I used to laugh at my brother. Being five years older than him I had a right to. The job of the oldest sibling is to badger the younger ones. It was all out of love.
He had his problems, but he always entertained us. He never knew it; thought he was the funniest person on the planet. Really, he probably was. The world just never gave him a chance.
"You lumpish beetle-headed bugbear!"
I didn’t know where he came up with that insult. I just let it slip by and knocked my shoulder into his. He knocked me back, much harder than I did, and freaked when he saw me fall to the grass. I was fine, but he didn’t believe me. Mother was bothered for no good reason with his paranoia. She managed to coax him down. He wouldn’t let go of it for weeks though.
There were nights we spent awake. The entire family would curl up on the sofa while he wailed himself to sleep. I couldn’t get the cries out of my head and heard them even in my dreams.
Life was never easy. Life never is. There’s a family across the road with the same issues just in a different form. If we were to stand facing each other it would be like looking into a mirror. Although, our mirror would break easily as my brother ran straight through.
As I stand over him in the funeral home I wish it could've been different. The days of laughter are far behind us, maybe never to be found again.
“Goodnight you lumpish beetle-headed bugbear,” I whisper before planting a kiss on his cold cheek. “You'll see me again before you know it.”
Twenty years was far from enough time together.
a/n: I wrote this for the short shorts tournament so it had to be under 300 words. I'm just looking for some feedback to see if it works as flash fiction or not.
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,796 Reviews
I actually don't have any immediate qualms with this piece. It's nicely written. It's not trying to have more of an impact on the reader than it needs to. It's not trying to show off. It's not trying to be 'epic'. This feels wholly genuine, which a lot of people miss when they write laments. Well done.
Many writers miss the point when it comes to being sad in the first person. As you say, this is a true story, and so you may have an advantage in this area, but you really nicely avoid talking about being sad. In fact, there is very VERY little negative emotive language and lexis used in this piece; the sadness is all conveyed through semantics. This is phenomenally done, and I loved reading it. The reader assumes the emotion by the speaker DOING things, rather than SAYING things, which means there's no sympathy evoked; only the raw, yet distant, sadness. Again, I love it.
Nice use of tense by the way. I won't go into it too much, but the switches you make between them are rather pertinent... It changes pretty much at the perfect moment each time. Lovely flashback/echo effect.
There's not much more to say from me, actually. I enjoyed this piece immensely, and it's refreshing to see a genuinely sad piece, rather than a shocking, in-your-face, trying-to-be-miserable and depressing piece. This is moving, quite literally, I feel. Perhaps my only issue is that I'm not entirely sure how the brother passed... but whether or not this ambiguity was intentional, I actually like that decision too. Allows more feeling to seep through.
Thanks for writing this. Conveyed some wonderful feelings that I haven't felt for a while now.
-Kieren
Hey! I'm here to give a quick review.
I'm sorry for your loss. I've a brother too, and reading this, I hope I can mend my relationship with him before it's too late. This piece teaches me so much.
Since you're my potential opponent, I'd give you crappy review. e.eJust kidding.So I really, really like this. Since it's based on something real, I feel the genuine emotions emitted from this. I like how you don't go with using intense words to convey strong feelings, but use effective imageries or events that show us what're the characters feeling.
Hmm, these sentences seem to contradict each other to me. So, he always entertains them, he doesn't know it, but he thinks he's the funniest person on the planet? I can't be sure if it's really him thinking that, because there's no subject after the semicolon, which I suggest you to add to fulfill the conditions of the use of semicolon. It would expand the clarity too. If it's the protagonist that's thinking, than I won't find contradiction in these.
I also find the cause of death vague, but it's not all that bad. At one hand, it allows readers to guess what it could be; at the other hand, it's not really necessary to keep it vague. Using one line to tell us what it is is enough to let us know. But yeah. I think some readers would prefer to ponder about this. I do too, but after having no satisfying theory, I want answers. ._.
The last thing I would like to touch is the transition. I thought the brother dies when he's young, but the protagonist implies they spent time together for twenty years, which means he wasn't young when it happened. It caught me off-guard. Maybe rewording the sentence about the brother running straight to the mirror by adding a time-span would fix this? I'm not sure. It's a flash fiction; it's hard to add anything more if you're close to the limit words.
Anyway, this is a solid job, mostly because I think you wrote it from your heart. It's something I admire and encourage myself. What you want to deliver becomes infinite-folds more powerful if you write this way. Good luck with that round! <33333
Yay, another flashfic! Two hundred and ninety-five words. Let's do this.
Apologies if my review isn't very on-point. It's midnight, and I'm absolutely destroyed.
I believe the best parts of a flashfic are the title and the ending line. I think your title is something that turns heads quickly. Just look at it:
The Silence Is Too Grand
It's ironic and clever. That's why I like it.
Though I can see where you're coming from with your title, it doesn't really quote anything about silence being grand. I don't even see the word "silence" mentioned in this flashfic at all. A bit of a turnoff for me. That's just my two cents on it though; I like to derive the titles of my flashfics from the story itself.
I can see that this is one of those flashfics that tell an entire saga, as opposed to those that just focus on one fleeting moment. One pattern I observed about these kinds of flashfics, is less of the "show", more of the "tell." I feel that you did quite well in this part, while still keeping the balance between the meat of the story and the bones of the plot, while still keeping the plot progressive.
I can get an idea of what the conflict was, or why the brother died, but it's quite vague to me. Maybe it's just meant to be like that, or maybe I'm just really sleepy.
Now, let's move on to the ending. As much as possible, aim to cut the story at the denouement, in order to keep the reader thinking about what happened and what's going to happen, and to avoid an ending that merely relies on its ending line.
I feel that you just cut it at the ending, because what else can we derive from that part? We don't really know much, so I can't really think about how the brother's death impacted the family or will impact the main character from that point on. There's pretty much nothing to talk about after that point.
The ending line isn't killer, but it isn't dull either. Just in-between. Or maybe it's just that I'm really sleepy at this point.
I guess that's all that I have to say on the story for now.
Overall, this is well-written flashfic that is progressive at a consistent pace. Though it's a little bit underwhelming and a little bit rushed at times, such as the last three paragraphs. Still a very good flashfic nonetheless, and I feel it's fit for a contest.
I hope to see more flashfics from you in the future.