"Arthur, it's the truth you keep denying!" Stephanie shouted, slamming her right hand, which was curled into a fist, on the hallway wall. It made a loud bang and I jumped backwards, quietly closing my door and pressing my ear to it. I shot a glance at my twin brothers, Matthew and Justin. They were older than me by two years. Justin had a worried look on his face.
"Love," Arthur tried to coo, trying to calm the women down, his voice breaking, bits and pieces cracking up his throat and into the air, disintegrating. The usual fight was about something different every time. This time Stephanie found Arthur in bed with a women.
I glance at Justin. "I hate this," I said.
He stared at my red and white pillow before picking it up. "And you think we do? This is horrible! Those two are our parents! Our guardians! We're dead without them," Justin said, quickly. He flattened out his hands and began to repeatedly slap the pillow with his palms until Matthew came over to him and ripped the pillow out of his hands.
"They're our parents. You aren't even related to them, Emma! You were dropped off in Mom's arms by a stranger who couldn't keep care of you!" Matthew's face was red, his shouting loud. I looked at him with surprise and confusion.
"You're stupid," I spat. "There's nothing you will tell me that I don't already know about. Go cry me an ocean."
Matthew took a deep breath and feel against the bed, closing his eyes. "Look, Em, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that..."
"Then what? You're not my sister, I'm not your brother, you're parents are gone, wonderful! Look..." I strained my neck for something else to add. "If they split, I'd rather move in with Laura, than stay with one of you."
All this time, Justin just sat on my bed, listening to his entire family argue. He wanted to jump up and call out to the people. He wanted for them to stop fighting and just hug each other and sit down and watch movies on the couch together.
But adults don't handle things so easily.
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127,923 Literary Works • 671,487 Reviews
Hello.
I didn't really get a good feel for the characters in this story.
Firstly, you introduce too many at once. As a result, we can't get any solid personalities because you shuffle them in all at once, no proper introduction past "here is who they are", and everybody's doing stuff at once. Hardly any characters have more than two lines of dialogue, which is nowhere near enough to get any sort of grip on who they are.
This scene also feels rather pointless, because I can't look at the end and go "here's how the characters changed" or "here's the story arc that progressed". This is nothing more than a tiny little snippet of something that doesn't have much if any context.
I can't even identify the narrator. Your writing reads like third person, jumping around between what's going on outside and what's going on inside, perfectly reading characters that aren't the narrator, and the narrator seems to hold no purpose. First person requires a narrator who is so special to the story that they can't be captured in third, and you're lacking that.
A good short story needs to have a purpose. What are you trying to drive home with this scene? Is it the narrator's development? Another character's development? The argument that leads to them all feeling abandoned and kids imitating parents?
Get a purpose to this thing and you'll do a lot better.
Hope this helps. PM me if you have any questions.
~Rosey
The grammar in this whole thing is very awkward. Some sentences tend to run on for too long, ("Stephanie shouted, slamming her right arm....."), some sentences are either out of place or don't need to be there in the first place ("They were older than me by two years"), and you tend to switch back and forth between past and present tense. Also, you constantly use "women" instead of "woman".
As a snippet, it's very descriptive. It doesn't try to hide the dirty details of a dysfunctional family. But this reads waaayyy too much like it's an introduction to something bigger, especially since you seemed so keen on dropping bombshells like "You aren't even related to them". Like you had planned something much longer, but you liked the phrase "But adults don't handle things so easily" so much, that you just cut off everything after that.
All in all, it's very first drafty. There's rampant grammar issues, and quite a few ideas that seem to build up but don't lead anywhere. It might be best to edit your stories a bit, just to see what works and what doesn't.
I love your writing. It is so full of emotion. When I got to the end I wanted to read more about Emma, Justin and Matthew. See how their lives are and what happens next. It is also very realistic like people and things like that would actually happen in real life, hopefully they don't but unfortunately they do. And you represented that really well, which is usually really hard to do, or for me at least it is. If you do continue this story I would love to read it.
Keep up the great writing!
- Roxie Rain