Warning: This work has been rated 18+ for language.
The bus shook faintly as Carl Friedman browsed his cellphone, a cheap Nokia bought after a burglar stole his former one.
Squished in the middle of numerous individuals waiting to get off, he could barely move his arm, but had to grip unto the pole unless he wanted to fall in public.
In front of him, an infant began to erupt in tears as the mother brushed the strands of her hair with her fingertips. She hushed her gently in the midst of the various small noises.
Carl always wondered why mothers could manage to do gentle things. Graceful things that nobody else could do so perfectly. If he were in her place that instance, he’d sing a My Chemical Romance song to the baby until it shut up.
The man in the business suit beside him rolled his eyes. “Kids, am I right?”
Carl wasn’t in the mood for small talk, but whenever moments like this came, he was prepared for it. He wasn’t going to be some loner forever stuck in his teenage years instead of moving on and finding a job. Or at least, that’s what he told himself. That he was a self-proclaimed victorious rival of ‘depression’.
“I wouldn’t know,” he turned his phone off and slid it into the pocket of his baggy pants. “Never had one.”
“Figures,” the businessman replied quietly, leaving an air of silence between the two.
Carl heard, even as he tried so obviously to hide his comment by facing away. Asshole.
As much as he liked to punch his pretty, cash-stinking face and leave the bus for A. generalizing children and B. sending a so-called ‘unobtrusive’ remark, he brushed it off. He wasn’t the arguing type, let alone the fighting type, and this guy had a fair amount of enhanced muscles.
Carl had a goal, the reason why he was on the bus instead of sleeping inside his barely-home apartment. He’s pretty sure it’s not to beat up some guy (even if he wished it was).
Mark had called earlier this morning, his voice sort of awful and glistening at the same time. All while Carl had been staring at the razor inside the musty bathroom, wondering if he should shave his beard.
“Hey dude,” he had said in a quiet tone. Probably tired. Mark was always loud and part animal sometimes especially during the house parties. “So… Jessica is in.”
Carl nodded, though he was sure Mark couldn’t see him. They both knew what that meant.
He dropped his razor, because razors ruined his style, and left.
And here he was, inside this bus, going to some local hospital and possibly going to wait for a few minutes outside a room. A room that was probably brimming with life. Literal life.
He couldn’t stop but think about a pink dog on Cartoon Network. “The things I do for love”. Or friends. Or friends that have stuck with your lazy ass for several years and still don’t regret a single thing. Friends that have been with you forever and now have got a child earlier than you.
He couldn’t stop but think about what awaits after the hospital and the room and the smiles and the fresh scent of babies and probably the sight of his long-time friends, now carrying a child.
What the hell happened with time.
He couldn’t stop but think, and think, until the bus reached an intersection, and was still moving on, until the baby in front of him wrapped in pastel pink lace was now shrieking, not just crying.
Until the fucking businessman beside him was now in a complete trance, staring outside the right bus windows and into the road. Until Carl followed his eyes and stopped time. He didn't know how, but he did, because in a split second everything was an idle figure.
The baby still but with knitted eyebrows and reddened cheeks. The outside view just like a painting, what with the people-washed streets and creeping sunlight. The sunlight was annoying. It had crept and in that split second, it had managed to hit his face as hard as it could. Perfect timing.
He had stopped time. Partly.
Until he could hear nothing but an explosion. A very loud one. Much louder than Mark, which was something almost impossible.
He couldn’t hear the baby in front. Nor the mother. Nor the businessman. Nor the driver. Nor the other people inside the bus, because now, now they were all shut up.
Shut up because time has stopped for Carl and the sight of fresh, red blood sticking out of skins and a head crashed against the window glass was enough for a silencer.
He felt hearts fall. Literally fall because now he was a feeble man stuck under a buffed up guy with tattoos as his skin.
It was all so weird, because he knew he was standing awhile ago, and now he was lying on the ground, touching the sides of the bus roughly.
It had fallen like the Roman Empire. The bus.
But after all that had fallen proceeding the other stupid bus that decided to speed, and now was wounded like this bus he was in, his utmost concern was the phone.
Well, maybe the baby. But he had no relations to her or the mother.
