z

Young Writers Society


16+ Language

For All Intents and Purposes - pt. 2

by Evander


Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for language.

Against my better judgment, I raced over to the slide and went to ask one of the kids if they had seen my little sister. I conjured up a description of her in my head — a small girl, rather sickly, with bright red hair, not easy to miss. She had a smattering of freckles across her face and the was wearing a flower dress with marigolds on the front.

“Hey!” I slowed my jog into just walking in place, seeing a girl about eight years old who was helping a toddler get off the plastic and metal platform. “Have you seen a girl about yay high? She has bright red hair and freckles, looks a little bit sickly?” I pictured Sienna in my head, broken and afraid of the outside world. Knowing of the horrors and understanding, but not quite grasping the direness of everything.

She had grown up with it, after all.

The eight year old responded, after attempting to carry the struggling toddler on her hip. The wisps of blonde hair in her ponytail rested in front of her eyes. “…you’re not going to make me look for her with you, are you?” She raised an eyebrow and then hushed the toddler, who was beating at her chest with his little fists.

I shook my head rapidly. “No, no, not at all! Stranger danger and all of that. I’m just wondering if you could tell me if you’ve seen her, that’s all.” I started to speed up my jogging in place, looking around every couple of seconds to see if she had somehow appeared out of the shadows just to surprise me. This isn’t funny.

She carefully scanned me with her blue eyes, “…I saw a girl like her in the slides a few minutes ago? She, um, looked like she was asleep though.”

Oh no, oh no, oh no. “Thank you!” I said, quickly climbing the playground equipment, with my legs yelling at me. I should have gone around and went up the steps, instead of trying to make it in one big bound. But my sister was on the line and I had to do something. The cold evening air bit my face and nipped at my fingers as I tried to make my way up the castle-esque playset. My head almost banged against the ceiling but I managed to be just aware enough to duck.

Then I heard her cough.

It was just distinct enough and I could hear the echo coming from the tube slide — it made sense that I couldn’t see her before, but I kept on mentally kicking myself. I peered down the tan tube and I could see some of her hair, although I couldn’t discern the color. But it was her voice, I was sure enough.

“Kiddo?” I knocked inside of the tube and I tried to wait for her response, but all I could hear was her shaky breathing and I just had to continue. “Hey, kiddo? If you could slide down the rest of the way, that’d be great. I need to take you back home.” It was stupid that I let her play around outside, I could have just lent her my laptop. A dozen plans on how to properly go about disinfecting the slide raced through my head but that wasn’t top priority. “Can you say something?”

“I’m tired, Nora.” Her voice was croaky, each breath was shuddering. She sounded like my dad, almost. The night before he —

Oh no.

My mind raced at a thousand miles per hour and I wasn’t exactly sure what to do, but instinct kicked in and I climbed over the guard-rail and jumped into the mulch below. I have to pull her out, I have to get to the hospital, I was stupid for waiting this long. My feet stung with mild pain, but I got myself over to the bottom of the slide where I could see her feet. She had kicked off her shoes somewhere.

“Kiddo, I’m really sorry about this.” And I yanked her down, just trying to get her to slide down the rest of way. My movements were trying to be gentle but I wasn’t sure that worked, but she didn’t yelp. Her legs came into view, her the ends of her blue dress came to view as they rode up her legs, and then the rest of her did. She looked paler than normal, her eyes were heavier than normal.

She was light when I scooped her up, she was easy to carry as I raced over to the parking lot to get in the car. Please, please help her. Her head curled into my chest and I just wanted her to ask to be put down, but she was oddly compliant with me. “Lemme go back to sleep,” she mumbled, closing her eyes.

“Can you please stand up for a few moments?” When there was no response, other than a small moan, I had to put her down in order to open the doors on the red mini van. I felt bad when I set her down in order to open the van doors, but she just drew her arms around herself and lay there content in the grass.

I managed to put her in her seat, as her head lolled around. The buckle clicked and I slammed the door shut, hoping that she would jump awake and maybe cry a little bit. Her actions weren’t… Sienna-like. I had always imagined that she would go out, kicking and screaming like she had come into this world. Hell, she did most things kicking and screaming and begging and pleading. Arguing into she was red in the face, because when the world was unfair, she had to show it.

