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The Coffee Table



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18 Reviews



Gender: Male
Points: 1300
Reviews: 18
Mon Jan 23, 2012 2:13 am
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thersites says...



The floor in Arthur Nickel’s basement was covered in old purple matted shag carpeting, and the walls were covered in paper that had been so yellowed by time and cigarette smoke that the flowers on it look decayed and wilted. The room was devoid of furniture, except for a small oak coffee table. It stood on rickety legs, and the surface was covered in rings from long gone drinks. The finish had been dulled and worn away by time, but was still visible on the sides of the legs if the light hit them just right. One corner had been broken away, and the pale wood beneath it stuck out like the face of a sharp cliff.
Before it was put in the basement, the table had sat in an apartment that Arthur had lived in with his new wife, and his newborn son. She had been beautiful, with dark chestnut hair and eyes grey and hard as steel that were between her haughty cheekbones and her slanted arched eyebrows. Their baby boy, Zander, had been beautiful as well, with a tuft of soft sandy hair sprouting from just above his forehead and his mothers steely eyes.
Arthur stood in front of the mantle in his current home, a small bungalow not too far from a park with a pond in the middle. He loved to watch the sun as it moved across the wall above the mantle, he would breathe in and remember the little boy, or the young happy family that had left him so long ago. He remembered how his son used to crawl around the legs of the coffee table, and giggle and smile when Arthur would crawl around with him. His wife would stand aloof in the kitchen, never touching the baby unless he needed feeding or to be dressed.
Arthur sighed, and began to dust the mantle. There were no pictures on it to be moved, nor were there any pictures throughout the house. The walls were bare and simple. All of the furniture was beige and all of the walls were white, to match the white shirt and khaki pants that Arthur always wore. Everyday he would go from breakfast, to coffee, to dusting, to vacuuming, to lunch, to reading the paper, to laundry, to dinner, and finally to bed before the sun went down.
Arthur jumped when the phone rang, and set down his duster and walked nervously to it.
“Uhm... Hello?”
“Arthur! Glad you picked up, it’s Ma.”
“Ma?”
“Yes, your Mother. You remember me, your mother.”
Arthur paused, he had not spoken to his mother since he had moved into the bungalow.
“Why’d you, uh, why’d you call?”
“I’m just tired, and old, and haven’t seen my boy in so long.”
“Ma, I’m, uh, I’m fine. Just was dusting. Why’d you call?”
“Arthur, it’s-”
Arthur waited for her to finish, but the end of the sentence never came.
“Ma?”
“It’s your father Arthur... He passed Sunday. The service is Thursday. And I want you to be there.”
“Ma I, uh, you know I can’t be there. I, uh, I have to stay in.”
“Now we both now that’s not true, Arthur! You didn’t see your father for years, not since you moved into that little sterile box you live in. He missed seeing you around, and well, it’s not like your being shut up all the time made him any better.”
“Ma.”
“Arthur you know I’m right. I haven’t heard more than ten words from you since they locked that crazy wife of yours up! Now the least you can do is come pay your respects to your father! Hell we oughta lock-”
As she spoke, Arthur felt tears rise in his eyes, and his throat began to close as pain gripped him.
“M-ma, please stop. Please. Your being so loud, ma, please.”
The voice on the phone stopped and took a breath.
“I-I’m sorry. I just don’t know you anymore, Arthur. You were so bright, and had it all laid out. Had that wife and that baby boy, and everything together. And, sure, she lost it. But that’s-”
Arthur did not hear the rest of the sentence. He took a deep breath, and wiped the tears from his eyes.
“Ma! Enough, Ma! You have no idea. It was so messy in there, she had stained everything. And when I got home it was so silent, and she was smiling, Ma. And the carpet was all stained up under the coffee table, and the corner was chipped off. You don’t get it, Ma! I kept scrubbing and scrubbing but the stain never came out. I looked everywhere for Zander, but all I found were more stains. They were everywhere! And even after they took her and told me the whole apartment was clean, I knew they were wrong, or lying, or... I just had to leave, to be clean. And out there it’s filthy, and I can’t go, Ma!”
“You think you would come out of sympathy, Arthur. I feel like I lost you, and you know what it’s like to loose-”
Arthur dropped the receiver, and let the phone hang by its cord. The voice on the other line just kept making an unintelligible series of sounds, like a jazz band trying to play three songs at once. He ran up the stairs into the bare master bedroom, and opened the window. He looked at the sky, and how brilliant the sun was that day. He tilted his head back in the light, and wished to be back in that apartment without his wife, so he could be alone and filthy again. Arthur let the warm light hit his cheeks and looked down out of the window. He looked out across the street to the park, with its tall cottonwood trees, and peaceful green lawns all surrounding the cool water of the pond. A mother was pushing her baby down the sidewalk. The infant in the stroller began to fuss, and his mother stooped to pick him up. She sang and held the baby, as it looked over her shoulder and directly at Arthur with two round steel grey eyes.
Arthur looked back into the room. Held his breath, and for the first time in years Arthur went out of his house and into the outside world.
Let's run in some circles, mate.
  





