True Love

Preface
this will be my first review of the year. It is probably my longest, too.

Bad

Plot:

I don’t like the ending in context with the rest of the work. On its own, it works fine, but I feel it renders much of the description up to this point irrelevant, since you seemed to be putting a lot of emphasis on things like age and how the female character isn’t content with her soulmate. While I’m not asking for a more bombastic ending, I am asking for one that makes more use of all that you’ve been building up to that point. I also find the story a bit too frenetic for my tastes, both in style and pacing. While I enjoyed it, I feel I would have enjoyed it more if I had more time to breathe in between when it started and when it ended. Other than this, I find the plot to be well structured and well carried out.

World:
I think you meant to have world building in this piece, with the sutures and that one offhand mention of a bonding ceremony, but this just doesn’t work because of how short the work is. This is why you typically find fantasy series rather than singular novels, because it takes a lot of work to build a world behind the scenes and it takes a decent writer a while to bring it all out naturally. The trouble here isn’t that the world building is unnatural, it’s that I find it rather unnecessary and I think it detracts from the story because it makes it more difficult for me to anchor myself in the reality of the story, especially with your rather feverish delivery as it is making it difficult enough for me to keep a handle on reality.

Style:
Preface
Given the condensed nature of this work, I’m assuming your goal was to pack as much into as few words as possible. It is with this mindset that I made my stylistic edits the stylistic edits that I did. I mention this because I realized a while ago that my edits often involve me superimposing my style over the original work when I edit, I am also not the closest reader of text, and I have a bad habit of missing important pieces of text, so feel free to discard my suggestions if you feel they aren't necessary or may harm the work.

General
Something I noticed is that you mention colors a lot, something I'd suggest is maybe playing around with color symbolism. In a story like this, where everything is so condensed, everything should mean something, so why let something as evocative as colors go to waste? Other than that I don't really have any major complaints. My only other one is that your use of descriptors for the female character got a little confusing for me. I wasn't (and I'm still not 100%) she is the same character as the street cleaner or not. I remember a piece of advice I saw read in 'character and voice' (I think that's the title) that suggested keeping with one set of descriptors for a character (I've taken this idea further: I think you should alter the descriptors you use for a character depending on whose POV you're writing from, but this is only tangentially related and I haven't actually applied this in any of my writing because the conditions haven't really presented themselves) in order to avoid losing the reader.

specifics

Fresh rainwater polishes the waterside boulevard in town. The fat droplets reflect the colours of cartoonish lanterns that smile down from pushcarts.

These two sentences are kind of just reiterating the same thing, so I would suggest fusing them, maybe something like "The fresh, fat raindrops polish the the concrete and reflect the colors of the lanterns that line the waterside boulevard" probably not exactly like that, since I wrote in my own style to make the example less of a headache for me to put together, but I think you get the idea. It helps get the story started quicker and removes unnecessary redundancy in the descriptions.

cartoonish lanterns

I'm no sure if you meant this adjective to be as open ended as it is. What I mean is, all the readers probably have different image in their head when they hear a description of a 'cartoonish' lantern (I pictured something like a piece of clipart). If you did intend this, then just ignore my raving, but if this wasn't your intention maybe consider giving a more exercise description of the lantern. Not necessarily longer, but perhaps with an adjective with less variable imagery associated with it.

Tired eyes roll upwards, stretched taut by crow’s feet,

this construction seems incoherent to me. Are the eyes stretched tight? if not, what is? I would suggest trying to rephrase this.

Tired eyes roll upwards,

The 's' on 'upwards' isn't necessary.

buttocks in the air like some kind of cartoon ostrich, fingers fumbling to right the wrong in their traitorous footwear

-I feel the fun of this description come specifically from its flaw: I feel its more than a little overblown. I would the 'like some kind of' phrase and replacing it with 'like a'

-Also just thought I'd note (not negatively) that this description reminds me very strongly of something Mervyn Peake would write. I really like Peake and I really think more people should read him. I'll leave a link at the end of this review to an affordable edition of his works (my edition, which contains many of his own fantastic illustrations (he was also a distinguished artist) is apparently 87 U.S. dollars now for no reason that I can conceive.) if you want to read his work.

