aside, leaving emotions free to tumble around inside my throat before erupting from my mouth."

Even if I had never experienced this feeling, after reading your writing, I can definitely understand the sensation. And I agree with Carbon about the genre of the piece--it's too specific to be fable, but too... iconic(?) to be anything else--but that's why the piece feels so fresh.

The story itself was so beautiful. I couldn't find meaning in it, but I don't think we really have to. I loved reading about this society and the narrator's family and home and setting. And the ending was tremendous. I loved it all.

I agree that I do want a fuller story. I don't really know what that means--but maybe I do want more meaning, I guess? Why does it matter that the narrator saw that angel? Why was that angel sort of disguised as a deer?


Gadi
my world isn't only beautiful
it is so far away
  








she slept with wolves without fear, for the wolves knew there was a lion among them.
— r.m. drake