"Now we see everything that's going wrong
With the world and those who lead it
We just feel like we don't have the means
To rise above and beat it" ---Waiting on the world to change by John Mayer
We drove to the top of the nine mile hill and parked parallel across the street. Waiting on the world to change Played behind the static that dominated the speakers. He took his right hand off the steering wheel and placed it on the top of my knee, squeezing slightly. I looked at him and he looked at me; then we sipped our stolen drinks and watched the lights go out one by one until the only light that shone came from the moon.
A/N: Ok so I know this was very short but I was going through my folders of stuff I've written and I found it folded in the folder of random pieces. As I was looking at it and rereading it I kind of thought that it would work as a stand alone piece. What do you think? Stand alone or should it be apart of another story? ---Myjaspercat
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125,029 Literary Works • 672,781 Reviews
As this is an incredibly short work, I think it might warrant a shorter review than normal that mostly circles around your question.
Personally, if I were stuck in this predicament, I would expand upon this short a little more. It's too vague to mean anything to anyone but the author, too diluted in its own atmosphere to be exceptional. The song lyrics are a little questionable, as well. There's nothing wrong with inserting songs into works, but often the readers won't let the author get away with that unless the song is cleverly inserted. For example, in All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein, the song "I'm My Own Grandpa" is inserted in the background of a pub (if I remember correctly). This is before it's revealed that all the major characters in the short story is actually just one person in a time travel loop, and the intersex protagonist impregnated his past female self, therefore becoming his own father. It's not overtly stated why the song is there, but once the reader looks back, it makes sense why it is there.
How does this ramble relate to this work, you might ask? Well, that's simple. Why did you attach it there in the first place? If the answer is "because it sounds nice", you need more meat on your bones. What does the stationary, corrupt state of the world matter to the protagonists? Why is it so important to the story? Is this supposed to be a theme for the story? In any case, you need to expand at least a thousand words or more.
In any case, it'd be interesting to see where it goes, but as of now it's more an underdeveloped fetus than a baby.
Signing out,
--EM.
To answer the posited question - in my opinion, this works fine as a stand-alone piece. Whether or not it would work as part of a story depends on what the larger story is, but if it's a larger story, I would recommend you remove the John Mayer verse at the top or work it into the narrative somehow.
Song lyrics can be tricky to use well. I'm not sure what, exactly, the song in question here has to do with the moment it is juxtaposed with, but they are good lyrics - if you're doing a longer piece, consider it a source of inspiration?
As a standalone piece, it relies heavily on atmosphere. Most of it is description of the setting.
Grammar nitpicks - Nine Mile Hill should be capitalized, proper noun, and played should be lowercase.
'I looked... at me' and 'We... the moon.', in my opinion, should be separated into two separate sentences to help with the flow, because it's a quiet moment.
Actually, with the simplicity of the prose, actions, and occasional spurts of poetic language, this might make for an interesting, prose-style poem!
Thank you for your review, I greatly appreciate it.