Published April 21, 2012
One day you can see your life flash right before your eyes and not even know what happened. You could simply be walking down the street, maybe even going for a jog, when that person that is half asleep driving their car on their way to work. But they spill the coffee they quickly got from McDonalds on their lap. They go off the street. Right at you, and you never saw it coming. Never got to tell the world good bye.
It wasn't like that for me. I knew I was leaving my life as I knew it. I knew what was coming. I knew how exactly how I was going to die. I knew why I was going to die. I knew everything.
Why you ask? Why was I going to die? Why did I know everything about my death? How did I? That's something better told in a story, one that starts from the very beginning.
The one that ends my life.
Honestly, I never thought the word "life" was that big of a word. To me it held no meaning, just something every person has, until they lose it.
I look to my wife over my newspaper that I don't even really read. It's just something every man and husband should do. Makes you feel more like the "man of the house". "Mind passing me the coffee? Sort of need it to stay awake at work dear."
She brings the cup of coffee to me not even looking at me. It's been like that for awhile, no interaction, no love.
I look at the coffee that hasn't had anything added to it, yet. "Do you mind giving me some sugar? How about some cream, darling? Not a big deal, it's just been like that forever."
She whips around to me from the pancakes she's making for our daughter, rage filling her eyes, "I'm not your maid, or servant! I'm not just here to make sure everything for you is perfect, and your life is wonderful! I'm your wife! I've had enough of this! You have your own two hands and two feet! Heck, there's not even something mentally wrong with you, that I know of! Make your own fucking coffee from now on." She turns away again.
Dear little Haley looks up from her pony coloring book. "Ooo, mommy said the "f" word."
We both act as if we hadn't heard her and I go on, "No, I'm just supposed to go to work nearly every fucking day! Bright and early in the fucking morning! Bring home the fucking money that this family fucking needs to fucking survive! But it's too fucking hard for you to put sugar and cream in my fucking coffee, so I can stay awake at this job I have that gives me the money! Makes perfect sense. Fucking perfect."
"That's eight "f" words daddy."
I look at her not even really meaning to and notice how much she looks like her mother, and I hate her for that. "Enough, Haley."
"I'm just saying that's eight dollars in the sw-"
"I said enough!"
She runs away crying, and Lillian starts to go after her, but turns to me before leaving the kitchen, eyes looking right through me, "Have a wonderful day at work. Maybe you can pick coffee up someplace, they'll probably be better at making coffee to meet your needs better than me."
I open my mouth to say something witty, but she's already disappeared out of the kitchen. And I was on my way to work, not doing anywhere to pick up coffee. I wasn't in the mood to talk to people.
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137,563 Literary Works • 672,044 Reviews
Hey!
RandomTalks here with a short review!
Wow...that was an intense story. However, before I go into that, let me just mention something I am absolutely certain you have already heard before. You need to break this up into paragraphs. The entire story stands there like a big chunk of text and if it doesn't scare away readers it is certainly going to give the person a headache. Let me explain why. Your story is incredibly tense. It has all these strong dialogues and a lot of action happening, and unless you break it down into paragraphs, it is going to overwhelm your readers.
That said, the plot is actually very interesting. A person narrating the last day of their life? Well, count me hooked right there. I really liked the way you started with the story and then slowly zooming into the actual matter. It felt ominous from right there and I just knew this wasn't going to be a happy read. You really managed to put all the emotions in there. I liked the way you conveyed little details about their marriage with a single scene and without really making it obvious. There must have been a lot of frustration and tension in their marriage from before if a simple request for sugar could get them to blow up like that in front of their daughter. I liked the dialogues and the anger and resentment that was evident in it, although there was too much swearing there for my liking.
Now if I move on to the grammatical aspect of it, I noticed the change in tense in the very beginning. It throws the flow off a bit there because like I said, the introductory sentences were really nice.
See, the first sentence here is in the present tense like all the ones before. But then you suddenly shift to the past tense and it messes it up a bit.
You change the tense here again. Also, the 'doing' will be 'going' here.
I also liked the way you ended here. Its a bit abrupt for sure, but there is a link to the beginning with the coffee spilling on the sleeping driver that makes you wonder if that is how it is going to happen. It is an effective way to hook the readers.
Overall, this was a good read. Just the formatting and the tense were a little problematic.
Keep writing and have a great day!
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.
Anyway let's get right to it,
Well, before I get into deciphering this passage, I will start out by saying that this is in desperate of some paragraphing right here, there's soo much happening here, and having the whole thing kind of clumped into just this one piece is messing quite a bit with the general flow of things here, so you really need to look into breaking this up into a few smaller pieces here.
So moving onto the content, this is a very interesting premise, we've got someone that's already dead narrating things to us, definitely makes things really interesting, makes you ask a looot of questions there as a reader to figure out what may have happened for this person to end up dead and what's happening now.
And then of course the argument with the wife there, on what I assume is perhaps the final day this person was alive. That seems to indicate something along those lines...what with the sudden and very scary calmness the wife had towards the end of that argument. Also I think there's a slight overuse of swears there in the argument, once or twice is good to anger and emphasis but 8 times in one sentence is just clunky and just not effective there.
Anyway, not a bad start here.
Aaaaand that's it for this one.
As always remember to take what you think was helpful and forget the rest.
Stay Safe
Harry