**** This is a scene from a short story I've been working on for a while. This isn't the first part or anything, but I think it functions on its own enough to be looked at separately. The main character (Earl) is dealing with the loss of his wife, and his friend Kate is making him go to a meeting where people try to deal with grief. ****
The woman who’d organized the meeting introduced herself as Beth. She was rectangular; she looked like someone’s busy mother, though certainly not mine. I guessed she was in her early fifties, a few years younger than me. She had the dry look of burlap, and smelled too strong of something flowery. I glanced around at everyone and heard very little of what Beth said as she talked. When she directed our attention at a man sitting down in the circle, I tuned back in. He didn't seem to know what to say at first, and shifted nervously in his chair while everyone looked at him expectantly.
“I’m Bill.” He stopped, sheepishly. “I’m not a logger, I work at the butcher shop in town, but thought that maybe I could – y’know.” He stopped again, and looked at Beth, who nodded encouragingly, the extra skin under her chin swaying with the motion. He sighed and picked his words back up. “My daughter Lacy died a couple of months ago in a car accident with some friends and it was... well, it was my little girl.”
Despite being across the room from me, I could see Bill’s face fill up with water when he spoke. He told us about Lacy’s grades at school, her basketball team, the art he’d kept from when she was a child -- all of the small justifications he could think of for God to give her back.
A growing tension rippled through his barrel chest, his large hands, and then his loose-skinned throat. He told us about his daughter, the wife whose body had turned gray and conformed to the shape of their living room chair, the glass bottles he had started collecting in order to compensate for their absence– and then he disappeared his hands into his sleeves like a wary child and stuttered for a moment before he stopped altogether. He broke then, spilled, pulled his meaty hands out from his sleeves, and cried openly into them.
We went around the entire circle in that fashion. I dreaded each story, each crack in the voice of the person speaking, and yet, it happened every single time. Each person usually only spoke for a minute or two before they, too, fractured and spilled away into their memories. For some, it was simply getting past the name of the one they had lost that broke them; others were crying before we'd even reached them.
When came time for me to speak, the blue walls seemed to push their hands onto my chest, push and push and the air grew unbearably warm. I realized I couldn’t possibly make an impact on all these damp and sniffling people if I’d tried, and glancing around, realized I didn’t particularly care to.
Every small noise, every shift in a chair, scuff of a shoe against the floor, the sniffling and soft crying – they were all magnified in the empty space of people caught inside themselves. By this point, everyone but me had poured some raw, cringing part of themselves out onto the grayed linoleum floor. I couldn’t tell if they were crying more from the emptiness of space in them, from having let this thing out, or their having to look at it and give it a name. Yet, I realized, no one was really paying me any mind because of it. Everyone was too distracted.
I took a moment to gather myself before speaking. “I’m Earl. My wife’s name was Elean-“ I stuttered for a moment, uncurled my hands from each other, and took a moment to breathe. “Eleanor.” My hands knotted again. Something pushed its way out of my body and I was not alright. I said it again.
My mouth twisted something alien out of me and I felt as if I were almost singing her name at this point, again and again, more than I’d said it in years. I talked about how she used to paint, how gentle and kind her hands were, how thin and intricate the rivulets of her braids were. I spoke about the way she used to part the curtains from our bedroom window in the morning, how an ocean of light would spill across us while I still lay in bed. How she would lift her face up to the sun and breathe it in, how her mouth would part as if for a kiss, how she would look back at me, full of light and sun and breath and laughter. Then I heard myself talk about shallow and sunless the mornings were now. How I didn’t want to get out of bed. My words caught in the net of my throat for a moment – I waited, breathed, and did not break. But there was nothing else to say. This was a room full of strangers, failing dams, emptying floods and they did not deserve her.
I went home that night and felt dulled. There was some oaken, heavy part of me shifting, finding that it could not fit the corners of me anymore, discovering that maybe it never had at all. I was reflecting on it, sitting in the living chair, bookless for once, when Kate came and sat next on the couch next to my chair.
“How was it?” She smiled. Kate never really smiled and it was interesting seeing her wide mouth turn upwards, in something that was neither really pleasant or unpleasant. As I started describing the meetings though, how everyone was bleached through and watery, how no one really said anything that meant anything, how they just wept and we all nodded along, as if encouraging them, her smile was gone.
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
140,755 Literary Works • 673,687 Reviews
Thewriter13 here to review this on such a lovely Review Day!
Love this! Your word choice is spectacular and I enjoyed reading this.
I understand this is part 5; I haven't read the other parts but I promise I will get to those right after this review!
I liked this humor as well:
"She was rectangular; she looked like someone’s busy mother, though certainly not mine."
Perfect imagery and I laughed a little. Well done!
