Last year I had a late lab that ended at 9. On the first week of lab I took the NightCat home to BioFive. As I crossed the parking lot, I saw a car start up and move toward the parking lot exit. I didn’t think much of it until I went to the Wells Fargo parking lot and the car followed me into it. I panicked and started running towards the drive-through ATMs (which I hoped had security cameras) and crossed over to Speedway. I ran all the way home, not looking back to see if they were following.
Even though nothing bad happened, I became freakishly paranoid for one week. I would flinch every time I saw a red car and never go out after it was dark. I couldn’t sleep. It was only when SafeRide dropped me home without incident after lab next week that I truly felt safe.
I learned that day that the mind is like a child; no matter how many times you tell it that everything is going to be fine, it won’t be completely reassured until it gets a do-over. A memory re-write, if you will.
For this assignment I chose to hide in a closet. Terribly cliché, I know. But it’s not what you may think. I utilized two leads from the prompt—hiding in, and hiding from. I was hiding in my one of my roommate’s closet while hiding from them. The closet has sliding doors and no light. To hide myself well I had to surround myself with suitcases, hang up a long coat in front of me, and slide the door all the way to one side.
I waited till both my roommates were about to return home from class and hid myself in the closet after switching off the lights and the heater (they knew I would be hiding sometime in the week, and I didn’t want to give away the fact that I was in the house). It was really dark in the closet. And cold. I was sitting on the bare floor, and my feet were freezing. I could hear myself breathing. I could hear the creaking footsteps on the balcony outside my apartment door. I could hear the cars driving by my house, which led me to think about the Doppler shift, for some strange reason. But mostly, I was cold. I remember thinking “so this is how Jack Dawson must have felt in the Titanic. Freezing, freezing, freezing, and waiting for death”.
But I wasn’t waiting for death. I was just waiting for my roommates to come and find me. After an eternity I heard the sound of the key turning in the lock and my roommates entering. I heard them figure out I was hiding. I heard them search for me in the living room and kitchen. I heard them, but I wasn’t listening to them. I was thinking back to last year, thinking about how I reacted whenever I heard the key turning in the lock. I would immediately switch off all music, tiptoe around the room, make no sound whatsoever. I would hear hard for where my roommate was. If I wanted to eat, and she was in the kitchen, I would wait. Towards the end, when it got really bad, I’d wake up before her, hide in the library for the entire day, and come back late in the night when she had gone to sleep. You see, I was scared of her. Not scared to talk to her, not scared to be in the same room with her. I was scared to even cross her mind. It was childish, I know. If I can’t see her, she can’t see me. If she can’t see me, she can’t think of me. If she can’t think of me, she won’t come to my door and tell the new thing she found wrong with me.
Why would I care, you ask? It was my first time living with someone else apart from family. It was also my first time away from family. Like eight thousand, three hundred, and seventy miles away from family. It’s hard not to take things personally when they come from the first friend you’ve made in a new city. You’re also more vulnerable to criticism when you’re homesick.
Thankfully, I got new roommates this year who, apart from being fun, are extremely nice, kind, funny, understanding, and all in all awesome. Even though it’s almost been a year since I moved out, I didn’t realize how scared I was of hearing the key turn in the lock again until I heard it while sitting in the cold darkness of the closet.
I was still trying not to breathe loudly so I wouldn’t be heard. But instead of nervousness, there was excitement coursing through me. And instead of shaking with fear, I was shaking with suppressed laughter.
When the thirty minutes were finally up, I slowly slid open the door. The room had been quiet for a while and my roommate was working. She freaked out when she heard the sound of the closet door sliding but relaxed when she saw me. When she figured it out, we both started laughing hysterically. That night, I felt a sense of release. My heart felt lighter, my mind freer.
Sometimes, the mind just needs a memory rewrite.
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Hey there!
Starleene here!
I have come to deliver a review! So let’s begin!
“On the first week of lab I took the NightCat home to BioFive.”
There should be a comma inserted after “lab.”
“…towards the drive-through ATMs (which I hoped had security cameras) and crossed over to Speedway.”
For some reason I really dislike the use of parenthesis is writing, If it were me I would change the sentence to: ”…towards the drive-through ATMs, which I hoped had security cameras, and crossed over to Speedway.” I think that looks a lot better.
“It was only when SafeRide dropped me home without incident after lab next week that I truly felt safe.”
I would insert a comma after week. Natural pauses are 9 out of 10 times the correct placement for commas.
“I learned that day that the mind is like a child; no matter how many times you tell it that everything is going to be fine, it won’t be completely reassured until it gets a do-over. A memory re-write, if you will.”
I find this paragraph captivating and interesting. The words are perfectly and concise. Nicely done.
“For this assignment I chose to hide in a closet.”
What assignment?
“(they knew I would be hiding sometime in the week, and I didn’t want to give away the fact that I was in the house).”
Again I find parenthesis terribly distracting. It may be possible for you to reword this into you sentence without using parenthesis.
“which led me to think about the Doppler shift”
If you’ve ever seen The Big Bang theory, this reminds me of Sheldons dressing up as the Doptler effect, Mnnnnnneeeerrrrrrrrrrr. If you haven’t seen it, then discard this and pretend it never happened.
“so this is how Jack Dawson must have felt in the Titanic…”
Nice comparison, I always compare my floor to the North Atlantic Ocean, lol
Sorry about the shortness of the review but I honestly couldn’t find anything wrong with this piece besides the things that I mentioned above. I really, really enjoyed this! It was really interesting and had a great ending.
Good Luck! Happy Writing!
Starleene out!
This felt rambling. The premise was intriguing, but this wasn't cohesive enough to really enforce it at all. The loosely organized thought-stream method you adopt is rarely effective in the short story arena, due to how inefficient it often is in word choice, and the last thing you want to be in a short story is inefficient. Your goal is always to concenter the entire piece on a single theme.
There's too much floating, irrelevant information being fed to me (ie the Doppler Shift thing, the Titanic thing) that it's impossible for me to be able to discern any real link between the various scenes you jump between. Cut off all the fluff! It serves no purpose here.
The last line came too suddenly, unnaturally. It was like you were forcing the theme on me when it was still only half-baked. Also, repetition is great for enforcing a point, but only when it doesn't sound forced. Its purpose is to show a mutual theme between related parts of a story. It doesn't work if there isn't any clear mutual theme.
To conclude, this piece would be much, much better if you tossed all the decorations here that don't have anything to do with the memory rewrite thing.
-Kafka
This has a really great use of plot development. I love how we start out with a summary of fear and a frightful thing that would make anyone scared, then move on to a challenge with the fear and lastly, the narrator personalizes the step one layer further and reflects on how they were afraid, why they were afraid, and how they don't have to be afraid any longer. It's absolutely wonderful.
As for a 'review' per say, I would say watch out for making things too 'dull' before you start building them back up again. It was a bit of a drop to go from the fear of being kidnapped to an experiment with hiding in the closet. For this piece, it was perfect, but in a different piece, if this is generally your writing style, I would suggest caution. Also the names are great, but I don't recognize them, so they really didn't help me personalize the story at all.