An adrenaline rush surged through me. I can do whatever I want. I smile at the faces around me, all of them filled with either fear, shock, or awe. They don't know how exhilarating this feels. To know that you can do whatever you want...to anybody. I take a step forward. Everyone immediately takes a step away from me. I raise my hand and twirl it slightly. Meteors crashed all around me, people screaming and running here and there like the panicked mice that they are. Filthy rats. However, it's still nice to have someone look up to you.
"Stop," I say, as if I were talking to a friend who was lying on a hospital bed, barely waking up. They do. All of them look as though they're frozen in time.
"Love me," I order. They all turn their heads to me again, oblivious to the meteors killing their friends. Some bow, others spell out whatever pleasantries they can think of. Fake. All fake.
I look away, tired of this. Tired of them. Pathetic. All of them.
"Die," I say, turning around and walking the other way. They speak no more. They scream no more. They stop being so damn pitiful. They just fall on the ground like the rag dolls that they are. After all, once I get lonely, I can raise them from the dead.
Wouldn't the sun be prettier if the sky sparkled like an opal? And the sky hears my thoughts, transforming into a creamy white with beautiful sparkles. The meteors stop raining on the pelted, tired earth. I accidentally step on a corpse's thigh.
"Disgusting." I flicker my hand again, and all the bodies are gone. Instead, I'm standing on a meadow now. A peaceful river trickles along, reflecting the milky sky. Its soothing sound does not lessen my heartbeat; to the contrary, it makes my heart pound harder and makes me feel alive, more alive than I'd felt when I was one of them. A giggle rises, and a feeling I cannot comprehend overwhelms me. I can't help but laugh now: laugh at myself, laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation. All I ever wanted was for them to notice me, to love me, and now that I have the power to do that, I kill them instead.
I can't stop laughing, I can practically feel the loneliness leaving my body. I'm manic now, unable to stop the hearty bellows escaping my soul. It's my cure, my cure for apathy. I stand up once more, never noticing that I'd fallen in the first place. My sable hair falls in my face. I shut my eyes and smile, letting the sun bathe me in its light.
___
"Wake up already! Dirty ingrate..." I hear my mother grumble. I rub the weariness away from my eyes and see the musty ceiling of my bedroom.
I was...dreaming...? No.......
My heart sinks into my stomach. I'd felt so alive in my dream. So....happy....
I hear the clatter of the dishes in the kitchen. If I don't get up soon, Mother will hit me again. I slowly lift myself off my lumpy bed, stretching my arms until the bruise on my ribs starts to hurt. Reality slowly starts to set in. I'm here again: the daughter of an abusive fucktard who couldn't care less. I'm not powerful. But...you can be.., a voice whispers in my head.
I'm sick of the constant day to day abuse from my mother. I don't have any memories where my ivory skin wasn't peppered with deep purple bruises. She pulled me out of school when the teachers started noticing that I wasn't extremely shy, but disturbed. No one knows about the things I go through, or, if they do, they don't care. It's gotten to the point where I don't even feel anything. The happiness, at least, that's what I think it was, felt in my dream is the only happiness I've felt in my entire life. I open the door that leads into the dark hallway. I could hear my mother shuffle here and there as I near the kitchen.
"Dammit Lily how many times do I have to wake you up?! I give you a place to stay and food to eat, and you still choose to be a lazy selfish bitch..." She went off on her daily rant, only stopping to hack into the sink every now and then. I see my mother's box of matches on the table, next to a bowl of old oatmeal. How have I lived to be in my teen years? I do not know. I don't even know how old I am. I never celebrate birthdays. I only know that this isn't the way a mother should treat her child because of the way the other mothers would talk to their children, back when I used to go to school. You can stop it all, Lily.., it whispered again. The matches draw my eye again. The wooden table is old enough to ignite without the use of gasoline....
I pick up the box of matches and light one. It twinkles faintly between my fingers, like a dull star that can never be brighter than it is right now. I tune my mother back in when she turns around to face me.
"...be dead without me. What are you doing, Lily?!" She exclaims, mouth opening to expose her yellow, rotting smoker's teeth. I look her dead in the eyes and ask her the question that's been burned into my head since the first day I went to school.
