Short Story / Excerpt from "An exercise in denial" (Analysis)
They are coming for me.
I can smell them.
Much much sooner than later…
I can feel it.
Tracking, lying in wait, reading.
Foul movements, flanking, planning injuries and hurtful thoughts, hoping and preying.
In the trees these beasts, with glowing eyes and sharpened claws hung, swoop down only when I might be too tired or injured to fight. Leg caught in bear traps of my own circuitous design. Gnawing frantically at my own digits in a vain search for freedom. Hiding in the dusk, ash grey fading to India black, amongst roots like the knuckles of gods. Grasping into the Earth, reaching for something tangible, and finding only evidence of rot and stagnant truth.
These fuckers, these cheap thieves of flesh, I could feel them out there…
They wouldn’t take me alive, gods willing, but I think that’s what they planned anyway. It’s been this way for days and nights and days and nights and it seems to be nigh time that I get what I deserve.
Finally.
I’ve gotten away with too much, gone too far over the line, as one of them put it. Pushed the term dry, expended all forms of payment, wrung out the dishrag.
And I thought I was doing so well.
Damn.
That’s all in the past now, and the only issue left to ponder is not when, but what will be the manner of dispatch? Just how do you think they will mete out my punishment, usher my egress from this mortal coil?
Will it be public?
Maybe a party?
Or possibly private, so as to intrude a sense of personality into the proceedings?
Either way, I might as well just accept it and I guess that’s just what I am doing this evening.
You can’t reschedule your own demise, no matter how modern of a day-planner you purchase.
It wouldn’t be long now, and it wouldn’t take long enough for me. For my taste they would enjoy. Carnivorous whores, they’d strip my body, and feast on the sweet marrow encased within my bones. Sucking me dry and slaking the cottonmouth with their saliva. I can’t say that I haven’t wondered what it will feel like as I’m always up for new experiences. I just love a surprise, a mystery, a Christmastime of bad vibes. Tear the wrapping off, and investigate the treats inside; I hope it isn’t clothes.
I wonder if somehow I might be disappointed by their lack of resolve, their inability to finish the job correctly and with dignity. I wonder if somehow I will be left with a bad taste in my mouth over the whole thing.
No matter, regardless of the outcome I was patently assured of the sound of rending flesh, meat stripped. Attack ships going down in flames, deckhands screaming obscenities in their last. Belching sulphur, brimstone, and methane…
Tasting the sweetest meat of all, defeat.
Salted with regret, moistened with cajun hatred.
It doesn’t make it easier, for me nor them. They expect me to capitulate, to render unto them satisfaction. They want me to help them help me, they want me to focus less on them, and more on myself. Just sit back, take what we give you, watch the spinning wheel…
Here, take these, some of those, more of them.
How do you acquiesce to infernal deeds when you have no real idea of what it is you have done? Better still, how do you coerce a person to admit to actions they have no recollection of perpetrating?
I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.
And view I will this history lesson, wide-eyed and questioning; I’m just as curious as they are. There are so many questions in the modern mind…
All in good time.
I’ve gotten away with lifetimes full of others misery, distaste and horror.
It’s my turn.
I’ve begun to think that they are just toying with me, in some futile attempt to wrest their truth from my cracked lips, to make me see their error of my ways. To hear me scream from my ghetto cell the truth they need to vilify once yet more. To make their victory, their meal, my last smoke all the more sweet.
Too bad.
And that seems to be the moral of…
Whatever this is.
I’m getting tired of waiting for them to come and take me down, to claim the prize they need to keep themselves from ripping each other apart for another day. I tire of the echoed taunts and cardboard phantasm dangled outside my windows, stolen from someones’ moldy Halloween storage locker. So I decide to meet them head on, show them demons yet unnamed.
I have decided to make a stand.
One last stand for all that is mine, however little it may be, and has been from the beginning. A bitter shred of dignity in an otherwise worthless existence.
They will at the very least never forget this, although they have forgotten something very important, something very dangerous. Something that should have lain sleeping with the others in it’s’ pack…
I will not go without a fight; I have done far more with far less.
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I found this to be very interesting, as a poetry author who is turning his attention towards fictional story writing for the first time, I looked at your work and have realised that every writer’s own style is compltely different to other people’s. And that this shows in your work, I realy liked this.
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A very new idea indeed. One keeps waiting till the end to know who is coming to eat up and devour the narrator. But the piece ends in uncertainly.
The descriptiona are rather well handled and the reader’s curiousity kept alive skillfully.
This the kind of idea that is likely to sell well, particularly in the West.
Keep writing.
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This does a very good job of capturing a fever-pitch atmosphere, and even the feverish mindset of your protagonist-on-the-run. Since this is an excerpt rather than a completed story, which is always a disadvantage, I’ll try to review it accordingly.
I think that if you want to blow away potential readers, then you might want to start at the beginning, and provide a few more details on the who, the what, and the why. A sense of place or the establishing of a setting would be great too, since that would leave your reader with far fewer questions which aren’t answered at all in this context.
You have all sorts of intimations of drama and intrigue, and this is not at all a bad thing, but you need to deliver just a hint, or even a red herring or two, to keep your readers hooked and to keep reeling them in. This gives not much at all away, except a hint of atmosphere and a lot of mindset/stream-of-consciousness, and personally, I didn’t think it was quite – enough.
The main problem I had with this, though, is your choice of vocabulary. Call me old-fashioned, but “usher my egress from this mortal coil” sounds far too Victorian and downright antiquated, if not obsolete for a 21st-century reader. There’s nothing wrong with showing off a large vocabulary or making demands on your reader, but phrases like that – this was just one example – distract more than they get your point across, amd my own reaction was one of irritation. By all means, as I said, roll out the phrases, but be careful not to descend into Bulwer-Lytton territory, by which I mean to say – if you’re after an antiquated/Victorian Gothisc feel, then use it sparingly, or it becomes a bit too – much.
This has some good potential, and it deserves to go somewhere. So see where you can take it – or where it takes you!
I wish you the best of luck!
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