He thought that if this was over now, if all this happened just so that Lady Fate could screw up with his life before reaching the damn hospital, then It’s all fine. His world was a shit hole already so why not get some climax running around for him?
At least when he died he could tell people (other ghosts in the pub) that he did not die of suicide.
At least he could tell them he wasn’t a wimp, even if at some point of the crash he was about to beg the pole to save him.
Carl thought about Jessica. And Mark. Friends.
And he thought about the baby---no, not their baby, the baby he was staring at right that instance, with his eyes ripping apart and his mouth parted----now coated in dripping liquid. Her long lashes now tainted with something red and gooey. God, how he wished it was ketchup. How he wished that if Fate was really here just because of him, she should have just sent a car to run over him or something.
Not like this, when everything was silent. Everything, everyone was silent, because they couldn’t talk.
They couldn’t talk because the blood was running towards their mouth and their eyes were as white as the glow of the moon. The blood was trying to choke their throats and slit them open and if they tried to open their mouths it would enter and everything would burn. The metallic taste of blood would burn. So they kept quiet.
They couldn’t talk because they were screaming inside but their lungs were full of fear.
Based on experience, Carl knew how fear felt. Fear was fucking acid.
He thought about how he was fine with this, but maybe not the others. He thought about many things, but time seemed to drag on effortlessly. And the sirens were so close away, but there. So close away, a light presence, but there.
He tried to think about several things, because he knew that if he didn’t, he’d just panic and die more quickly. He thought about this incident, and whether somebody would make a documentation of it, and whether somebody would know him because of it, and whether he would, for the first time, be famous.
Of course, it would happen. He was so sure of it, because beards attract fame. However, he contemplated, saggy pants and a sweatshirt did not.
And then, he fainted, with the thought of disappointment because he wore saggy and loose clothing on the day of his death. (With the thought of slight acid for the baby. And the mother. But not the businessman.)
He woke up, fresh in bed, with self-thought disheveled hair and a broken body. A cast on his leg and bruises everywhere. That muscular guy must have the same weight as a blue whale, he reckoned.
His head also hurt. Not like the Math Hurts kind. The It Burns And Tries To Kill Me kind.
Mark and Jessica were staring at him on the white couch in the corner of the room. In Jessica's arms lied a stuffy figure coated in white fabric. Its eyes were looking at Carl intently.
"Hi dude," Mark had stood up and walked as quick as he could.
"Sorry I missed the birth of your internet-proclaimed 'misery'." Carl spoke with a quieter voice than usual.
After a couple of minutes talking and barely fist-bumping, they, Jessica and Mark and the little guy, had told Carl that he was in a coma for four weeks.
But hey, at least he got to the hospital. Just not the way he thought he would.
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139,797 Literary Works • 672,771 Reviews
Hi there.
My first suggestion to you is going to be to work on your syntax. The majority of your sentences are '[noun/pronoun] [action/thought]' beginnings, and the sentence length remains, for the most part, unvarying and rigid. So even though the situation you're describing here is supposed to be tense and exciting, it reads like a monotonous drone. The narrative voice hinges on quirky and sardonic, but always falls short of being either quirky or sardonic, and this, too, I mostly attribute to the unvarying sentence structure. (Syntax is just a fancy word for sentence structure, by the by. XD)
An example:
A] That paragraph break is a massive jolt. The second sentence is in no way a disconnect from the first one, so I fail to see why it's been given its own paragraph. This could just be me, of course, but I think there shouldn't be a break there.
B] Sentence Two is a tad wordy, and it's not the strongest of sentences. I was once told that shorter sentences are stronger sentences, and while this is not strictly true, meandering sentences do tend to lose focus after a while. Longer sentences are also more susceptible to grammar-bugs, so just remember to stop when your sentences are running away from you and you're set.
C] 'unto' should be 'on to'. I'm also going to suggest incorporating some sensory detail at this point, just so we can get a better grasp of the MC's situation.
This is how I would edit this bit, personally, though you can edit this as you wish, of course!
