“We need a name for this place.” I said, looking out over the rocky hill to the empty road before us. He pauses for a moment to think before replying.
“How about Terabithia?” A smile plays across his face. He turns toward me, his blue eyes glint with laughter.
“Isn’t that already a treehouse?” I joke. We made many jokes up there. It was the one place we were free to be ourselves. We spent the next half hour thinking up crazy names-The Tree of a House, Square, Nature's palace, and Patrick's chapel. Being young is really the only time your happy. You don't have to worry about enemies and dating, just friends. We were friends.
Years pass. We grow, I become twelve and the boy now eleven. It was now summer and I was almost thirteen. We didn’t talk as much anymore, but in this one moment, when we sat on the surfboard floating around in the water, it was like we were children again. No awkwardness or real thinking, just having fun together.
“Remember building the fort? We never named it, we just always called it the fort.” I said. Being with him made me think of all the snowball fights and quiet moments while he was nailing a board in the floor. I'd be cleaning or organizing while he did all the dirty work.
“Maybe The Fort should be it’s name.” I smiled. He had never really wanted to name it. I think he felt it was too final, like it was over. He jumped into the water and swam away.
School had started and I was thirteen. Hem still being eleven, was in 6th grade while I was in 8th. That year his parents asked me to babysit him and his siblings. That was the end. We had named the fort. Broken our connection. We no longer were two kids perfectly comfortable hanging out, being friends. We were just neighbors now, nothing special. He didn't say hi to me at school or call wanting to have a snowball fight. Sometimes I wonder if he even really considered me a friend. I may have just been the neighbor he swam and built a treehouse with.
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Canary word: Present
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125,012 Literary Works • 672,842 Reviews
Hello, Road! Jash here to review as requested. =) My nitpicks will be in #FF0080 ">pinkish font. That means, if you find something altered, I changed that. =)
This is very short. Uh--I've noticed some nitpicks there, which are highlighted in pink above. I also deleted the spaces between the open quotation marks and the dialogue; just so you know, you don't put spaces there. For example, you wrote:
This is correct:
See? No space.
About the story, well. I don't wanna be harsh, but you've lost my interest while reading through it. It was too simple, I guess. You left the reader with sooo many questions like: what are their names?! Not knowing much about the characters are pretty much--boring. And the plot. Well, I'm not sure if there was a plot. Short stories should have a plot.
Okay, Imma shut up now.
If you have any questions, PM me or post on my wall.
Keep writing!
~~ Jash ♥
Okay, my first complaint is how you shift tenses. Sometimes you make it sounds like you're in that time and place, while others it sounds like the past. It just makes it a little confusing.
Anyway, story-wise I just didn't get that much of a plot, and I think you could've gone further with it. All the same, it wasn't bad either. I think I agree with what you're trying to say - we don't perceive the same things when we're young, and emphasize the things we want to see. When we're older and our perspectives change, we get another look at people...even people we think are our friends. And that's a good story to tell. I'm missing my inner child all over again *sigh*...but back on topic, I think you just could've expanded this, and made it into a much stronger piece.
Keep writing,
StoryWeaver
Hi there,
Let's see. The first thing I want to say is that you've got a great grasp of beginning, middle and end, great dialog and a comfortable style over all. The problem with this was that 1. It closely resembles the overall arc of Bridge to Terebithia, and 2. It was fairly bland. You told us what happened, instead of showing it to us. With a twist, with some personality for the two characters, you could turn this into a real whopper of a story, a novel even. This is non-fiction, so clearly you are writing about something that happened to you, but honestly you could flesh this out, give the characters some buffing up and have a wonderful story. That's what I suggest, anyway.
PM me if you have any questions.
-Aussie