-

'Nobody should die!' She yelled, tugging on the end of my shirt as I tried to finish up some Algebra problems. Her face was red with anger and tear tracks streaked down her face, but she didn’t seem to care as she wiped off the snot with the ends of her sleeve and kept on arguing. 'Can the present do somethin’ about it, Nora? Can-can-can you do something about it?'

I turned back to the paper, erasing my answer with the pencil as I ignored her protests — only to correct her a few seconds later when I was processing her words instead of the math, 'The president, kiddo. Not the present.' I went to write in my answer again, but the graphite only scrawled across the page when she jumped up and tugged down on my arm.

I snapped to look at her, getting ready to berate her and then make her sit in her corner of our bedroom as I tried to finish up homework. But she looked me dead in the eye, opened her mouth, and started to scream at the top of her lungs.

-

Thank God for automatic doors, I thought, as I tried to adjust her sleeping form in my grasp. She was light, yet heavy enough that I staggered when entering the admission room. My voice was frantic when I called out, in denial but facing the truth in front of me at the very same time. “She’s dying,” I yelled, my voice raw in my throat as it ripped out of me in absolute terror. “She stopped breathing!” I tried to make over to the admissions desk, over to the receptionist in the green scrubs with the bun, she looked nice enough, she could help.

Everything was processing so fast in my mind that nothing was fast enough, not really. Each and every step I took, each and every time I blinked, every word of distress that I yelled out didn’t matter in the end. “She’s dying!” I screamed again, “Please help her!”

This is my fault.

The receptionist stood up from her desk, but I couldn’t read the reaction on her face. There were about fifty thousand other people waiting in the room and I could hear all of the coughing and muttering and vacant words, but none of that really seemed to matter.

My world slowed down just a little bit by the receptionist was by my side in a matter of seconds, “I’ll go get the nurse, kid. Is she breathing? Is she still breathing?”

I looked down at her, slowly. Not fast enough. “No, she’s not breathing.” She was almost dead weight in my arms and I just wanted to drop her, I just wanted to drop her and I just wanted to sob. “Can you save her? Can … can you please save her?”

The words, coming from another person, didn’t seem real. They seemed like the articles about the cure in development or my mom holding my arms and telling me that the world was going to be okay soon— I wanted what she said to be real and on some level and so I believed her, on some level. It helped. “We can save her, kid.”

There was a hospital bed, there was my sister being hoisted from my arms, and there were questions in my ears as I walked along with the bed with wheels. The promise was real, the world was real, but I didn’t feel real. “What’s your relationship to her?” A nurse asked me, someone different, someone new. A different person, but they would have to uphold the same promise. She wore blue scrubs and she smelled like rubbing alcohol.

“She’s my sister —” new room now, with lots of bed and lots of people in and out. Green curtains, shiny floors, lots and lots of beeping. Emergency room. She might die. “Sienna Solo — seven soon, she’s six now.” From hospital bed to another bed.

Someone said something about heart rate, but from the looks of it, she looked to be dying. No breathing, no response, but she had been responding in the car ride. She had been talking to me, she had been mumbling. She had been alive, because it had been my job to keep her alive. Seeing the stark difference between her sweaty hair and the bed hit me, like a load of bricks.

“Has she been exposed to W.E.V.?”

“Yes. My fath… She has been exposed to the virus, yes.”

A year and a half, the virus had been out there for a year and a half. For some reason, I was sitting down in a chair. The world ran by me at a thousand miles per hour, but I was still so goddamn slow. She was there, barely breathing. People were checking on her and there was someone over her, getting ready to perform CPR.

“Go easy on her, she’s fragile!” I said, wanting to get up but knowing that I couldn’t do much. My words held no weight. “…why aren’t you guys worried about the virus?” Dead bodies in the streets, in abandoned tunnels under roads because the morgues stopped having space. Gray bodies with the blood in the back of their head, just waiting to be found. Bodies in trash bags, long internet posts about how you shouldn’t even let the common symptoms pass you by.

“Immunity,” the nurse answered. She sounded tired. “It’s not really world ending.”

I had heard that before. It was a load of bullshit.