It's a weak edit, but you get the gist, right? We need a reason to be sympathetic to Carl's situation--why is his being squished a big deal? I'd imagine it's irritating, because he can't use his cell phone and balance himself at the same time. Why did he grip the pole if he was simply squished? Was it because the bus was lurching, or that people were restless and couldn't stop fidgeting? How did he feel? Was their presence invasive? Was he used to it? Did it bother him? There are so many ways you can draw characterisation out of simple situations, so utilise them!
~ The bit in brackets is irrelevant and contributes nothing of importance to the story.
~ Why is 'depression' in quotation-marks? Is it because the MC is unsure of whether or not they are depressed, or is it simply their opinion regarding depression as something that does not exist? Because I very much do not agree with the latter, if it /is/ an opinion, and I'd like some clarity on this! XD
~ The comma ought to be a period + the 'h' in 'he' should be capitalised. This is because 'he turned his phone off...' is not a dialogue tag, but a sentence of its own. Take a look at this this article for more on punctuation within dialogue.
The conversation between the man and Carl seems ultimately aimless; it doesn't convey anything solid in the sphere of characterisation, nor does it hint at any plot points or make the scene of the mother caring for her child more poignant or important. It feels like the narrator is dilly-dallying, and that isn't an effective method of hooking your reader. I also don't understand the man's reply--is he bitter because Carl does not understand his dislike for children? Or is it meant to be a more personal remark? Like, is he judging Carl by his clothes or the fact that he looks like he doesn't have a job/a family or something? In that vein, I'm finding it hard to narrow down on how old Carl is--he makes a lot of references to teenagerhood, which makes me think he isn't that old, but then again, he's living on his own, so I'd assume he's above nineteen or so. Anyway--this is important, because I don't really know /who/ Carl is. What does he do for a living? What about his family? Surely his social circle can't just extend to Mark and Jessica, and if it does, why? I know close to nothing of your character's background and, seeing as this is vital to the construction of current events, I think you ought to probe a little deeper into the character's backstory.
So. Carl wants kids. Or I assume he does, or that he's really affectionate towards kids and is bothered by the fact that Mark thinks having kids is a 'misery'. Or did Carl and Jessica once have a 'thing', and is he bothered about the fact that she and Mark are together and have, er, procreated? Re-reading this, I understand that Carl's going to the hospital because his best friend(?)'s about to become a dad. But his complete abstraction from life besides that, and his unrelenting focus toward that one fact is slightly ... disconcerting. It's like all the other elements of his life have been sieved out, leaving room only for the thought of Mark and Jessica's kid.
Yeah ... initially, I didn't know what that meant. It was only after I'd read the piece once and was skimming through it again that I realised being 'in' meant Jess was at the hospital. Some context would be nice here!
I think what needs working on most in this story is background details and firmer context. I didn't know what we were walking into, and it wasn't until I reached the last line that I realised: 'OH, so he was going to the HOSPITAL.' And I thought, 'Well, he didn't seem particularly impatient--there was nothing abnormal about the day, initially, unless he's never travelled by bus before.' The accident and the part with the baby are meant to strike a chord with the reader, but I never developed a connection with Carl, mostly because his motives never came through until the very end. This has the potential to be fleshed out, though, so keep working on it!
Hope this helped! Good luck on your writing endeavours~
Keep up the good work! c:
~Pomp
THANK YOU FOR YOUR REVIEW! I just recently read this because I think I didn't see it in my notification e.e thank you for being so kind and pointing out all the flaws, seriously. I needed the criticizing. I'm a bit weak in fiction so this really helped me.
Hello, MemoryHunter. I decided to stop by and review your work, since I'm trying to clear out the endless Green Room. This was very amusing. I thought it was very cool, well not the part about everyone dying or going to the hospital but because you really captured how annoying bus rides are. People cough, sneeze, argue, curse, and all sorts of delightful things. The only thing I have to say about the story is it would be nice if you added more description. The reason why he was going to the hospital in the first place was a bit sketchy also. Last thing (I know I said I only had one comment but) you don't have to space everything so much you can make it closer together. All the spacing wasn't necessary. Anyway, great job! Keep writing and never get discouraged!
~Keepwriting
Thank you for your review~ The spacing thing is very helpful!
Imma go edit it~ (Translation: you were so helpful that I noticed my ignorance)
I'm glad I was a help to you.