Ascendance
She’s careless, when she cries. She’s careless.
Her streaming cascades of tears. Or are they waterfalls? Rivers that flow and wind, gripping hungrily to the rocky features as they learn every delicate crevasse on the cold, moist surface.
Her face tingles as the tears reach her lips. She touches them, fingers realising each dip and split of the numb bleeding tissue and inhales. Salt water flows into her mouth as a wrenching shudder rips through her.
Alone in the room, her despair echoes.
And it’s everywhere.
It consumes her, eating at her whole being and in one large gulp-she’s gone.
Just another lost soul, left to roam, pieces of her start to float away, she wants to catch them, hold them to her stuttering heart and never let go. Memories, songs, books, films, family, friends.
Everything she ever loved.
Everything she ever lost.
But she can’t get them back, she can never get them back and the hole in her chest gets larger and larger, until she can feel her body splitting. No pain. Just empty numbness. And nothing.
There’s nothing left of her so she embraces the darkness. Embraces her defeat, embraces everything she ever hated about herself.
And suddenly she wishes it would all just come back.
The bad parts. Because, the bad parts are better than no parts and she screams it with everything left of her. But no sound comes out.
Because she doesn’t have a mouth.
She gave that away when she couldn’t stand to listen to her own voice anymore. She’d sit. On her own. Dreaming. Nightmares, weeping, evaporating into the shadows. But she made not a sound.
Why?
Why didn’t she tell them something was wrong?
Why didn’t they see?
Why didn’t they do anything?
Because they were as blind as her. Unable to stop themselves from falling in the darkness, there was no way out, no ledge of hope to cling onto. Not a splinter of light. They couldn’t see she was falling because they were drowning as quickly as she was, stuck fast in an endless, bottomless, pit of tar.
She gasped and the viscous oozing blackness seeped into her mouth. Into her brain.
She was there but she wasn’t. She felt as though she were thrashing, although she knew that she could not move.
It was all she could do to keep sane, lost in that onyx eternity of trapped souls and sorrows.
She felt as though she had passed through hell. Sunk all the way past the gates of Hades themselves and then, suddenly, she was floating.
Screams pierced her ears, and only when the air had stopped its tidal wave mission towards her shrivelled lungs, bursting them open and forcing her to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Only then, did she realise that the screams were hers.
She shrieked again.
This time with joy, if only for the fact that she could perform the action.
The light consumed her and in doing so memories, songs, books, films, family, friends flew past her eyelids as though projected from a diamond. Clear and bright.
Even watching her darkest memories felt wonderful.
Exuberating.
Exhilarating.
She stretched and suddenly recoiled. Retreating to the foetal position. Warm and safe, tucked away in a womb of white light that softly stroked her.
Like feathers.
Like wings.
Touched by an angel.
She sighed; it tingled through her whole body. She giggled. Then laughed.
It sounded to her as though bells were chiming along with her laughter and again the feeling of being encircled by wings captivated her, holding her in a comforting, pure cradle of everything that had ever felt good in her life. And as she relived her memories, a new feeling came back to her. A purely human one.
Curiosity.
She jolted awake, eyes saw from crying and she was clutching her black pillow in one hand. Shaking her head slowly, she struggled to regain control of her breathing.
She was panicking and yet, somehow, she felt oddly at peace. Not just with herself, but with everything around her.
A cold wind rustled her hair, allowing her to softly sink back into reality. She turned her head to look out of the open window, and smiled.
There on the windowsill, lying like her very own piece of heaven was a,
Tiny.
White.
Feather.
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125,027 Literary Works • 672,774 Reviews
Hi ViridianGrace,
Mailice here with a short review!
I am surprised to find this short story in the aforementioned category, because when I read through the text, especially at the beginning, I have the feeling that we are in a poem. You have an extremely great voice that you show here, and I especially like that you kept that as a main feature in the story to give that sense of a sombre undertone.
At times I had the impression you were telling a story and at other times I thought we were dealing with an anecdote. You remain veiled and yet open. It gives me this feeling that there is much more to the story than what we realise at the first moment.
I think that's a big plus but can also be as a minus because sometimes you have the fog too thick to express yourself here, making the story in general feel a bit confusing to the reader. At least in the tone that you have to think a bit about where you are on it, which can be a bit problematic in a short story.
I like the repetition of the sentences and the insertion of new sections when you want to create a special intensity. It gives the effect that you read the story a little bit in a certain beat, as if you were breathing. I liked that this structure was also found more towards the end, just as the more poetic expression was able to find itself at the beginning.
I like these two sections best, they show a bit of the inner world of the character and also an increase. But above all, a fall again. You use the rhetorical devices well, so that the story itself seems lively and well-filled.
In summary, it is a very exciting and partly dark story, but sometimes a little too unclear.
Have fun writing!
Mailice
Good Morning/Afternoon/Evening/Night(whichever one it is in your part of the world),
Hi! I'm Knight Hardy here on a mission to ensure that all works on YWS has at least two reviews. You will probably never see this but....Imma do this anyway.
First Impression: Overall this sounds like its telling a very deep and dark story through some poetic imagery. You've managed to restrain yourself with the elaborate wordings and give the proper impact so that's great. I have seen too many stories where the author has forgotten to draw the line between a poem and a short story. And the whole piece overall has a lovely flow to it too.
Anyway let's get right to it,
Well certainly a very interesting start that you have here. Very poetic which is fine in a story when done minimally to enhance it.
And this is wear it begins to shape up to be yet another sad story.
Why are there so many of those on here?Well that's certainly summoning a lot of emotion in us so that works.
At this point I am starting to see this maybe being a metaphor for something else or maybe I just watched too much Film Theory. Please blame MatPat for this.
Okayy....that's unusual although I can see where this is going now.
Yup. She definitely just die if I am not mistaken which I certainly could be. And we have our....uhhh I have lost count at this point sad ending of the day.
Aaaand that's it for this one.
Overall: So this was a pretty interesting read. A bit of a bittersweet but I will take it over all the pure darkness that came before it. And the message that it is trying to convey seems to be quite a deep one. I might be overthinking this but I think I am doing a decent job of interpreting what you are trying to say. Overall a really well written story.
As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.
Stay Safe
Harry