“My sister? She's okay, yeah?”

There was no heart monitor, the CPR had stopped, she must have been okay. They could bill us and then we’d be on our way, just trying to hold out until the blessed cure. Until her birthday. There were noises that I couldn’t fully understand and that weren’t connecting in my head, but she was going to be okay because I had been promised. I had to protect her—

I started to stand up.

‘Dead’ wasn’t really a word to me, not when it was connected to Sienna at least. I had always imagined her dying kicking and screaming, yes, but I never hyper fixated on the death. Only on the fact that she would fight death off with her bare hands. Because that’s what she did. She clung at the ends of my shirts, kicking and screaming and begging and pleading.

“I’m sorry, your sister …” the nurse had obviously broken news like this before, “is dead.”

-

W.E.V. didn’t end the entire world. The cure was actually real and immunity was a thing, inflation went down, happiness went up. The world slowly placed itself back into order, even with a significant dent on the population. It was mostly an American-centric thing, if I really thought about it. But everyone pieced everything back together, identified the dead, and continued to live their lives. (PTSD was high among, well, a lot of people, but we managed.)

Each morning, after the fact, I woke up early and poured two cups of coffee. I set my father’s at the end of the table. Then, I poured two mugs of hot chocolate. Five marshmallows for her, zero for me. I set her cup on her chair and waited.

Because that’s all I could do.

W.E.V. didn’t end the world, but it ended my world. The name still fit.


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Sat May 14, 2016 5:37 pm
SpiritedWolfe wrote a review...



Hiya, Adri! I am here for reviewing once more :3 and once again, I don't have a whole lot to say.

Rydia touched on one of my biggest points, and that is, again, the ending. It felt such a sudden jump from Sienna dying to suddenly everything is okay. What happened in between? How did Nora react? What about the mother, how would she feel about the family? It feels more of a lazy ending, because, quite frankly, we don't care if there is some happy ending for the world -- we're invested in Sienna and Nora and I'd rather see an ending where Nora tries to cope immediately after rather than thinking back months later.

(I did, however, like the part with Nora pouring coffee for herself and dad before making hot chocolates for herself and Sienna. That was really sweet ~)

Another thing that really confused me as I was reading was about Sienna. As I mentioned before, I didn't quite understand her condition. And we don't know a lot about this virus. Based on the what I've read, it seems like most people don't either. But I'm a bit confused as to how fast this virus acts. How long as Sienna had it? If it's been that long and they've known why didn't they bring her to the hospital sooner? I'm sure Nora had her reasons, but I wished they were explained more. If anything, maybe have a thought where she's imagining her sister in the hospital, quarantined. Forgotten about. I dunno, something to put more into Nora's thought process, because we're in her head a lot, but we don't know much about her.

It would also help if things like survival rate (or like how long it takes to kill a person) is mentioned. Maybe Nora fears about it coming, descending upon her sister in an hour or something.

I quite like how the author see her little sister, as a strong willed individual who will kick the crap out of anything unfair. The repetition of that is a bit iffy to me. I mean, it's mentioned two or three times and then we even see the flashback of Sienna screaming because of how unfair the world is. It's great characterization, and you have tons of that, but be careful not to go too overboard.

(I also agree with Rydia and the not having that much reason to care for Sienna's death. That kind of goes back to the whole "show us how Nora reacts to this, it's kinda devastating.")

Uh, that's about it! Once again, I really liked this part and hopefully I had some coherent critique :3

Happy writing,
~ Wolfe




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Fri May 13, 2016 7:08 am
Rydia wrote a review...



Hello again!

Specifics

1. I don't think you need to have the speaker think of what her sister looks like in her head - it feels repetitive when she then says the same details out loud. I'm also not sure that in this world where there's a dangerous virus people would just throw around the phrase 'looks a bit sickly'. People are irrational and scare very easily! Red hair, freckles and this height are plenty of information for a first probe.

2.

Her legs came into view, her the ends of her blue dress came to view as they rode up her legs, and then the rest of her did. She looked paler than normal, her eyes were heavier than normal.


This is a little bit bulky. I'd suggest trimming the edges, like:

Her legs came into view, then the ends of her blue dress as they rode up her legs and finally, the rest of her. She looked paler than normal, her eyes heavy.

