I could feel the beating, reverberating through the crisp night air; the smell of incoming rain held heavy and shifted on some invisible current. I sat in the field, watching the horrifyingly immense and grotesque lightning slugs work their way laggardly across the bleak and indistinguishable horizon. A dread worked its way into my heart, but the storm; marching proudly but certainly not swiftly, was not responsible for my downward spiraling mood. This was a dread that crawled beneath my skin during some other event unnoticed. It laid dormant under the frail skin and feeble hairs until it found me properly vulnerable. Now was its cue. It burrowed deep and took hold of the bone, it clasped its narrow fangs into the marrow and shredded the flesh about it in a crazed dance of claws and talons. It knew just as I, that it would reach my heart. It would screech and tear at the fragile veins and soft tissue until all that was left was an ambiguous meaty pulp.
Unfortunately for the dread, when it found my heart it was already dead. Perhaps not entirely dead, to call it dead would to imply that it stopped performing its function. It still beat more or less, but the beats were spaced and eerily distant. As if it were humming some melancholy tune, thinking of the day it would finally silence. The dread must have pitied the exhausted organ and made its destructive path leading to my mind.
The first miniscule drop of rain grazed my hand nonchalantly. I watched the wetness gather and roll off of my skin and then disappear into the waves of grass forever, most likely sinking sullenly into the dark ground. I felt at the grass, noticing the change in moisture, listening to the sound of a million tiny diamonds fall upon a tainted Earth. It was the sound of tortured blood falling as silently as the anguished tears of the beaten and hopeless. It was the sound of a midnight rain.
My eyebrows furrowed as the first drops gathered on my forehead. The smell was almost overpoweringly subtle, soft as a moon shadow or silken as a drug induced euphoric kiss yet loud like the chest shaking roar from the bolts in the sky or the sharp and tormented screeches of a being testing its mortality. I let the moment take me, I soon became drenched and I knew that if I wanted to shed a dignified tear, no one would ever know about it. No one but me. But I didn't, I fought it back with a finely honed ax and a torch that started burning before my memory would allow my cognitive abilities to reach.
I fell to my back, looking up into the violent flashes. I decided that I would count the stars as my reasons for living. It didn't take long, nor did it require very many scans across the atmosphere to realize that I wouldn't see a single shimmer all night. And so it was I sunk into the ground, the soft worm infested fissure inhaling me with one easy breath, curing me of sulky demeanor. Yet when I opened my eyes, here I was, my feet still properly stapled to the floor, my hands nailed down into the green entanglement below me.
With a sigh, deep and shuttering, I rose to my feet, truly feeling the new wet weight that slouched against my shoulders. I had things to do I suppose, better things than this. I turned just as a bolt, like the flash of a camera, shattered my shadow and threw the fragments out into the field. With hands dripping and feet that sloshed about in their cloth prisons, I made my way back to the trees, reaching eerily into the sky like bony fingers. It was all time now, I knew my legs were not going to fail me, my mind would not dissolve beneath the steady torrent, my heart wouldn't collapse under the strain of my heavy clothes.
I closed my eyes but kept moving forward, guided only by my faith that the world wouldn't suddenly drop off before me and send me toppling down and down until the light above would become a sliver, a million miles away. The descent would be terrifying, but I had to wonder where it would end.
Good.
Something to contemplate while I walk.
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125,017 Literary Works • 672,850 Reviews
Hey there GloweringStranger!
This is a really interesting story, though perhaps not really horror, and a really enjoyable read! I liked how poetic it felt at parts, and the ways our unnamed narrator's emotions/thoughts sort of mirrored the un-stability of a lightning storm. There are a lot of things that worked really nicely in this story, which I'll elaborate on at the end, but first let's get to what worked not-so-nicely.
The opening sentence of any story (especially a story as short as this) should be concise and striking, something that draws a reader into the story and interests them, makes them want to read on. This line leaves me confused. First, it's a little awkward in construction. There's a lot of punctuation that works okay, but doesn't really need to be there.
