Young Writers Society

Hey Brad.

My first impression: For all the minute detail, the narration felt essentially blind. Naturally, first person narrative can tend that way, to say the least. But there must be room to breathe, for the reader to step back and absorb the scene in any story, and in this, with the hark-back-to-then tone coupled with exhaustive detail covering both past and (seemingly) present, one begins to feel choked.

It's rather sentimental - you're right, not my first choice in fiction. But do I think something like it can be pulled-off, one way or another?

Well, yes. Merely a switch up of pace and sentence structure would lighten it, give breathing room. (You'll notice, doubtless, that your paragraphs are uniformly the same length, nearly to a one.) You end up with a monologue rather than a narrative.

How much inner dialogue, discussion of God, past and Chris's brilliance are needed to move the story? How much, as it is, drag?

You have a deft eye for detail. You've put emotional impetus into this; the conflict - hinted at in the narrator's sense of himself and then Chris's illness - is there. I'm afraid the narrator will drown it in its first voyage into words if he isn't trimmed down on inner-monologuing. (Detail, I'm sure you know, can be adjectival.)


Anyhow, that is my first impression on three hours sleep. My apologies for the week it took to get it to you.



IMP

This piece was delicious and I mean that in every sense. You made everything so wonderfully descriptive, that for lack of creativity on my part, it was like a fine wine. Which means that I had to actually slow down and READ it. When a story makes me stop reading so abnormally fast and absorb what it's saying, it's worth the effort.

My favorite line by far was:

Incandescence wrote:...we eventually erupted into something so nauseatingly beautiful we were tragic.

Incandescence wrote:It is difficult to acknowledge you are in love with your best friend, someone who has entrusted you with their deepest and most personal secrets, someone who begats their memory to you. To love them, especially when you are unsure of their feelings, feels almost criminal, as if you alone possess a free pass to the inner chambers of their heart and are quietly stealing bits and pieces of it. It should be natural, one would think, to be in love with your best friend, but oftentimes such a revelation is far too shocking and disgusting for other person to continue the friendship. As logical and necessary as it may seem to be in love with your best friend, the sad truth is that no matter how strong you felt the knot in your stomach you knew you would likely damn your friendship to an irretrievable purgatory.

Mightily impressive, Brad. The voice fits well with the first person narrative; a wonderful job of characterizing. It's difficult to have such extensive narrative and then add the appropriate dialog, but I believe you did it quite well. Superb flow, and I only felt drag at one moment: the part where you describe the apartment and even then I wouldn't go so far as to say I was bored.

There's little in my mind to critique here. I would suggest that at some parts you cut the melodrama. It works well in some occasions, especially near the end, but near the beginning, we don't quite have a feel for the relationship, and should develop it a bit more before going soppy.

Superb, just superb.

Goodness Gracious Mary Agnes, where are all the replies to this? And so luke-warm comments. Your work is untouched my mediocrity, and yet the awkward blubling of the unformed thought.. For shame AndNeverAgain and MB, you said nothing and very quietly was nothing said.

Stud, your style has always been an aquired taste, but, despite your protestations to the contrary, through this work I see why you so brazenly defend the true tone of a writer. The eccentricities, the elboes and knees the gawkiness and awkwardness are what makes your voice so remarkable.

Having said that you still get a thwacking so let's get down to it.

"Look, there's a penny on the ground. You should pick it up for good luck!"

Our shoulders collided in a moment of mutual mirth as the first tears of rain slipped out from underneath the sky's blanket and fell to the black pavement below. Abraham Lincoln's rusty face stared up at me, eyes unmoving, body unflinching, before I crushed him beneath my boot.

It was late enough without having to incorporate an element of luck. We'd sustained enough bruises from its overwhelming power

"I don't need any," I said, stepping in front of him and looping my arms around his back, pulling him close but also careful to be gentle, "because I've got you." Our lips met almost accidentally, brushing and pulling back before reconnecting, for sure who they were about to touch. Even in that kiss, I could feel a smile on his face--it radiated his warmth onto me--and as the cold rain from a summer north blew in, I realized I needed it more than I thought, that there was no way I could do this without it.

