z

Young Writers Society


12+

Sirens

by ShortStorySean


The waves are erupting around me like a volcano. Each blade of water piercing my skin and my weak dinghy. Jess is bleating with boredom. She wants to chase sheep through the fields back home. The rusty anchor is weighing us down but it is much too heavy to relinquish. My arms are aching, stinging. The piece of wood which we are perched on resists any movement and there is no sight of anything but blue both literally and mentally.

The storm has passed but we are still suffering. I am starving and my stomach is howling like a hungry wolf. Jess is feasting on the gilled mammal with my sharp stick protruding from its substantial lip. Jess is grinning like a child on Christmas. I’m not. The light ripples of the evil water are knocking our boat, our home. The water is enticing me to drink. To poison myself. My clothes are sagging; I am chilled to the bone despite the glowing red ball laughing in my face. The water ripples directing me the way to safety. To survival. I take the moment to smile. To actually mean the happiness. Despite the relentless hate the sea has for me. The moment is bright.

I am thrusting frantically toward the black shadow floating on the curvature of the earth. The small rock welcoming me to the rocky resort. My smile is growing each time my paddle lifts from the water. My feet are warm now; I’m surrounded by pale stingrays. They are teasing Jess. I take my first step onto heaven, or as some richer people may call it, a beach. The palm trees standing over me are like coins piled high in the sky, gleaming, signalling everyone who has nowhere to go. Everyone like me. I scream but no one looks at me as though I’m crazy. I’m away from society. My solitude and I are finally together after 32 years of my life of suffering I’m here. I’m home. My arms and my legs are trembling with both happiness and fatigue. I decide to lie down and steal some long lost shut eye.

I wake up to the sirens of Jess barking and racing towards the sea. The chill of the sunset carefully scatters goose bumps on my bare, red skin. As I lift my head I see an impressive commotion disturbing the solid sea. A fish I expect. I slowly wonder towards the beige rope tied to the bending palm tree. My filthy hands wrap around it and I tug my home towards silver beach. I need to be in my boat, the hooligan. It’s been weeks, months sleeping on my wooden bed, the swell of the sea lulling me to sleep, I felt that I was betraying the ocean after all it has done for me and so I jump into the boat and Jess joins me. I patrol the island until I find a beautiful cave luring me into the suitable shelter. I could sense a following of a higher mammal an animal much more powerful than the average human (myself). My back hit the wooden boat as I lay down. My pupils circled my eyes as I inspected my room for the night. The hole in the top of cave insured a beautiful sight of the ivory circle in the sky. My favourite planet. I wrapped my exposed arms around the black and white ball of fluff, Jess. The sweetest of whistles lifted both my mood and my head. Curiosity filled my body as I grinned then almost unconsciously sat up. My eyes open and i lean over the side of the boat the beautiful lullabies lured me to the water; the sugary harmony of a vocal cord now entered the echoed cave. The sight of a glowing woman appeared in the clear water beneath me. The water suddenly disappeared and the woman lost her scaled fin for pale skinny legs. The aqua dress she stood in reminded me of the temptation the poison water provided me with. My closed fist opened up revealing a pumping heart, my pumping heart dripping with lust blood. The blood was slithering through my slightly opened fingers and onto her long, pointed tongue. Her mouth opened and she bit into the carmine piece of meat.

I woke up in my tent. In the lush green hills of Scotland.”Home at last”. I breathed


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Mon Feb 24, 2014 12:38 am
ladcat13 wrote a review...



Welcome to YWS! I hope you love it here, I know I do.

I want to say that I like your story, but there are some things wrong with it that make it painful to read. For one, you have some issues with run-on and fragment sentences. There are a lot of them, and they make the story seem confused and jumbled. Also, the beginning is rather ambiguous. I didn't understand that Jess was a dog until halfway through, and I wasn't sure whether he was on a boat or a dinghy or a floating on a plank of wood. Also, the last paragraph was strange... just very strange.

But I think you have some good material here. All you need to do is refine it. So work on it, and as always, keep writing.




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Sun Feb 23, 2014 9:47 am
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Demeter wrote a review...



Hello Sean and welcome to YWS :D

Your writing is very fluent, which is very nice for the reader! It gives the impression that you've been writing and reading a lot. However, I noticed that at times the text seemed a little choppy, and I think it's because you use quite a lot of main clauses (sentences that don't have connecting conjunctions like "but", "and", "even though" etc.) and that a lot of your sentences begin with "I", "my", or another pronoun. That doesn't necessarily make the text difficult to follow, but it does create a sort of dragging effect at times. However, it should be relatively easy to fix by just changing the sentence starts a bit and varying it up.

I think the idea of a man and his goat (Jess is a goat, right? haha) on the boat is quite interesting. It reminds me a bit of Life of Pi! Just less exotic and sunny. I'd be very interesting in seeing some more of why he's in the boat and how long he has been here, even it's just a dream!

That reminds me. I think you should be extremely wary of endings like "And then I woke up and realised it was all a dream". It sort of pulls the carpet from under the readers' feet and leaves them feeling a bit cheated, when you want to make them in awe of the great story you've just told them. However, from your reply to HutchesonHS's comment I can see that you do have an idea there as well - for the man to wake up homeless but more appreciative of what he has. Unfortunately the ending in the story is so abrupt that I wouldn't have realised this unless I had read that comment of yours. Why not tell us more? It seems like there's a good idea there, and I feel like you could save the dream ending by making it more obvious in the actual story as well. ;)

Good luck! You've got a great base here!


Demeter x






Thank you very much for that that has really helped me. By the way Jess is actually a Border Collie, i think i did mention she was a sheepdog? Yes actually now i re-read my writing you are indeed correct that i use many main clauses. I also have noticed and i agree with you that i start my sentences with lots of pronouns. Thank you very much once again for your help!
Sean



Demeter says...


Haha! I thought she was a goat because she bleated ;) Sorry about that!



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Thu Feb 20, 2014 11:22 pm
HutchesonHS wrote a review...



Very good. I really enjoyed reading this and I think that you are very good at writing short stories. I like how the character woke up in the end, home, after being homeless for so long. I didn't quite understand the ending though. I also enjoy how you described the ocean and the waves in the beginning. Do you think that you could look at mine and give me feedback? I would be happy if you did. Thanks






Thank you very much. The idea was for hi to wake up still homeless however he now appreciates it much more and now his dreams have been changed.



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Thu Feb 20, 2014 11:20 pm
HutchesonHS says...



Very good. I really enjoyed reading this and I think that you are very good at writing short stories. Would you look at mine and give me feedback? thanks





Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.
— Dr. Seuss