The pain, its... fading. Is this death... why? How is it so... peaceful. Has my life been so unsuccessful that nothing holds me to the world of the living? Is no one willing to save me? No one? But what if I dont want to die. I have so much I can still do. So much that I want to do. Am I so meaningless that I mean nothing in the eyes of others. Truly that cannot be. Why, in a world so full of death could they let one more person slip by. This war. All it's ever going to do is bring more and more pain and suffering. But then why would I want to go back? I don't have any family, little friends... I think. Why can't I remember? But there is one thing I do know, and it's that I do not want to die. So someone please save me.
I drift in this realm of nothing. I can look in any direction I want and all I see is grey. Not the dark, be careful grey or even the light, cheerful grey. It's a bleak fuzzy grey that dulls your mind and slowly drives you insane.
Yet, it's so calm here, why do I want to leave, why do I want to leave to go somewhere that someone can hurt me? Here I am safe, safe from that, that cruel place that I once belonged. Why would anyone want to go there.
A small dark void is slowly growing in front of me, it was so small that I just barely could see it. " It was me young one, I am here to take you home to where you belong now. I feel my body being pulled towards it, I feel as though all of my past sins mean nothing there, that all my failures are being excepted, but none of my successes. Inside that void must be hell, and it is welcoming me with open arms. Please someone, save me, I do not wish to go there, I do not want to go!
Someone is calling me? But who? What are they saying?
"Medic," the voice circles the void, drawing my attention. The voice sounds like a man, but who is he? "I need a medic over here! This one is still alive."
What is this feeling? Is it happyness? Does someone really want to save me? Are they really trying to save me? Do they even know who I am, and why do they care? But mostly, who is he?
I try to open my eyes but they do not listen, they want go to the void, but I do not. I want to get out, I want to live.
Please I just want to see him, the one person in this world that wants to save me.
"No! Come on stay with me." the void slowly envelopes me and slowly pulls me into its dark embrace. " I need a medic over here." The voice grows louder. The void slowly starts to fade, but soon is back. Again, trying to pull my into its depths. And I forget all about the voice. But soon it is back, bringing me back to the real world.
"I said stay with me! Where's that medic, I'm losing her." Voice is back, it's so bright, so powerful. Its light slowly wraps around the void and starts to force it close.
Please, don't leave. The void whispers, temptingly. We can make you happy. We can make sure you never feel pain again or have to suffer. Only we can. Soon again I forget about my light, the voice. Then someone is touching me. I remember the him. The person trying to save me.
"Finally, Medic save her." My hero, he sounds so strong, so powerful. He will save me, I know he can.
Why would you leave us, after all that we have done for you. You need us, and we know you want us to.
Wait, what have you done for me. You have tried again and again to force me to a place that I have always been told is the worst form of evil. A place I do not wish to go. I want to live, to survive, to meet my light. Why can't you understand that? Why can't you just leave me alone? It finally realised that it was fighting a losing battle and slowly faded away.
"I... Can't. There is just to much blood. I'm surprised she isn't dead already. Maybe we should just put her out of her misery." Weak. I do not like this person, for he is weak and stupid. How can he say something so inhumane? Does he not believe that everyone deserves a fighting chance and that I deserve at least that much? "We can't move her, for she will bleed out and die even before we have a chance."
"Aren't you at least going to try. She is still alive, which probably means that she wants to live. How can you turn your back on someone like that without even trying?"
"You want to know how? Just like this."
Wait, no please don't. I want to live, I promise not to die. At least give me a chance.
I force my eyes open, just in time to see a man walk away. I watch him go, sorrow pierces me as I realize that he was my last chance. I know he wasn't my hero for he did not try. I look around to see my light, my voice. He's standing to my right with his back to me watching the other man leave. He is tall, board shoulders, slim hips and dark, wavy hair that brushes the bottom of his neck. He sighs and turns around. He looks down at me, his eyes are ocean deep blue. His nose his straight, his chin stubborn, cheekbones high, artistic with his hair falling down to cover the top of his eyes. He was looking down at the ground, and sinks to his knees beside me. He grabs my hand and pulls it onto his lap and cradles it between his. He stars down at it before finally looking at my face.