He tossed his head back and laughed, "I love you," his voice caught, and he rasped, "I love you so much," and a thunderhead discharged its dull roar as signal for the sudden downpour of water. It was only then that I realized we were still standing on a sidewalk in front of la Madeleine's, and the sound of police sirens wailing in the distance finally registered with my ears. I smiled as he lifted his hand to my cheek and wiped a drop of water off. His eyes danced in--illuminated, really--his entire face, and in their resplendent hue of green they flirted with mine.

I finally broke apart from his hold and his gaze. I laughed as he tilted his head to one side and stared at me--begged me to come back--before getting in the car. There was no need to speak on the ride home, no desire to fill the happiness with the possibility of the emptiness of words. We were content merely to be in the other's presence.

When we got to the loft, I went to the kitchen and pulled out a bottle of Voss almost immediately. The marble counter tops had been cleaned so heavily earlier that day that when I missed my glass the first time, it just beaded up on the wetted surface. I grabbed the gold Armani Florenca towel and quickly mopped up the droplets. It was dark outside, almost two in the morning, and I drew the curtains across the window. I turned and was briefly startled at my own kitchen--it was so spacious I had once, jokingly, suggested converting it to an extra bedroom.

But there it was, and in its blank stupidity I was almost frightened. When first arriving, the modern two bedroom loft opened into a large living room with floor-to-ceiling windows connected by a nine foot archway to a library with Walnut shelves and cabinets and steel and glass sliding doors that opened to a patio. The high island kitchen by Builthap to the left was intricately blended with just the right colors and homed Subzero Thermador and Gaggenau and Bosch appliances. The windowed master and secondary bathrooms had marble finishes along with Dorn Bracht fittings and insulated double walls and wide-strip maple hardwood mosaic floors. It was always quiet here, and even when I sat outside on the patio to smoke I could barely hear the roar of a thriving metropolis below.

We had laughed about getting this particular loft when we first signed the contract, because we didn't need two bathrooms and we certainly weren't interested in two bedrooms, but we got it anyway simply because "we could," because the price ($17000/month) was reasonable enough, and we had the cash to spend. I stepped through the dark and into the living room. The dark leather couch with gold buttons looked vacant. Not only because it had no occupants, but because it was not surrounded by other things. Our home was more or less like a minimalist portrait, and in that simplicity I simultaneously derived some of my deepest inspiration and depression.

I sat down at the piano and considered playing something, just anything, really, to help combat the quiet of the place. As a child I had stayed with my grandparents in the country, and in the guest bedroom where I slept an A/C window unit was used to cool the room. I would always go to sleep in there listening to the hum and whirs of its arctic chill, and ever since, I had required a minimal noise to comfortably go to sleep. Living alone was almost an impossibility for me, and when I woke up in the middle of the night, even if someone was there, I had difficulty returning to my dreams.

Every morning I woke up with his fingers touching mine and for a long time I wasn't sure what it meant, exactly--I had previously thought this was simply his way of sleeping--until he told me that if, God forbid, something should happen to me, that he wanted his hand to be the last thing I remember, that he was there with me, even until the end.

I didn't understand it at first, how he could love me so much. I didn't understand how after years of silence from both sides we eventually erupted into something so nauseatingly beautiful we were tragic. While I desperately needed the comfort of someone else to go to sleep, I was terrified of the prospect of being weighed down by another's body, but Chris didn't do that. He was like a close friend--not family, because family has the tendency to overlook what you need for what you want--and he was just as light or just as heavy as I wanted. He made no attempt to hold me to him, but in this very freedom I confronted the terrifying possibility of a life without him, and it seemed at that moment that such a prospect was unbearable.

I thought that everything we had ever built up had washed away, caught as mere driftwood in the oceans of life. But they came back two years later, and whereas he still saw only the best in people and believed in them, I had been hardened by the reality of my unsupportive parents, who were both disgusted by my sexual and moral ambiguity as well as my desire to be a novelist.

I was partly relieved, but I also recognized something significant, something I hadn't accounted for, was suddenly and scathingly absent.

"Behold the wood kindled by a small fire, and the tongue is a fire."

"Brad, I want to be your friend more than anything, but I can't be hurt like that again. I really, really can't be," and I would always tell him, "I won't, I'm so sorry, I swear." For all of that, it still took almost a year for things to get back to normal--there were a lot of times I would get an extra ticket to a show or a play or a baseball game and I would want to call him so much, begin building things up once more, but I could never quite bring myself to do it. Instead, when I saw him in public, we would barely speak and avoid any sort of discussion that even tangentially forced us together. That hurt more than any girl or guy ever dumping me, but I didn't know what that meant until much, much later.

