People always say that when you die, your life will flash before your eyes. Personally, I don’t see how anyone knows that because dead men tell no tales, but I will admit, I hoped that the poor boy got to see his life before he succumbed to the death he did. Life is too unexpected. Life is always keeping you on your toes. For instance, I never expected to take an unbelievably beautiful and amazing girl to the fall dance. I never expected her to pull me off the dance floor and into the hallway of our school. I never expected her to open the nearest door she could find. I never expected to see Walker Smith’s charred body stuffed into the janitor’s closet.
Rebecca screamed when his ashy body fell from the closet and onto her feet. I was just in shock. I wanted to scream like Rebecca, but my throat wasn’t working. We stood there for about five minutes, her screaming and me staring. I hadn’t actually taken the time to look at the body clearly. The only reason I knew it was Walker was because of his burnt tie. He had been so proud of that tie while we were driving to the dance with his date and Rebecca. It was white with giant green polka dots. I thought it was ugly, but Walker wouldn’t hear of it. I could barely see the green in it now, but I would know Walker anywhere. He was my best friend.
We both knew he was dead, but we didn’t want to do anything about it. People do that, you know? They think that if they don’t call the police or if they pretend that the person is just sleeping then it just magically makes them alive again. Life doesn’t work like that. If they are dead, they are dead. I knew I had to report his death, stop the dance, something, but my body wouldn’t move. Rebecca was still hysterical and the only reason that no one could hear her was that the music was too loud. I’m sure that when the song ended, they would all come running.
“Rebecca, stay here. I’m going to get help.” I said, finally recovering from my shock-induced paralysis.
She finally stopped screaming to answer me.
“Get help? What help? He’s dead! He’s gone! We were just with him. He had just left us and now…” she couldn’t finish.
She knelt down on the ground, her tears falling onto Walker’s distorted and burnt face. When her tears slid down his face, they gathered up the ash and dragged it down to the floor. He was going to be surrounded by a pool of black, salt water before I got back. It was hard turning away from him, but I knew it had to be done. I realized that I hadn’t started crying, so it hasn’t hit me yet. It hasn’t hit me yet that my best friend had been burnt alive and shoved into a closet.
I flung open the doors to the dance and started yelling. No one noticed me since everyone in the room was yelling anyways. The room was filled with sweaty bodies slapping up against each other. Everyone was so close that I couldn’t get through to the teacher in the front of the gym. I curse loudly and began pushing dancers out of my path. I had to keep wiping other people’s sweat from my face. It was hot enough in Alabama without having a dance in an un-air-conditioned gym in the middle of our famously sticky and hot falls.
When I finally broke through the crowd, the first teacher I saw was my English teacher, Mr. Tate. He was laughing with some of the other teachers, so I knew I had to shock him to get him to be able to listen to me. I ran up to him, grabbed him by the collar, and began shouting in his face.
“Walker is dead! You have to get help! Please!” I screeched into his face.
He didn’t seem to need any more proof than that. He told a teacher beside him to turn off the lights, stop the music, and call 911. She nodded and went to work. I led Mr. Tate, who parted the crowd like a wood axe, to Rebecca who was still in hysterics over Walker. When he saw the body, he looked taken back. He knelt down beside Rebecca and pried her off Walker with difficulty.
“Go to the gym, the other teachers will get you some help.” Mr. Tate said.
Rebecca nodded to him, gave me a quick hug, and went to the gym. I looked back to Walker and it seemed to hit me. That was Walker lying there. That was the little boy who shared his toys with me in preschool. Walker was the one who passed notes with me in second grade. Walker had always been there in my life, and now he was gone. My hand flew to my mouth. My stomach seemed to realize it was Walker too. I leaned over and threw up, spilling the contents of my stomach onto the floor beside Walker. Mr. Tate immediately came to my side.
“Are you all right?” Mr. Tate asked.
I was tempted to hand him a witty, sarcastic comment on how I was supposed to be all right considering my best friend was a dead, scorched mess on the floor, but my mouth couldn’t handle all of that work. All it wanted to do was let out a wail of sadness. So I did. I fell to the ground, clutched Walker’s dead body, and sobbed for what seemed like hours. He was on his stomach, so I heaved him onto his back. I gasped when I saw two letters viciously carved into Walker’s chest.
“TM?” I asked the universe in-between sobs.
In that instant, it became clear to me that Walker had been murdered. It had been obvious from the start, but I hadn’t acknowledged the fact until now. I held his dead body tighter when I thought of someone purposefully taking Walker from this earth. Mr. Tate tugged at my arm, trying to pull me off, but I forcefully held onto my best friend. I heard the siren of the police from the hall and I knew that they would take me from Walker. They could try.