"Why don't you love me?" I ask. Her eyebrows raise, and a small gasp escapes when I drop the match onto the table. The dying star brightens angrily, spreading around the table. She starts screaming and running around the kitchen, but I don't listen. I stopped listening a long time ago. She fills a pot with water and dumps it over the table, but it proves futile. The star turns into a supernova, crawling across the wooden floor, climbing the cabinets, and engulfing the room, surrounding me and my mother. There's no chance of escape. She looks at me with eyes full of terror, but I remain emotionless. Deep down in my soul, that feeling I encountered in my dream starts to awaken again. The flames lap at me hungrily, blistering and boiling my bruised skin. It hurts, yet I start smiling. Mother doesn't cease screaming. The ceiling beams fall around us.
"Love me! " I shriek, and the flames intensify more than ever.
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,857 Reviews
So much drama...I love it!
That was definitely a different kind of story than I usually read. And it was wonderful!
There were a few things that confused me though.
1. I don't understand why this is rated 18+. I don't think it's that intense, but that's my own personal thought.
2. The dream at the beginning seemed... too real. And I couldn't make a clear connection between it and the actual story. If it had some sort of mention or relation to the abuse (a reversal of roles, perhaps?) then I think it would work better.
3. As said before, the school thing was a bit confusing. It doesn't seem like the mother would care enough to homeschool the daughter, and if she pretended to but wasn't, the law would have intervened.
Besides those minor issues I had, it's absolutely gorgeous! Please keep writing!
~Tammy~
Haha thanks! I'm glad to hear that!
Let me see if I can clarify.
Well, the 18 was due to the fact that there is a swearing in the piece (a moderator or such told me that although I put a 16 rating for said swearing and the fact that its a murder/suicide story it should also include an 18 rating in the title). The second issue, regarding the dream, involves her reality in which she believes that no one loves or cares about her enough to save her. She kills everyone in her dream and it surprises her because she thought that her only desire was to be loved, but lo and behold her subconscious reminds her otherwise! And about the last part....yeah, I had no idea how to close that loop so I tried to leave it vague/emphasize her 'unloved' situation.
Thanks for your insight, this will definitely encourage and benefit my writing
Woah, that was a good story. I've read something a bit like this before. But this was ten times better and a hell of a lot more intense.
So there are only a couple of things that aren't particularly clear to me.
First, the dream. I don't know if this is just me, but it seemed too real. And I know we all have dreams that seem real but when we wake up we understand that nothing in it made sense. I genuinely thought her dream was real and was intrigued, but then she woke up. Normally dreams are totally twisted and people start to tell people things which seems like a load of nonsense. Maybe you were planning to make the reader believe that all the meteor situation was real (because that's how I felt). In that case, it's all fine. If you want to make it seem more nonsensey-dream-like then I suggest to make people do things that wouldn't happen in real life. Refer back to your dream experiences and add little bits in from that. Thinking about it though, meteors falling from the sky and killing everyone isn't really normal. But maybe consider it anyway. Nike and The Black Sheep liked it so maybe I'm wrong.
Also, I doubt she could have been taken out of school. But only because her mother doesn't seem to want to homeschool her and isn't sending her to a different school. To me that doesn't seem real enough.
Despite these things, this story was fantastic! I really like the ending where she burns the table and how everything seems to refer back to that dream at the beginning. I really love the last line as well. It seems to intensify the story even more and then it just stops. Love it.
Amazing story, keep writing
~The World
Thank you for the constructive criticism! I really appreciate it! Though, to be honest this story was inspired by a lucid dream I had and it felt really amazing. When you have those types of dreams, you can control anything and everything you do in it, thus my character ended up having a very sensible (if not realistic) dream. Just thought I should make that clear because I agree, dreams are, for the most part, very random and weird. Thanks :3
Starleene here!
It's been a while so let’s see if I still have it!
First off: Whoa. The emotion was intense. I don't usually read stories that depress me but for some reason the reaction to this piece was like a car wreck that I couldn't turn away from, in a good way.
Second: There are a couple things that could be improved upon, such as: Why is she mad at everyone else? Sure her mother beats her, but I think that that would ignite a bitter hatred for her mother, not the world. Also, I believe that the school would probably keep close eye on her, especially if she was marked disturbed. Let's face it; a person has to be extremely disturbed for a school to take notice. So, wouldn't the school become suspicious if she didn't show up for an extended period of time?
Third: The table definitely wouldn't ignite as fast as you might think, even if it was old and wooden. Contrary to popular belief, if you drop a lit match into gasoline it won’t spontaneously combust. Gasoline is liquid and when you drop fire into liquid it goes out, Mithbusters proved this on one episode. Just a little factoid.
