I admit that the end has been problematic. It previously ended with Calen in the chair, tired from the third encounter. But my writing class found this very difficult to understand and so the last chapter was my compromise where I don’t get to explain everything, but it sort of ties up.
Your questions:
Lisa is dead. Calen never really dealt wit it. He is the stranger as his psyche tries to reconnect with him. Calen finds it painful each time. When he breaks down, he gives up the fight and it’s implied that he comes through this when he wakes up in the flat. Now without that ending, whether or not he wakes up is left to the reader.
Thanks for the Twilight Zone comment, it was the inspiration for this. Cheers.
Sci Fi & Fantasy / Arm Chair! (Analysis)
Calen opened the door to his apartment. He didn’t notice that it was unlocked. He was too tired to notice anything really. He simply pushed himself in, slung his overcoat into the built-in wardrobe by the door and ignored it as it sank to the heap at the bottom. He pulled the mail out of his letterbox, glancing through it as he walked into his living room. At first, he didn’t notice anything different, his attention on the mail he didn’t care for; it was the smell that tipped him off. She used to say that it was the smell of thunderstorms. Her memory interrupted him and that’s when he saw him seated in her chair. Her chair! He didn’t even think; he walked straight to the man, growling,
“Get out of that chair”. His voice rose with every syllable. He grabbed the man’s arm. It was the last thing he remembered.
At first he thought he was dreaming of Lisa in the hospital and that his dream had some pretty impressive smell- effects. But, he was in hospital. Still, he didn’t want to open his eyes. He preferred the dream, the smell-effects dream, the one in which she woke up. A male nurse opened his eyes. In his dreams, there were no male nurses; in his dreams, there had not been any nurses. Just her in the bed and him by her side, waiting. The nurse kept asking him if he was ok, asking him if he knew what day it was, Calen grunted. He wished that whatever it was that had put him there had killed him. He couldn’t remember. It was his last thought as he drifted back to sleep.
The police said they had no explanation for what had taken place. They said that a neighbour found him and called them, thinking he was dead. They arrived and called an ambulance. It was apparently mystifying for them, whatever it was that had laid him out ought to have killed him by the doctors’ accounts. They and the helpful neighbour had found his apartment door wide open, with him laid out on the floor, looking pretty dead. Calen hadn’t known he had any helpful neighbours. When he returned from hospital, it stopped looking likely that he would follow-up on this acquaintance. Calen was glad that no one showed for the grateful thank.
Two
Calen opened the door to his apartment, working through several locks that held his door fastened to the wall. He kicked his way through the pile of letters on the floor, threw his coat onto the chair in the hallway and strode into his living room. He stopped as soon as he entered. In a way, he hadn’t expected to see the stranger back, the event filed away as some anomaly in the back of his mind. But there he was, sitting in the same armchair. This time Calen approached him slowly. He was still angry. He remembered being angry the first time. His memory of the event, blurred and painful as it was, had returned.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“What are you doing here?”
He tried to stop his voice from rising, but the stranger was sitting in her chair again. The stranger looked at him, kept looking at him, he didn’t say anything. The expression on his face unchanging, he simply kept looking at Calen.
Calen tried to hold himself back, he really tried, he didn’t know what the stranger had done to him the last time, but he couldn’t handle watching him sitting in that chair.
“Get up” he yelled, “Get up, GET OUT”.
His voice rising again, Calen could not believe the hysteria in his voice. In his bid not to be this person, not to be this mad crazy man, he reached out for him; but the stranger pulled back, he flinched. Calen was glad. Giddy with the change of power, he launched forward to grab the stranger. This time, he remembered being flung back into living room wall behind him. It was like the memory of the first event crashed into his head simultaneously as he crashed into the wall the second time. Calen’s last thought as he lost consciousness was that he could not imagine why the man had flinched.
He woke up in hospital again. This time it was the police looking at him. Calen was sure he preferred the male nurse. The nurse had at least looked down at him with a smile… a great big wide-ass smile beaming from his brown face, almond eyes smiling beneath a cap of curly black hair. The police by comparison, wore pasty white expressions with bored steely eyes under thinning brown peppered hair. They were dishevelled and clearly looked like they would rather be elsewhere. Calen at least shared their feelings in this. He hated hospitals and he hated the fact that people were looking into his life. But then, one couldn’t just tell the police to get lost, you might need them someday and it was beginning to look like Calen’s someday was here. Another attack in so many months, he hoped they would write it off as the first one. But the police had different thoughts, they were convinced that he knew more than he was saying, more than he was able to tell them so far. Apparently, strangers did not appear in your apartment on two separate, unrelated occasions, only to knock you about, leave no bruises or trace and keep you unconscious for a couple of weeks and oh yes, take nothing. No…
Still, Calen didn’t have much to say. The stranger was as before, a stranger, dressed in brown slacks and a white shirt, an easy style, no belt, no jewellery except a thin black band on his hand. It was strange the things Calen remembered like the fact that the stranger had no scars. He had no idea why he would notice that. He noticed though that the stranger wore his hair short, news-anchor style; that he seemed fairly normal, a normal everyday man who packed a punch whenever you touched him. The police, of course, weren’t really interested in those details. They wanted to know what Calen did for a living and what he did to attract a man’s attention who clearly wanted to kill him. But Calen didn’t care, he wanted to get back to his life and to his apartment. Eventually the police left him, they visited for a while every now and then just to remind him that they were watching, after a fashion.