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Points: 9326
Reviews: 107
Mon Jan 23, 2012 9:58 pm
Cadi says...



Hi thersites,

First up, bear in mind that YWS strips out all the indenting of your paragraphs, so to make things a bit less text-wall, it helps to put in extra line breaks between them!

I have to say, I really like the first paragraph of this. Your description of the basement room is wonderful - I especially like the 'wilted' wallpaper. Really gets across the atmosphere of the room, and so the feeling of the piece.

I think it's a shame, therefore, that this room gets...almost forgotten in the rest of the piece. In general in stories, especially short ones, if you're going to linger on describing something, you're setting the reader up to expect importance from it. So I would suggest tying the coffee table back in later on in the story - we saw its importance in Arthur's personal history, but perhaps you could tie it into your concluding paragraphs, to make for some nice circularity. And the park with the pond that is mentioned - it doesn't feel particularly relevant, unless you make the woman with the child a bigger deal at the end.

On a similar note, you introduce the basement room, and then set the action in a room where the sunlight can reach the wall - not something I'd expect of a basement. I would say that either the action should take place in this beautifully-described room, or you should make clear that the basement is a place Arthur doesn't go, and introduce us to this new room. While I'm on the topic of locations, you mention that he lives in a bungalow - but later on, he runs upstairs. A bungalow being a single-storey house, this doesn't entirely make sense - you might want to think about dealing with that.

And, at risk of over-emphasising the relevance-to-story point, I would also say that, for example, the wife's hair colour is not relevant. Her eyes and cheekbones you are using to characterise her, and Zander's tuft of hair shows his age and lovability. Speaking of Zander, "his mother's steely eyes" seems to suggest he shares his mother's aloof character, which is at odds with the image of him giggling with Arthur. I would leave this out, or perhaps say that Zander had Arthur's eyes.

As I said, there is some good description in here. There's also action, and there's dialogue - so you've got a full house of things that are good to talk about. However, they're a bit... separated out. You begin with the description, then there's a big chunk of dialogue, and the action-in-the-present is getting a bit lost in between. I'd suggest that you mix in a bit more action with the dialogue section - what is Arthur doing on the phone?

On the other hand, I'd also suggest you reread the descriptive beginning, and try to make sure that the what-Arthur-is-doing-now doesn't get too muddled up with Arthur-when-he-was-married and what-Arthur-does-every day - these are three separate periods of time, and if you mix them up too much within a paragraph, it will get confusing for the reader.

Thinking about the dialogue, then. As a general rule, I advise people to read all their dialogue aloud, perhaps even in 'the style' of the character, to see if it sounds natural. It's also important to consider dialogue in the context of what the characters involved know. For example, both Ma and Arthur know what happened with his wife and child, so Arthur's paragraph of dialogue about what happened is probably something Ma has heard about before. Rather than trying to explain the whole scene in his words, I would advise cutting this down to something shorter - perhaps he mentions the stains, and her smile, Ma, and mentions looking for Zander, before she cuts in with something about it being a long time ago. You can give the impression of the scene in his dialogue, and either leave the details up to the reader, or fill them in with non-dialogue about his memories.

The dialogue is also the main way in which you characterise Ma and Arthur. So far, the impressions I get is that Arthur is hesistant and anxious, and Ma is blunt and loud, and not particularly sensitive or sympathetic. I see that they are an estranged family, and don't get on particularly well, and Arthur seems to not have a lot of feeling for his late father either (though his father apparently missed him a lot). This is all done well, and if you edit the dialogue just a little to make it feel completely natural, as I said in the paragraph before, this is a wonderful section.

This review is starting to get monstrously long, so I'll just make a couple more points and then stop myself from rambling. Firstly, a general stylistic tip about sentence structure. It's a good idea to mix up long and short sentences in a story, and to tailor sentence length to get the 'feel' of a scene. For example, when Arthur is cutting across Ma on the phone (before "you have no idea"), I would make the action sentences punchier to emphasise that. Another tip about sentence structure is: put the most important thing at the start (within the constraints of grammar). My key example for this one is "Arthur jumped when the phone rang". The phone ringing happens first, and causes the jumping, so putting it first helps the sequence of events lie right in the reader's head.

Finally, I have a couple of spelling/grammar nitpicks. Be careful with your vs you're, loose vs lose, mothers vs mother's, everyday vs every day. These are all easy mistakes to make even as a seasoned writer, and it's easy to miss them when proofreading, so keep a sharp eye out for them. I am also unsure about your use of the word "mantle". I gather that you mean the mantlepiece above the fireplace, but I have never heard mantle as a short form of this, and my dictionary doesn't mention it either. That might be a colloquialism, in which case, I'm sorry, I've got that wrong.

Ok, I'll shut up now! Hope I've been helpful! Feel free to PM me if you've got any questions, or would like me to do a full line-by-line grammar nitpick. Happy writing!
"The fact is, I don't know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn't collapse when you beat your head against it." --Douglas Adams
  








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