It is difficult to acknowledge you are in love with your best friend, someone who has entrusted you with their deepest and most personal secrets, someone who begats their memory to you. To love them, especially when you are unsure of their feelings, feels almost criminal, as if you alone possess a free pass to the inner chambers of their heart and are quietly stealing bits and pieces of it. It should be natural, one would think, to be in love with your best friend, but oftentimes such a revelation is far too shocking and disgusting for other person to continue the friendship. As logical and necessary as it may seem to be in love with your best friend, the sad truth is that no matter how strong you felt the knot in your stomach you knew you would likely damn your friendship to an irretrievable purgatory.

I stood from the piano bench and slowly walked to the master bedroom. Chris was curled up, bare white arm thrown over the dark and rich covers, black hair kissing his face and ears -- and how I wished it didn't -- and eyes so relaxed I briefly thought he was like an angel. I didn't move for a moment. I was afraid that the slightest commotion would rouse him from his slumber, and I knew that he needed his rest. Almost as soon as I realized this I hated myself for walking in. I had no intention to go to sleep at that moment. I had no intention of ever going to sleep again; I just wanted to lay next to him and hold his hand or touch his soft yet toned shoulders; I wanted to kiss him forever. I never wanted his smile to leave me.

"Hey, Brad?"

His voice scared me in the mornings, especially now. I jerked up from the couch and realized I had spilled the glass of water all over my jeans, so that it effectively looked like I pissed myself. I rubbed my eyes before standing up and running my hand through my hair. He smiled weakly at me and blinked.

"Hey," he said again, as if reassuring himself (but he probably meant it more for me) that I was still alive.

"Good morning," I said and swaggered over to him, pretending like I was happy. And I was happy to see him--I was always happy to see him--but I wasn't always happy he saw me. His whole existence seemed to tenuously rely on my happiness, and I knew that was a dangerous and perilous thing. I was prone to emotional outbursts, but Chris seemed to have come to understand them and, perhaps, appreciate their irregularity and the strange bases from which they arose. We made no promises to each other, which did strike him as odd. Even as children the need for promising one thing to another seemed superfluous, or, perhaps, even then, as my grandfather would say, God somehow came to us and let us know that everything was going to work out okay.

He was the reason I lost my faith and donate my Bible to the Salvation Army. I never told him this, but when I realized I was in love with him, I realized there was also no God. God could not create someone as beautiful as him, because God must contaminate everything with the feces of sin. Chris was not, though--his sins were accidental, not intentional, and if he, of all people, had to ask anyone for forgiveness, it was just wrong. So I guess I didn't stop believing in God; I just stopped caring about Him. If He can't see that Chris doesn't owe an apology for who he is, then my apologies for who I am were equally, though in the opposite way, worthless.

. "Don't be sorry. You were the only person who ever made me feel at home in this world."

That night, I cooked a meal of pesto tortellini--his favorite--and we watched old movies. He liked them best because he said they had to really rely on acting instead of just special effects. He said they were like living a life with your days numbered so you act as happy and as well as you can until afterwards, when he was pretty sure they all collapsed from their great performances. I never said anything when he told me that the first time, but it broke my heart that night.

The chance to encounter someone so beautiful in your lifetime is so small, and I was so insignificant and inconsequential until he breathed life into all things ugly inside of me, that I couldn't believe I was losing him. How does one

I didn't know what this meant. I didn't understand the full scope of the symbolic exchange taking place at this precise moment, but I knew Chris was there, I knew he was still with me, and that's all I could bring myself to think about. "Good luck, huh?" I asked, studying it. "I guess things didn't work out so well." I immediately hated myself for saying that, for being so cruel. It was a part of me I had tried to hide from him, had tried to relinquish in the last year.

But he just grinned bigger than I think I'd ever seen, and he leaned over and kissed me and then laughed, "No." He shook his head and smiled at me, looped his fingers into my hand, and kissed me once more. "I got everything I could ever ask for."

It was.....ok. You pick interasting topics. Some parts were good, others ok. But other then some parts, it was good.
Good luck.

-- M.B.Author

Complete.

hmm. intriguing. =] no critiques just yet!