First piece

hello and welcome to YWS!! this piece was such a treat to review! let's jump right in

The air is thick ferocious and freezing… dad's been bottling again.

i'd add some commas in between the adjectives. also i'm unsure if 'bottling' is the right verb here? from what i understand 'bottling' means putting liquids into bottles, and from the rest of the story it feels like you might mean something closer to 'drinking'? or something more metaphorical like 'getting lost in his bottles'? though, i do like this opening. it's very atmospheric, and we get to jump right into the scene!

I felt my forehead, I think I'm bleeding.

'felt' is a verb in past tense. as the rest of the text is in present tense, you could change it to 'i feel my forehead' to make everything feel more cohesive.

Oh well mum's is worse.

i'd add a comma here as well, maybe after 'oh well'. also i'm pretty sure 'mum's' has a possessive s, but i read it as 'mum is is worse', and i wonder if there might be another way to phrase it that would avoid readers stumbling? even something like 'oh well, mum has it worse' or 'what mum has is worse', imo, could improve readability.

That's when I'm most scared, he's gonna hurt himself I keep thinking, but that doesn't matter.

:C it's clear the speaker still cares for who i'm assuming is their father, and it makes the whole scene feel much sadder but also more realistic... i also like the way you convey what has happened without stating it outright... though 'he's gonna hurt himself I keep thinking' sounds a bit oddly structured to me. i'd probably switch it around to 'i keep thinking he's going to hurt himself'. i'd also consider turning 'gonna' into 'going to' to match the somber tone of this scene.

*Bang* the door flies open, oh no.

this took me out of the text a bit because of the structure. i'd recommend changing it to something like 'the door flies open with a bang'.


lastly i'm a little confused about where the (alleged) father is? when you say 'eventually he'll give in to my tears and go for a drive' it seems like he's present in the room where the speaker is crying, but then the door flies open and it seems implied that it is him entering? this isn't really a critique but i don't think it would hurt if you decided to clarify a bit more.

overall this was a great piece and i'm very impressed with how much you managed to portray in such few words! i'd definitely love to read an extended version, if that would be something you were ever interested in writing. thanks for sharing, and thanks for letting me review!

Hi! Welcome to YWS, and well done on posting your first piece!

It's a very short piece, but it's doing a lot. There is a real sense of disorientation in how the lines are short, and the actions happen very quickly. The short timeframe (the 10 minutes Mum gets to rest) is a sharp detail that makes the whole piece feel like a lived routine rather than a generic description of trauma.

I felt my forehead, I think I'm bleeding. Oh well mum's is worse.

This is doing a lot of heavy lifting for the piece, bringing the reader directly into the scene with a chilling flatness that shows how normalised the violence has become for this narrator. However, after forehead it should be a semicolon, not a comma. And Mum's should have a capital M. Do you mean the Mum has an injury on her forehead, and that her injury is worse? The piece definitely needs more clarity, since we later understand this is what happened because the narrator fixes her up from YouTube.

I think you could make this more effective by having some showing, not telling. In your piece, you tell us that these things are happening. How about restructuring the piece so that a scene plays out, we are shown the father being violent, not told that he is, by having his character perform some actions and the mum and narrator respond? That way, you could have the characters show some personality. We don't know anything about the main character or what she looks like or what the rooms around her look like, and those things help a reader feel grounded in the scene!

*Bang* the door flies open, oh no.

I think this happens a bit too quickly, and the *Bang* feels a little comical. I would be tempted to have this as a separate paragraph and show that the character hears a band and sees the door fly open, which is a terrifying image!

You have the beginning of something really good here, something very harrowing. Keep writing! You'll only get better, and you're already good!