Second, don't understand the first half "I could feel the beating, reverberating through the crisp night air". This suggests that it is the beating that is reverberating through the night air. While that may be exactly what you mean, I as the reader don't understand. What is beating? Where is it coming from? What does it mean for the character?
Here, in the second line, I as a reader am still confused. The wording is clunky and awkward, and inspires contrasting images in my mind that don't help me get a firm picture of the setting or what is happening in the story. First, let's address the wording. Throughout much of the story, there are a lot of adverbs (horrifyingly, laggardly, etc) used. Adverbs, while appropriate and helpful in certain cases, should in general be avoided like the plague. When adverbs are used willy-nilly, they lose their impact and just become extra words weighing down the story. Try to use them sparingly so that when they're used they have an impact on the reader.
Now, the images. Once we cut out the adverbs, we have "the immense and grotesque lightning slugs work their way across the bleak and indistinguishable horizon". This is better, but still isn't doing what it should. What are lightning slugs? Why should we be disgusted by them? How does the character feel about them? Do you actually mean lightning bolts and this is some terminology I'm not familiar with? Some of this can be helped (and it can also help the adverb situation) by taking time to show how the character feels. As people, we have physical reactions to fear/horror. When we're scared, our heart rate quickens, we sweat, we shake, etc. By including things like "I swallow, forcing my heart back down my throat as the grotesque forms of the lightning slugs work their way across the bleak horizon." Notice how I've cut half of the adjectives you use, as well. When you're trying to describe something, it helps to use one exactly perfect describer (add more only if absolutely entirely necessary) rather than several unnecessary ones. It keeps your writing trimmed and poignant, and the images will be crisper and clearer in a readers mind.
This sentence is a punctuation nightmare. (I promise I don't try to line-by-line critique entire stories, really xD). There are several places where punctuation is shaky, but this is one in particular that I'll use as an example. Over-punctuating runs thoughts and images together in a way that makes them awkward and ineffective. And when the wrong punctuation is used for the situation, it's complicated even more. I, personally, would fix this sentence like this:
A dread works it's way into my heart. Yet the storm, marching with slow pride, is not responsible for my mood's downward spiral.
Here, I've cut up the sentence into two, making that first part concise and strong as a line. Short sentences can be good things, and their brevity can create meaningful impact. The second part I fixed up, taking out the semicolon that cut the sentence in a way opposite of what you were trying to do (semicolons separate two independent clauses that fit together very closely in topic/theme/etc). I also fixed up tense issues (don't break tense! When you chose present tense, stick with it
Here is a guide that lays out uses for more common punctuation, which you should check out as a way to learn how to tighten up some of the other lines in this story. There are a lot of other really great guides in the Knowledge Base here on YWS that can be really helpful too, so I encourage you to poke around a bit!
All that being said, I want to point out a few pieces of description that I liked a lot, and worked really well! Such as here:
And here:
And here:
These images are strong and work exactly as they should!
Neither line in this bit made sense to me. The description feels a little too vague, if that makes sense? Almost like it's trying to be too poetic for me to really grasp what is going on/what the character is feeling.
Overall, I really did enjoy this story. It's what I like to call a moment piece, where we have our character in this moment, and everything that happens to them, then the moments gone. It works very well as a short piece, and the overarching mood/meaning of the piece is one that I really enjoy. It's dark, and somewhat hopeless in it's emotional raggedness (or, the emotional raggedness of the narrator) which is mirrored well in the lightning storm setting. I especially like the ending. I can't really even explain why, it's just perfectly tied up and ended with that sort of vague closure that I really like in stories like this.
What really needs done in this story deals with over-punctuation, inappropriate punctuation, and over-wording. What these things do is clutter a story and drag it down. As writers, we don't want our writing to be clunky and heavy. We want it to be tight and poignant to inspire crisp images and strong emotions. Word choice and punctuation choice do a lot to help, or hinder, these attempts. Once this story has been tightened up, I think it will be really excellent.
That's all I have to say! If you have any questions, or want to discuss anything further, feel free to PM me and I'd be glad to help any way I can.
Keep writing!
-Lauren-