3. I'm not sure compliant is the right word since the first thing she says is an objection and when the speaker asks her to stand she makes no attempt to. Rather she is passive.

4.
Arguing into until she was red in the face, because when the world was unfair, she had to show it.


5. The flashback really isn't working for me here. I feel like flashbacks and books only gel when the flashbacks give crucial plot details. Here you're using them for character advancement, except that they're in the past so it can only really me filling in details of why a character is how they are. But that's much more interesting in dialogue. It works better with TV but in a book they're jarring and they really have to be justified. This short glimpse into their lives isn't enough. Have the speaker talk at her as they drive instead. Have her fighting desperately to keep her sister awake. That way you'll keep the tension building instead of squashing it.

6.
My world slowed down just a little bit by but the receptionist was by my side in a matter of seconds, “I’ll go get the nurse, kid. Is she breathing? Is she still breathing?”


7.
The words, coming from another person, didn’t seem real. They seemed like the articles about the cure in development or my mom holding my arms and telling me that the world was going to be okay soon— I wanted what she said to be real and on some level and so I believed her, on some level. It helped. “We can save her, kid.”


In this paragraph, the dialogue has to come first or we have no idea what you're talking about and it becomes very confusing and jerky.

Overall

This isn't as tight as the first part and it's not a very satisfying ending. It feels very rushed in fact - we don't find what happened to the mother and there's a sense that the events of this short story don't matter because just like that the virus was wiped out. The tension and emotions were nice but I didn't know Sienna enough to really mind that much that she died and I was waiting to see what would happen next, only to then realise that this was the focal point of the story and not just an introduction.

I also felt like things happened in the wrong order with Sienna's decline - she's already not breathing when they arrive at the hospital so I didn't expect her to make it. Maybe if you had her still breathing a little but weakly then the reader would think her chances were better and it will be a harder blow? By the time she was dead, I was expecting it and waiting to see what would happen next ad maybe that's why I missed that this was the focus of the story?

Anyway! The flow is still nice and the descriptions are good, I just was more sold on the virus aspect that on the relationship between the girls since one of them was off scene for the most part and we only got dialogue between them in flashbacks. That wasn't enough to endear her character to me. If you were to cut the ending from this - the retrospect part about the virus being fixed - then I'd be more interested in this as a novel. In seeing the narrator react to her sister's death and go on a rampage against the virus and meet people and love again. That kind of exploration of the disease and focus on what it does to people, rather than one person, would hold my attention better.

Thanks for the read and happy writing!

~Heather




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Wed May 11, 2016 10:39 am
Chappiez wrote a review...



Oh man. I can't even begin to describe how good this book- I mean CHAPTER is. It feels like I should just turn the page and keep reading. Nevertheless, I will attempt to review this amazingness. The idea is just fabsome. It's still the whole world ending virus theme, but it's not as...panicked in a way. Everybody isn't dead, children still played on the playground...In all the stories I've read, everybody but a handful of people are dead.

I like this story for that. :)

Sienna... I loved her. And then...she was ripped away. I loved how you described her death though. The way her older sister was almost in denial...perfect. I can't even touch on all the goodness in this story! The only thing I would change is the flashback. I know you put dashes outside of the paragraph, but at first I couldn't really tell it was a flashback. Maybe put it all in italics? I don't know, it doesn't have to be that, but make it a bit more noticeable.

(Or it's just me being too absorbed into the story to notice the flashback.)

I cannot WAIT to see where this story goes! Keep on typing! :D




Evander says...


Oh! I must have been really tired when I submitted this, because it was under Novel/Chapter when it really should have been under Short Story! That was a mistake on my end and I apologize.

This was actually the end to the story, which I hope I managed to make clear? It took me a while to wrap everything up, but I might have left a few things open.

As for the flashbacks, I was considering putting it all in italics, but I don't want them to be a strain to read, if you get what I'm saying. I'll probably look for other stylistic methods in order to present the flashbacks, though!

Thank you so much for this review,

-Adrian



Chappiez says...


Ah well, I suppose it is a fitting end. I guess I'll have to check out your other works instead. :D You're more than welcome for the review.




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