A frenzied reporter comes dashing

I'm not sure this adjective is necessary, since we get an idea of her mood from what she does in the following sentence and I think you would only need to add one or two things to make it come across more clearly, and I think those things (what I have in mind are more actions which would give us an idea of her mood) would make her a more vivid character.

reporter comes dashing from around the curb

The word 'from' isn't needed.

gushing in streams

This seems a bit much, since gushing kind of implies 'streams', and the word 'streaming' has a similar connotation to 'gushing'. I would suggest choosing whichever one of the two best gets across the personality of the reporter you want to show and deleting the other.

yet he beams so brightly elucidating it into the microphone.

I think you need a comma after brightly, otherwise I'm not really sure how this sentence makes sense. Even then I find this sentence a bit confusing.

The street cleaner picks up a stray leaf and chucks it into the water. She mustn’t think that way.

I think these sentences are put in the wrong order. because f the sentence preceding the first of these, we expect the second of these two sentences, and splitting it way from where we expect it by this little action creates a juxtaposition (quite an interesting one, I should note), which isn't a problem in itself, but I don't think that's what you intended here, so it kind of breaks up the flow of the sentences, we get one thing, then we are thrown over to another which we didn't expect before coming to what we did expect. I would suggest just switching the order of the sentences.

Every so often her hip bumps against his – it takes the whole body to clean, after all, especially at her age –

The phrase set apart by em dashes seems really random to me, and I'm not really sure what it means.

a pair of kindergarteners runs past

I would suggest changing this to 'run' because the extra 's' gives it a stilted sound, at least to me.

One footfall lands particularly hard into a puddle,

This word isn't needed, since we don't have anything to compare it to, and we really don't need to know that it landed particularly hard, we just need to know that it landed hard.

Good:

Specifics:

pastel-pink umbrellas

-A nice it of color in a scene which has so far been set as dreary and gray, with streetlamps (typical, at least the one I have seen, gray or black) and rainwater which implies a gray sky.

-Foreshadows the date of the story, since ink, along with red, are typically associated with valentines day

Some look more comfortable than others.

I like this description because it makes our brains (at least mine, anyway) create a more vivid and varied image of the crowd, since because there are now, according to this description people with varying degrees of comfort instead of one level of comfort or discomfort, it makes our brains create a more lifelike picture. All this and didn't even really describe anything.

brandishing the velvety black umbrella with both their hands but only his fist.

I like this. it sets a contrast between the moods of the two focuses in the description, one, the man, is more emotionally expressive in this moment than the woman, at least that's what I infer from the fist. This shows what can come from attention to detail.

can she have her hand back, for good?

interesting. subtly bringing conflict to the attention of the reader.

cherish his vegetables and plain water.

I like this, it gives us an interesting insight into the female partner's view of herself and her relationship, though, again, I'm not sure how much this factors in to the eventual revolution of the story.

They are as shallow as the warmth of a first kiss.

An interesting connection between different sensory inputs which also helps forward the themes of the work.

reporter’s plastic-packaged chest.

I like this description; it feels more like something I'd find in poetry (in fact as I read that line, I heard her voice saying this specific phrase in my head (you can find recording of her reading her poems on YouTube, I'll link some videos at the end of this review)), at it creates a very good image: we all know what something tightly packaged in plastic looks like, and it would probably look a lot like a rain soaked jacket, thus, we are left with the image of someone in a wet raincoat. All this with only three words, none of which directly describe the raincoat or the rain. Very impressive.

General

Your prose here is tight and extremely active. You’ve managed to do what I try and fall short of doing and hope to eventually actually achieve: you’ve managed to cut a story down to its most basic parts, cutting out just about everything which is irrelevant, without losing the soul of the story. The characters are distinct and well observed (I can’t really say real, since I’m not with them long enough to see how they act outside of this one scene) and they feel very true to life. Your descriptions are imaginative and do a good job of painting out the events of the story, and you manage to do it without resorting to direct descriptions (instead of ‘he was old and wrinkled’, you describe the crow’s feet at the edges of his eyes as his eyes look up, a method which reminds me of an excellent quote by Chekov about description, which was something along the lines of “Don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me it gleaming on a piece of broken glass”, not the exact quote, but quite frankly I’m too lazy to look the exact words up, and it's close enough.), which gives your world a sense of reality for reasons I will get into in the second of the short essays attached to this review. And the story you depict with these descriptions is an interesting meditation on love (or lack thereof) and relationships.

Conclusion
I enjoyed this story a great deal and feel I could get even more out of it if I spent longer reading it, this is the mark of a good writer. Unfortunately, the descriptions, for all their merit, can become difficult to untangle and it ends so abruptly I have difficulty figuring out where to start. But this is a difficulty resulting from my ineptitude as a reader and analyst, rather than any fault with your writing. I’ve always admired your work and I find myself learning a little more about my craft with each of your works I read. Keep up the good work, I look forward to reading more of it!