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140,084 Literary Works • 672,994 Reviews
This is really good! Everything flowed very smoothly and it kept me captivated from beginning to end. It left me with the good kind of questions and got me thinking.
I didn't really find anything wrong with it that someone didn't already point out, so I'd just like to say that I enjoyed this very much and I would love to read more.
Happy writing!
Hello there
I think you did a good job with this. I definitely have questions about it, but you did well. I like the detail that you put into describing this Walker kid's body when they found him, but it concerned me that you spent the entire time just talking about how the guy was dead and I didn't feel like you added much emotion about your MC(main character) finding his best friend dead. His date was more emotional than he was and then he puked by him... Not really the best thing to do with that, maybe have him turn away or something. Just the visual image of a best friend puking on/beside remains doesn't please the reader's eye. Also, I didn't quite understand the reason why he puked; stress, concern, devastation..? Make that clearer if you're wanting to keep that part, otherwise it just didn't make sense to me, but that might be a stylistic opinion.
A Few nit picks and comments:
“TM?” I asked the universe in-between sobs
--What is "TM"? What does it mean? Also, why is he asking someone this and not getting a response? I don't understand. If it's vital to the story, maybe add the background to it, the story behind why that's important, otherwise, it doesn't go with the scene and I would take it out. Personal opinion, but I didn't understand it, so clarify what that is maybe
In that instant, it became clear to me that Walker had been murdered. It had been obvious from the start, but I hadn’t acknowledged the fact until now.
--This kind of ties the story together, and I think it explains and tells more to the reader than shows. I think I would've inferred that Walker was killed; you showed that when you said he was nothing but ashes. (Side note: if Walker is ash, how is your MC hugging his body?) Or was this the MC's reflection on the situation? If it was that, I'd say keep it, but add more emotion here and maybe add personal thoughts and things so the reader is closer to him and has more knowledge of his emotions through this whole ordeal.
so it hasn’t hit me yet. It hasn’t hit me yet that my best friend had been burnt alive and shoved into a closet.
--*It hadn't, in both places please. Keep your tenses all the same through out the piece, if its all in the past, keep it in the past. Same with present, and future.
Overall, I loved the mystery you put out. I have a lot of questions about where this is going and what happened to his friend, which, for a novel or something, is great. You had me immediately hooked. I would add a little background between your MC and Rebecca, too. Also, you did great on describing what this ashen corpse looked like, and I could stand a little more detail when he goes into the actual dance again, but that was pretty good too. Overall, I'm looking forward to reading more from you, Mr. Locke, and I'll be seeing you around YWS
Feel free to PM me if you need help, or anything
Keep writing
Ash
Hey, John Locke! Welcome to YWS!
This was so cool. Good job on going into the action immediately - it always irritates me a bit when writers ramble on for ages until actually starting the story.
You seem to have posted this as a short story, but this seemed more like a prologue or a first chapter of a longer story. I know I would love to hear how this had happened, who/what is TM, and why would someone murder a seemingly innocent school kid. That's actually what you want to do as a writer - make your readers want more, so very well done!
Overall, your way of writing is effortless and pleasant to read. Something slightly minor you could work on is your punctuation is dialogue. You kept ending statements like "I'm going to get help." with a period, even though they're followed by a speech tag like "I said". In those cases, what you should have is this:
---> "I'm going to get help", I said.
But yeah, that's quite a minor point considering your storytelling works otherwise very well.
One thing that I'd like to point out was the teachers' seemingly indifferent reactions. I know that they're teachers and probably trained not to panic and stuff, but you could've described their facial expressions or something when the MC goes to tell them the guy is dead. Now they seem a bit like faceless robots.
All in all, I enjoyed reading this, and I hope there's some sort of continuation!
Demeter
x
I'm going to be OCD now and point out that in the first paragraph, you've wrote beautify and I think you might have meant beautiful?
Now that that's over with. I enjoyed this piece. I don't know whether you want this to be the start of a novel or somewhere in the middle or even at the end. It could work anywhere really. If it was at the start, it would certainly grip the reader in terms of what the heck is happening? Because you have no idea.
As I read it, I couldn't help but noticed that there was a lot of repetition. You repeat the fact that Walker is dead a lot of times and I understand that the person is in grief and all but maybe that's a little too much repetition.
I was a little confused at how the narrator saw the TM mark and then instantly understood that Walker had been murdered? But maybe you could explain that later. Maybe you are going to and I'm just being stupid.
It was a good piece. I liked it and I don't really like first person reads that much. I find them really hard to write so I guess congratulations are in order for writing one that was good.
Kasim.