"Your awake." I nod, and wince as I find that it hurts to move my head. He turns and yells over his shoulder before turnig back to me. " Don't move, you might hurt yourself more."
I wonder what is he talking about. I opened my mouth to speak but found that I couldn't. I look at him confused that my voice has left me.
"Your hurt badly. Your throat was cut and your stomach is shredded." Understanding finally hits me, the attack. That man, the assasin. But why did he come after me? What did I do to him?
"What are you yelling about." The other man is back, and I wish he wasn't. Though I knew he was the one who could save me. I still would never forgive him about what he said.
The man looked over his should to speak to the weak man. "She is still alive, and awake. We can still save her."
"She can't be. There shouldn't be enough blood to make it to the brain." He peers over my lights shoulder and looks at me. "Well, maybe she will make it. Hmmm..." He stared at me for several secounds before speaking again. "Try to pick her up, but be very carefully, don't bump her around to much. A lot of the bleeding has stopped and we don't want it to start up again."
He looked down at me before speaking to the other man again. "But what about earlier when you said it just might be better to put her out of her misery." He glared at the man behind him who realised his mistake and backed away from my hero.
Trying to fix the situation quickly, he said. "Well, that was before, now hurry we don't have all day." He turned and walked away, but I knew now that I have a chance. A chance to live another day.
My hero looked down at me and said, " My name's Marcus and I will try to be gentle." He pulls me up into his arms, but now I know what the other man was talking about. My body awoke into agony that only now was starting to reach me. The grey realm could only hold off the pain long enough. But the movement he created by picking me up, opened everything and now I could do nothing but think about him, my Marcus, as I faded away into oblivion once more.
I awake in a cold empty room. I hear the ticks of a clock and the beeping of machines. I do not know where I am or how I got here, but the one thing I knew was that I was alone and alive...
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141,381 Literary Works • 674,386 Reviews
Hey DreamsRain!
Here is the review I promised to you oh so long ago!
First thing I wanted to talk about is your punctuation. But I see that it has been covered by other reviewers so I trust that their advice is enough.
Now to the story itself. The beginning is insightful on the character's view of death during their unconsciousness/near death experience. You know it's said that your life flashes before your eyes before you die? I think you might want to, briefly, add some of your characters life memories in that passage. It will give a reason to us, as readers, a reason to care about her. Because right now we don't feel for her at all. We could care less about what happens to her.
You also want to put more insight on how your character almost died. You mentioned a war. What war? What was she doing in the war? Is she fighting in it or just caught in the middle of a conflict? Maybe she lost her family in this war and that's why she has no one to care for her. I'm not saying give us an entire history on her life and the war but small bits. Enough to get us interested.
Let me know if you have any questions or want me to look at it again if you fix it.
Ciao!
~Stellabeam
Hey there, here for your review!
First off, spaces!!! Typos!!! I know that you could have caught at least half of the mistakes in here if you reread this. I don't want to be harsh, but it's really hard to read a story where the Is aren't capitalized and the words are all stuck together with no spaces. It makes the whole thing seem a lot worse than it is.
So, my first advice is that you go through and change that and edit some more before posting. There are a lot of people on this side who will get very put off by those mistakes.
As for the piece, it was pretty good. I really like the stream of conciousness style of writing that you have. It's nice to read someone's thoughts sometimes, an it's much more entertaining than just writing "there was a girl who was dying but she didn't want to die." You definitely gave more than that, and I like it.
However, I wish you would give us more. Why is she dying? What war is she talking about? Where is she? Maybe you have a good reason for not mentioning all of this, but it would be nice if you did. Well, maybe not. It's up to you.