Essay one: the problem of tense and the perception of time

Spoiler! :

“Later, he’d said last night, but then breakfast had come and gone,”

I would like to preface this by saying I might be misreading this line. Here I am reading it as a sort of mini-flashback, but I think it could also just be read as reported dialogue. If it is the first of these, this essay is relevant. If it is the second, then please disregard my ramblings which attempt to show off a knowledge of craft I most likely don’t possess, and simply take from all of it that it may be worth considering some rewording so it isn’t as confusing.

This reminds me of a similar instance I saw in another one of your stories, 'deep waters, still' and the issue here is the same: writing in present tense makes sentences like this confusing because the story is more locked into a linear forward progression, from the immediate present to the immediate future. This is one of the main advantages of present tense, I think, especially if one is looking to reflect how people perceive time, because we can only move forward in time. This fact is what makes this passage difficult to read. To show what I mean, I'll use the opening to 'One hundred years of solitude'. While I haven't read this book, I know the opening and I think it is a good way to show how past tense narration has a different perception of time:

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

This works because, since everything is in past tense, the narrator is more free to move about in time, leaping forward from an undefined past point and then back to another defined point in the past. While I won’t pretend it isn’t quite confusing, it works better in past tense then it would in present tense, something like:

“Many years later, as he faces the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia is to remember that distant afternoon when his grandfather takes him to discover ice.”

While it works, I find it slightly confusing because everything--the many years later, the remembering, the discovery--is happening simultaneously, which doesn’t make any logical sense, because there is only one present moment at any given time, but in this version, we are being given at least two different presents: the unfortunate fellow in front of the firing squad and his memory; and while this is philosophically interesting, I think it is needlessly complicated for the mind of a reader who likely has little interest in temporal philosophy. Past tense removes this issue: since it’s all happening in the past, we’re just moving from one moment in the past to a moment further in the past.
I mention all this because I think it is interesting to look at each POV and tense option to see what opportunities are opened, and which ones are closed, and one of the ones which I feel is closed in present tense narration are these sorts of flashbacks, because I feel they defeat the point of present tense narration, if you could just do something in past tense, why not do it in past tense? I like to think of the different tenses as looking a the events of the story from different physical perspectives, for this I think we should imagine the events of the story unfolding along a table. The past tense narrator is at the end of the table and is able to see everything at once, while the present tense narrator is focused on the events as they happen, bent almost ninety degrees over the table, moving forward as the characters and the events do.
This is really just a very long-winded way of saying that I doing these sorts of flashbacks through prose (though, I should not, through a line break, there isn’t really any difference between the two tenses, though talking about something in the past of the story in present tense will still likely throw the reader off) in present tense misses the point of using the tense in the first place: it’s main virtue is the immediacy it offers, and when you do a flashback like that in present tense, you’re essentially writing a past-tense narrative, but with present-tense word endings.
I think the easiest solution to this is to try and figure out different styles for both, not super different, but I don’t think it would hurt to develop styles tailored to specific types of narration.

Essay 2: Why show don’t tell; why verbs and nouns.

Spoiler! :