"She had the dry look of burlap, and smelled too strong of something flowery." I personally don't think you need this comma in there.
"He stopped again, and looked at Beth, who nodded encouragingly, the extra skin under her chin swaying with the motion." This kind of a run-on, perhaps could be broken into two sentences. Also I don't think you need the comma between "again" and "and".
Try and reword that sentence so it flows smoothly and to avoid all the breaks/stops.
"When came time for me to speak, the blue walls seemed to push their hands onto my chest, push and push and the air grew unbearably warm. I realized I couldn’t possibly make an impact on all these damp and sniffling people if I’d tried, and glancing around, realized I didn’t particularly care to. " I really appreciated the imagery in this. Well done!
The second sentence in the above paragraph I mentioned is a bit iffy due to the commas and such. There are a lot of sentences like this in your story. Just work on making them less wordy. But the sentence is very well done as well!
the reviewer before me mentioned a lot already, so I don't want to bother you with the same things.
I love this piece! Please keep writing!
Persy, where do I begin with this?
There's so much to be said and if I hadn't read the disclaimer, there would be even more. I won't patronise you with what a short story is but I will say that transposing a fragment from a longer short story and selling it as it's own short story is a difficult thing to do. It's one thing to steal a scene from your novel and rewrite it, cut it down, mold it into the short story form but it's an entirely new challenge to take an already short piece of fiction and pick from it an even shorter piece of fiction that can deliver the punch to the gut that a story such as this needs.
What you fail to do here, is acknowledge the length of the piece and edit it effectively. It appears as though you have simply hacked it out of the original, you need to trace it with the stencil like precision of a surgeon. Take only what you need, refine, refine, refine. Figure out what you need to say to set up the denouement and weave it in there somehow. Because as it stands, it reads exactly like a fragment of another story.
It also left me unsatisfied. You provide a small insight, a comment on the human condition. You make a statement about grief. It's great, but it is a well worn theme that needs a foreign new element to allow the reader to take something away, to take something new. Any one who has read Carver's "A small good thing," a masterpiece and probably my favourite short story, will be too familiar with your story. That is to say, Carver says what you say here with nuance and simplicity. Don't get me wrong, no one expects you to write as well as Carver who had the benefit of a world class editor. But the point is, you need something different. Something small. A motif. Flip it on it's head. Show us something we don't expect but something that makes sense. Show us a father that is all too happy to talk about his daughter and it's not until he gets home and looks into his wife's eyes that it all comes back to him, that the waves of pain overwhelm him. Because right now you are bordering on sentimentality, and whilst I have never been one for frigid lifeless prose, I, like most readers, don't like to be emotionally manipulated and sentimental prose is nothing more that a cheap trick to make readers artificially feel something that is gone as quick as it came.
The story is well crafted. You have always had a certain precision with your writing, like you know exactly what you want your readers to see. It's not vague. I can't remember who said it but there's a quote. A famous writer was asked about his strengths and weaknesses. Of his weaknesses he listed many, of his strengths he gave us just one.
"I can describe a chair. Something old, with worn arm rests. I can show you how the patterned upholstered seat regards your weight with a faint whoosh as you sit. I can show you how after the years it still wears a faint scent of varnish..."
And so on. This writer just happens to be a fervent researcher, who's exploits become legend, when he spent a week in Antarctica standing outside until his bones rattled just so he could write about the coldness in a convincing way, just so he knew what he was talking about. Authentic fiction requires this, but I have digressed. The point I want to make is this: You have got it. You know what you are talking about. You are not exploring as you write because you know the direction. Such control doesn't come at the inception of the piece but requires concentration and careful consideration. It also requires a heavy hand with the red marker when it comes to editing. Because whilst you have the capacity to lead us exactly where you want, you have a tendency to over-describe which is something you can't afford, particularly not in a piece this short. With such few words, burden them with meaning. Select them like they are limited, because they are.
Here's an example I have plucked out:
I challenge you to find a way to say all of this but without describing exactly what happens. I challenge you to sit down, open your notebook and right one or two lines heavily emphasising the narrator's reaction to all this, how it makes him feel. Describe how he can't keep eye contact as a woman's voice breaks like a rope snapped suddenly taut.
This is a great excersise:
Describe a barn as seen by a man who has just returned from war. Don't mention the war or the fact he has just returned from somewhere. Just describe it how he would describe it. Next describe the same barn as seen by a man, lying close by and looking over from his lovers arms as they lie beside a picnic basket.
Here I am, telling an exceptional writer to do a writing excersize. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.
This really is a great story and the writing itself is at times, as good as I have seen on this site. Particularly this:
If the previous quote I posted was you at your weakest, then this, surely this is you at your strongest.
Well done,
JP