I do think you lost something towards the end. Suddenly it switched from being the girl's thoughts to just being another story about someone dying.
I also think you could work on dialogue some more. At the moment your dialogue sounds pretty forced and unnatural, which also makes it hard to read.
However, great job on the characters, you make them believable and make it easy for me to identify with them.
Hope this helped! And welcome to YWS.
I don't know why, but I went back to change it and in the edit, there were spaces between those words but for some reason they did not continue into what I posted. I tried to make the dialogue flow better. And I wasn't finished with the story, I was just putting a little bit on to see if anyone actually thought it was any good. Thank you for your thoughts, I did go back to fix what I could.
Oh, my goodness. Okay. Where do I begin?
This piece ignores a great deal of the rules of grammar. First, you've failed to properly use capital letters. Remember, the start of every sentence is written in capitals, and every proper noun must begin with a capital as well.
Secondly, you've misused many pieces of punctuation. You overuse the comma, especially in places where it isn't needed. A comma's prime function is to join an independent clause to a dependent one, or several of the former.
An independent clause is a sentence or fragment of a sentence that has the ability to stand on its own.
A dependent clause is a fragment of a sentence that can't stand alone.
For example:
"She gave presents of cookies, candy and ice cream."
This sentence joins the independent clause with the dependent one by using a comma. The clause "candy and ice cream" can't stand on its own because it doesn't make sense. Candy and ice cream what? What about them? However, the independent clause "she gave presents of cookies" can stand alone without the other clause, assuming there were only cookies involved.
Connecting "what is this feeling, is it happyness, yes it is" with commas jars the pace of the writing. Questions should be followed by question marks anyway. What commas do is encourage a person to read through sentences at a slightly faster pace than periods, question marks and exclamation points do. Do you understand? It should read:
"What is this feeling? Is it happiness? Yes, it is."
Can you see the difference? It flows much more naturally, and looks much cleaner.
Thirdly, quotation marks must be used on either side of speech. ' and " can both be used for this purpose, but not interchangeably (that means, pick one and stick with it). In this piece, you opt for " and you're consistent there, but you don't use them as effectively as you need to. That is, when you use speech in this piece, it should read as follows:
"(<- quotation mark) Medic,(<-comma)"(<- a closing quotation mark) the voices circles the void, drawing my attention. (<- period) "(<- quotation mark) I (<-capital letter) need a medic over here. (<-period) This one is still alive.(<-period, or an exclamation mark if you'd rather).
Therefore, it would look like this:
"Medic," the voice circles the void, drawing my attention. "I need a medic over here. This one is still alive."
Do you see the difference?
Fourthly, "it's" means "it is", "its" means "belonging to it".
Now, I can finally move on to the story itself. You never actually explain what's going on here. While that may be your own artistic preference, it's frustrating to read. So, someone's dying? Why? Who? Where? When? How? Why should I care? You don't flesh out the character as much as you really should in order to provoke the reader's sympathy or pleasure or anything.
You have a good idea here. Death always makes for a unique story plot because everyone has a different take on it. But, you don't really do the idea justice in this piece.
I have faith that you can reform this piece into something that really captivates. You've got the idea. All you need to do is polish it up.
All the best.
Thank you for the tips, I was just really lazy and didn't feel like capitalizing, so sorry about that lol. I did fix it and was hoping for some more pointers. I am new as this was my first piece and I know I am not the best, and everything you have to say can go a long way.
This piece…has a lot going on! The grammar and syntax definitely needs some editing. I think you are trying to convey a satire but it feels like you are just writing not really conveying emotions to the reader. Also I think you can elaborate more of what the speaker is going through because it’s from their point of view and also more description would make your first chapter more resourceful to the reader making them want to read more. Over all, I think it would be an interesting book.
Thanks that measn a lot and i hope i can continue to improve this until it reaches the level that i hope it will