Young Writers Society

Hi Lim,

Mailice here with a short review!

My first impression after reading it was very positive and had to hold back my short giggle a bit in the break room when the reveal came.

You manage to tell a very funny but also exciting story with a certain ease. If the story wasn't in the humour category, it would certainly have turned into a kind of "horror", especially when the pink glove was no longer at the garden fence. You wrote the story in a very relaxed way, and in a meticulous way you moved the plot forward. Because you had a good insight into the first person narrator, you could only see and read what she presented.

While I don't think you've dealt with any kind of perceptual distortion here and just want to talk about the possible consequences of myopia, it does show how easy it is to mislead the reader by only mentioning once what it could be a rather than checking what it is. (I mean, I didn't question the narrator's insight.) Of course, I liked the little detail of the daughter not mentioning the glove, but just asking if "that's yours".

Compared to Miscreants you used a much simpler style to introduce this humour, otherwise I think it would be very hard to follow the story. What I liked very much here was also this relaxed mood that was always maintained and that the narrator questions herself instead of someone else. (Why didn't she talk to John about it? Didn't he ask why there was a flamingo missing? Why am I worrying so much about this now...?)

One thing that still boggles my mind a bit now is the number of fingers and possible limbs a flamingo has. With the neck and the two legs and possibly a short tail, I only come up with four possible fingers. I guess I'll have a sleepless night now until I look for an inflatable flamingo on the internet.

Two points I noticed while reading:

The pink glove lay on the ground, almost covered by a sheet of snow. But I could see the fingertips peek out just so.

In the evenings, my daughter sat in the living room to paint.

Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),

Hi! I'm here to leave a quick review!!

First Impression: OKay...this was a really interesting story to read...I think its a really fun little short and I absolutely loved that little twist at the ending. Got a couple of places where I think it could get better but for the most part this is really good.

Anyway let's get right to it,

The pink glove lay on the ground, almost covered by a sheet of snow. But I could see the fingertips peek out just so. I bent over double and pinched one end of the glove between my fingers, holding it up in the light of dawn.

No one in my house owned pink gloves. There must have been some stranger, walking by in the dark, who had dropped this glove and left it here. Where else could it have come from? Maybe a bird picked it up from somewhere and let it fall into my garden. Either way, I thought nothing of it.

If the owner needed to find it, they would. I folded the glove and placed it on the squat square top of my garden fence.

The next day I came out to check on the plants, and the pink glove was right back where it was before. It was startling. Was someone playing a prank? Was my eyesight failing me? My memory? No, for this wasn't a second glove, because the fence was now distinctly glove-less.

I decided to leave it there and see what would happen tomorrow.

In the evenings, my daughter sat in the living room to paint. She liked to paint nature scenes. Autumn leaves on apple trees, waterfalls that shivered with white froth, large snowy lakes; all these and more decorated our otherwise empty walls. That day I came down from the loft to see she was painting a scene of the garden: including the glove.

"That yours, Mama?" she didn't look at me as she spoke.

"No," I said.

"That's odd." And she washed her paintbrush in the cup by her side.

Dawn. The night before we had heavy snowfall. I was in my sweater, groping around in the dark closet for a shovel, when suddenly I heard a noise. I thought about the mysterious glove-bearer.

I walked out. The living room window was frosted over, but I could see a shadow loping over to the middle of the garden. It looked human, thankfully. And awfully familiar . . .

"John?" I poked my head through the door.

My husband looked up from where he was picking up the pink glove. His arms were carrying a basket load of the things, as though he'd meant to sell them at a fair. "Oh, hi honey!"

"What are you doing with all these gloves?" I asked, putting my hands on my hips. If I'd known it was only John, imagine how much worry it would've saved me!

"Gloves? What gloves?" John said. I looked more closely at his cargo and realised they were pink inflatable flamingos.

"These are just some extra stock from work. Flamingos not popular with clowns nowadays, ya'know? It's elephant season!"

Maybe I had more than my eyesight to worry about . . .

This is an amazing story, especially considering you wrote it in ten minutes! And like stiggy said, it could definitely be turned into a longer horror piece. Remind me never to wear pink gloves again... XD

Okay, diving into some specifics:

I bent over double and pinched one end of the glove

"That's odd." And she washed her paintbrush in the cup by her side.

”...Flamingos not popular with clowns nowadays, ya'know? It's elephant season!”

Hey there
stiggy here for a review ^^

Let's play a game, I have to guess what the prompt is.
I'm just hoping it's not one of those impossible prompts like "write about a character living his life" or "write a prompt about a character having an existential crisis and reflecting on life and yada yada". You know, those ones.

"The pink glove lay on the ground, almost covered by a sheet of snow. But I could see the fingertips peek out just so." this sentence here, it's terrifying. It's probably your choice of wording or maybe typos, but when you see you could see fingertips peek out, it means ACTUAL fingertips. And unless you want to write about a missing hand in a glove, than just, don't. It's horrifying.
"the fingertips of the glove" or "the fingers of the glove" would be less traumatising and just more accurate.

I love the ending xD wasn't expecting that at all. But apart from the goofiness, this had a pretty good set up and rising act. Like you should seriously consider writing a horror story. The little girl sensing something is off, the MC feeling slowly spooked by a pretty simple object, but it just gets scarier and scarier every day- like you've got a perfect tone of writing for a airy horror story !

Maybe the dad is playing with her sanity ? or maybe it was actually a glove that she saw, but there's a secret behind it that the dad is desperately trying to hide ? Maybe he's in an affair ? Or maybe it's even darker. There's just so many ways you could've taken this story to, you should totally consider a second chapter


So about the prompt..
"Write about someone finding an unusual object" or
"write about a character finding something in their garden"

and if you took it from somewhere REALLY dark, although I think it's just my horror sense taking over telling me this is the idea behind it:
"Write about someone driving another insane"

Pretty sure it's not the latter xD