“Once upon a time, the world was a very scary place…” I blushed as someone snickered in the back of the classroom, but I pressed on anyway, wanting to make a good grade on my presentation. “There were billions of people and almost all of them were sick, not only in their minds, but their bodies too. These people were des…des…destro,” I stumbled over the word even though I had practiced every night for a week, and my cheeks grew even hotter, “destroying our planet and everyone was dying. There were wars, and feminine,” the whole class busted out laughing as I realized my mistake. I felt the tears well up in my eyes as the laughing and insults rang out. I turned, searching for the teacher to save me from this.
As soon as I found his face, everything grew blurry. The harder I tried to make out his face, the more I attempted to focus, the more distorted everything became. The laughing and insults slowed down, the sound in such slow motion that it wasn’t identifiable anymore.
I was terrified, not understanding what was happening. Suddenly, it was like someone jerked me away, as though a hook was in my stomach with an unknown force dragging me away. I ended up in darkness. Smothering, overwhelming darkness that covered me completely. I knew I wasn’t seven anymore and giving a speech in class. It was different and I felt the fear, almost as though it was crawling over my skin. I trembled because of it and it was almost as though the air was rank with the terror of whatever moment I was in. My breath was short and quick, and my brain franticly attempted to deal with the sheer panic that was coming over my whole body.
Things came to me sporadically. Waves of information flooded into my mind, and I struggled to make sense of it all. My ears picked up sounds of hushed whispers and rushed footsteps. The smell of sweaty people, blood and smoke threated to clog my nose. I still couldn’t see but I could now tell I was lying down, and that I was pressed against other flesh. I tried to squirm away and a hand was placed over my mouth from someone who was lying behind me.
“Lena, don’t.” The woman’s voice was comforting to me, even though it was muffled, and tight with the fear and panic that I myself was feeling. I forced myself to be still. I felt her softly stroke my hair and I could tell from the way her breath was catching that she was silently crying.
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,008 Literary Works • 672,820 Reviews
A great beginning! Very captivating, it hooked me right into the story. Personification was definitely a good choice and you used it perfectly! Will be watching for more from you!
rustic_rebel, I like. Will there be more to this story soon? I would love to read it. The descriptions that you gave were very clear and captivating (especially the part were it sounds like 'Lena' is about to pass out.
Were is Lena in the second half of you submission? Is she a civilian in a city and she was caught in the middle of a shooting or bombing? Or is she a solder that was just hit with an explosion? The only reason that I ask is because I want you to know how into this story I was getting. Don't stop writing, your work is very impressive.
Keep it up :]
This certainly is interesting, a good opening that identifies the character for us; a shy and emotional young girl. The description and imagery used was fantastic, especially the use of personification, similes and metaphors. However, I found that there wasn't much exploration in the sense of punctuation and sentence structure, the only adventurous punctuation I saw were ellipses (used very well in the dialogue). Try using colons, semi-colons, etc.
The transition of the scenes was very sudden, but the tensity and fast paced descriptive narrative made up for that, definitely making the reader much more interested and absorbed into the story. The story has got me wondering what will happen next, especially following this spontaneous and suspicious turn of events.
In the sense of spelling errors, I only spotted one:
"blood and smoke threated"
That should be 'threatened', but easy mistake to make, just be sure to spell check a couple of times before you post.
Sorry for the relatively short review, but I hope to see more in this novel, because it certainly has potential, at least it seems that way from the introduction, which is always a brilliant sign. Good work, keep on writing!
If you want another review for anything, just drop me a PM.
Regards
DNX