For this essay, I’m going to try and put together a coherent expression of my thoughts about reality and how we express it in writing. Most of this will be working through an epiphany I had a little while ago regarding this, especially in relation to the doctrine of ‘show, don’t tell,’ but I will come to that later, first, I want to start with words themselves, particularly the different types of words.
I’m sure we all know the basic types: verbs, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, prepositions, and I am also sure most of us have heard the warning to not use to many adverbs, instead favoring their cousin, the adjective, but I heard a Hemingway quote where he said something along the lines of ‘Ezra Pound told me to avoid using both adverbs and adjectives’. This may seem frightening to most writers (especially those unfamiliar with the different types of verbs, some of which function in the same way as adjectives), if we get rid of our precious descriptors all we are left with are nouns (dry, boring things), pronouns (the even duller replacements of nouns), Verbs (actions, but actions do not offer much of a chance to color anything outside themselves), and prepositions (grammatical necessities devoid of any use outside that required by some miraculously consistent basic rules of english grammar).
It seems odd that we would limit ourselves to these three categories, however rich the vocabulary of these categories may be (indeed, if english could be said to have any advantage over other languages, it is the almost absurd breadth and depth of its lexicon), they are still only three categories, why should we limit ourselves to them? For adverbs it is easy enough to see the reason: one can only read so many words with -ly ending strung together before it becomes annoying, but adjectives do not have the same issue. The answer has probably already come into the minds of anyone who has received basic writing advice: have a more direct style, let verbs carry the descriptions, since they force movement.
This is true, but in fiction I think there is an added reason to emphasize nouns and verbs over other word types: it helps better convey reality. In reality, there are only actions and things, even colors are nouns. So relying more on those words can help create a fictional world that reflects our own.
This idea, of trying to use words in a way which reflects the world around us more accurately, is also why I think it is important to show the reader things rather than tell them. before going further, I think it is worth clarifying that when I talk about showing, I don’t mean talking around the description the author has in mind (for example, instead of ‘She always loved playing the piano’, a writer with this idea of showing might write something like ‘She would always, at the end of everyday, pelt up the stairs to her room, here she would sit in front the piano that had been awaiting her arrival so patiently; it gave her an escape from school and her brothers and her helicopter parents’), I mean something a far deeper, which involves far more description and context, where the emotions of person are not described, but their effects are (ideally, with context engineered cleverly enough for the scene to illicit the same emotions in the reader), with a similar tactic apple to the context, where we see the effects of this context on the character and how they perceive the world around them (for example, instead of saying the long description mentioned in my previous example, we would have an entire story’s worth of context (probably a few paragraphs at minimum) building up to the description of the person playing the piano, where we would get a description of how she moved and how she viewed her circumstances while she played, or how playing helps her escape those circumstances, if only momentarily).
I think my reasons for believing why showing is better should be relatively clear from my description (though I feel obligated to mention that there are times and places for all three types and which is used depends on the context of the scene, narrative, and character (I mention this last one because I feel the voice of a writer should ideally reflect the personality of the character from whose point of view they are writing): it gives us a better understanding of the character, it helps frame the world as they see it, and it is far more impressive technically then writing a few sentences. But beyond this, I feel it also better reflects reality. In real life, there isn’t some disembodied voice telling us all we need to know about a person, we learn about them and formulate opinions on them based on their actions and words, which is reflected in the method of showing, rather than telling.

Essay 3: what the hell is going on? An analysis

Spoiler! :

Slightly melodramatic title aside, I have difficult figuring out what is going on in this story, in fact, I only realized the street cleaner and the female soulmate were the same person while I was reading through to make critiques (I copy paste stories into google docs and use the comment function to highlight text and write about it specifically, which is easier than writing it down quotes and criticisms in a physical notebook, which is what I used to do before I realized how impractical it was); similarly, I’m still unsure of what the sutures are.
They are obviously metaphors or symbols, but to what degree I am not sure. Originally I interpreted the term as a poetic description of a red ribbon, and I’m still more inclined towards this interpretation because I find the other possible interpretation, the literal (and likely intended) one, rather unappealing to visualize. This ambiguity on its own could perhaps be symbolic of a difference between a more real love (represented by the sentimental connotations of the ribbon) as opposed to something more forced (represented by the more clinical connotations of an actual suture, which is a stitch (as someone who has gone through the rather unpleasant process of having their wisdom teeth removed, I am well acquainted with this meaning)).
While this is possible, I hope you will not take offense when I say I have a difficult time believing that even a writer of your caliber (and I do hold you in quite high respect)) would be able to do this on purpose, therefore, I will leave it at my conclusion, with this possible symbolism dangling there for possible use later. The color symbolism is obvious: red is the color of love and valentines day.
Moving on from this we come to the ending (which, for reasons explained in my ‘bad’ section, I do not particularly like), which, I have always found, is the best place to start when a story is an allegory, since its typically where you can find the loose threads to unravel the veil covering what’s actually going on. In the ending, it states that the character’s are “stuck.” which could mean a number of different things, but I think there are two meanings intended here: the first is the literal meaning, that is, they are stuck together via the suture/ribbon; the second meaning is the figurative one: that they are stuck in terms of their relationship, neither of them possessing particularly strong feeling for the other (this is supported when the reporter, a woman described in rather attractive terms, comes over to the female character’s soul mate and she can’t even find the attraction to him to be jealous).
And so we come to the conclusion, putting it all together we have a story about love, its absence, and its temporaryness. This course could have been gleaned from the summary of the piece but shush and let me pretend at being a scholar.

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Spoiler! :

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