Fourth: A couple changes you might look into.
“I take a step forward. Everyone immediately takes a step away from me.”
You seem to have a lot of simple sentences throughout your story and in some places it works really well, but here I believe that you could possibly combine these sentences into a longer, more thought out sentence.
In the beginning you start out in the present tense and that’s what I thought the story was going to be consisted of but in a couple places you change to the past tense in the middle of a present tense sentence. Like here:
“I take a step forward. Everyone immediately takes a step away from me. I raise my hand and twirl it slightly. Meteors crashed all around me, people screaming and running here and there like the panicked mice that they are.”
When you mention that Lily has transported herself to a meadow, you say that she’s standing on a meadow making me picture her floating or gliding. I think you meant she was standing in a meadow.
“…to the contrary, it makes my heart pound harder and makes me feel alive, more alive than I'd felt when I was one of them.”
I believe you mean “on the contrary.” Also, what do you mean when you say them? I assume them refers to humans? If so, would that mean she isn’t human?
“I see my mother's box of matches on the table, next to a bowl of old oatmeal.”
You can take out the comma separating these two thoughts. It would make the sentence flow a lot better without the comma imposing.
“I only know that this isn't the way a mother should treat her child because of the way the other mothers would talk to their children, back when I used to go to school.”
All in all,
Love the piece it just needs some fixing up.
Any who! That’s all I have to say about that!
If you have any more questions message me and I’ll see what I can do!
Starleene Out.
Wow, thanks for all that! I do have problems with my tenses sometimes, I'm getting better at being consistent though!
Argh, as for the 'to the contrary' part being wrong, Spanish was my first language, so sometimes I translate in my head and it's a different phrase in English (for example, pay attention in Spanish is directly translated as put attention) ugh. C'est la vie. Thanks for pointing these things out, I truly appreciate it
Hey. It's Nike here with a review for you.
In this story I don't have really much to review. You wrote it nicely. No spelling or grammar mistakes. The plot ran smoothly.
Through the whole story, you had this great emotion in play. The way you portrayed your characters is wonderful. I felt how disturbed the MC was and the cry for help. The emotions you give her are felt while reading.
When I read the first paragraph, I didn't know that she was going to be killing anyone. I don't know if that was how you wanted to put it. But in reality, I thought she was just happy to be noticed. Didn't know it would end up in a killing spree until mid into the dream. I don't know if you want it like that or not. To surprise readers with the killings.
The dream was amazingly written except for the part (I don't know if it's just me) that I couldn't imagine what you wrote about the meadow or meteors. Your description wasn't enough to make a good image for me.
I was shocked she would kill so much and have pleasure for it.
The killing of the mother part was brilliant but I had wished that you did something more with it. Emphasize it. Give it depth. I don't know... didn't really want the mother to die... She could have just learned something if the daughter ran away or something. It's just me I guess.
Other than all this... Your story was really good. Great really. The emotion was captured.
Keep me updated with your writing, I want to read more
Nike
Aww thanks
Okay, I'll keep it in mind: more descriptions! MORE! Haha, thanks for the criticism.
Hey there! This is a pretty intense piece. Your characters come off as very disturbed which is what I think you were going for. I feel bad for the girl.
There were just a few parts that didn't quite add up. For one, the dream sequence. We know that the character is furious with her mother, but she doesn't seem overly upset about how the rest of the world treats her. Sure, she is frustrated at how no one seems to help her or care about her, but it's not like she was bullied by anyone outside of her home. So I thought it was a little strange that she's have a dream about killing a bunch of random people rather than, say, a violent episode between her and her mother.
Also, a parent can't really take their kid out of school without signing up for some kind of homeschooling or other program. I find it strange that no one noticed she didn't come to school for so long, especially after they dubbed her as disturbed. At some point, people will end up calling the law or something to check up on these sorts of things. Maybe you can include some of this in your story.
Lastly, the table burning at the end of the chapter wasn't too realistic in my opinion. It takes effort to set wood on fire, even dry firewood needs some help to get it burning good. I don't think what you had happen could've been possible. Maybe if the match was let sitting on the table for hours and the fire had time to spread, but even then I don't think the house would be consumed by flames.
Anyways, you had a lot of emotion in this piece which is great! Your grammar is awesome and you're a good writer. Keep it up!
I got a feeling about the homeschooling part being off, but I guess that means more research for me then huh? Thanks for reviewing, any criticism is appreciated