Three
Calen opened the door to his apartment. He hadn’t bothered with the locks in a while. It had been months since the last police visit and even longer since… But he was back. The stranger was waiting. This time Calen took his time. He hadn’t enjoyed the police visits and decided it would be worthwhile not end up in hospital again. Besides, he was just not as angry as the other times. He hadn’t been that angry in a while. He chose the sofa opposite the armchair and waited. The stranger had to want something from him. This time, he’d wait to hear it. But the stranger was also waiting; waiting and staring; staring at Calen.
Calen shifted on the sofa nervously, pushing off some books and old newspapers to join the existing collection occupying the floor space. He could feel himself twitching on the inside and he decided to break the impasse. He was hungry and anxious and worse.
“Can I get you something”, he asked.
He thought this a better entrance than his previous attempts. He’d had the time to think it through, the police interviews, that is, the time waiting for them to see him and question him. He had thought through how he would do things differently. Ask different questions, not touch him, and especially not touch him.
“A drink, coffee, ah… tea?”
“Then, perhaps something to eat?”
Calen sighed into the silence.
“You know”, Calen added, “I hate that I was such a bad host the last couple of times, with the yelling…”
He left out that most hosts got to invite their guests and most wouldn’t expect to get thrown into the walls of their apartments. Admittedly he had laid hands on him, which was not about to happen again, he reminded himself again. Definitely no laying of hands!
“You know that armchair that you seem to like is… belonged to my… Lisa. It was her favourite chair”.
Calen took a deep breath while massaging his temple and kneading his eyes. Then he began to talk about her. It was the second time of doing this. He did it with the police as a kind of trial run. So he did it again, only this time, it was personal. Though, Calen wasn’t sure if it was really the stranger who drew the personal revelations from him. Maybe it was just time; time to pour himself out; time to start talking about how he felt; what he would do again if he had the chance. He talked about their relationship, how they’d met, how they’d fought and got back together again, how she’d left several times, running off and coming back sorry, always sorry. How she had died, sorry. Calen couldn’t stop talking, it was like all the efforts of his family, counsellors and even the police, all their questions pulled out of him a long lost flow of therapies, a waterfall of confidences.
When Calen finished, he could feel himself on the wall, falling, which he thought was most unfair as he hadn’t even touched the stranger this time. Slipping into unconsciousness, he dreaded waking up and having to face the police questions again. It had to be worse a third time around. At the very edge of darkness, Calen thought he saw the stranger get up.
When he woke up, he was not in hospital. No hospital surely meant no police. No pasty snarling suspicion; no more questions. No, Calen didn’t mind waking up from the stranger this time. He was in his bed. He did not plan to get up. The world would wait, that is till he saw the armchair in his bedroom. The stranger had moved the chair. Calen dragged himself out of bed, ignoring his battered body. It didn’t matter that the chair was empty. He had tried being hospitable. He had even poured out his insides as some kind of cosmic trauma treatment. But Calen was not having anyone move the furniture around in his house. It was not just about the armchair he said to himself, it was the principle of it. He prowled round his apartment, half dragging himself through it, his right leg lagging behind needing help. But there was no one in the apartment, no stranger, no strange man in easy slacks. And as he dragged himself back to his bed, Calen tripped on his coat on the floor and fell flat on his chest and just like that, he cried and bawled and wept. He cried and yelled some more and then lay there, sniffling and disgusted with himself. He pushed himself off the floor, tried to make it to his bed, but he fell again, this time into the armchair. Calen stayed there, sitting in the armchair, too tired to figure out what next. He sat in it and waited.
Four
Nolan pushed the door open first with his butt, winching it with right arm and knee as he struggled under the weight of the sofa. He began muttering to himself.
“Hey, I heard that”, a faraway voice called at the other end of the sofa.
“Heard what?”
“Fine, complain all you want, but when you’re done and need somewhere to crash and this is the only thing calling ya, remember” Steve finished mystifyingly.
“Remember what? That we could have bought a smaller furniture piece? That it’s just the two of us for crying out loud and we had to get some freaking space machine doubling as a sofa”.
The argument continued between the two men as they staggered under the weight of the 8ft plus home suite piece. Nolan was particularly bitter as there were still other bits and pieces accompanying the sofa, that they still yet to carry. So at first he did not see him and then Steve said, “I think there’s someone sleeping in our chair”.
Nolan turned round to find a man with his eyes closed sitting in the armchair. The man was well-dressed, short hair and neat looking. Nolan stared incredulously at the stranger in their apartment.
“What the… Hey don’t look at me for that chair, don’t you say our chair”, he said. “You’re the furniture finding freak”.
Steve ignored the jibe. “I think I’m going to call the Police.”
“Yeah, well we should at least try to wake him.”
“Yeah… but what if… he’s dead?”
“Does he look dead? Come on. Besides what are we going to say? Hello, there’s stranger asleep, possibly dead in our brand new apartment. He doesn’t exactly look vagrant”.
“Still, he could be dangerous”, Steve replied calmly.
“- And there’s two of us”, Nolan challenged still.
“Fine! You wake him; I’m calling the Police… Where’s the phone?”
Nolan was increasingly aware that the day was not going to plan. Steve returned to say that since the apartment was empty and there were no signs of a break-in, technically they weren’t too high on police response priority at the moment. They were advised to wait and touch nothing. Nolan growled that he wasn’t waiting, he had plans for this evening and that carrying the sofa had almost ruined them. He touched his back gingerly. He swore to himself and suddenly walked over to the armchair and shook the strange man.
Calen woke up to find a very angry man staring down at him, telling him he had called the Police and he’d better get moving. He was confused. Who the hell was this man yelling at him? He was in his apartment, but as he looked round, it did not look like it was his apartment any more. He had sold it. But then, what was he doing in the apartment that now belonged to someone else. He ignored the furious man above him and spied another man nervously watching him from the other end of a sofa, a rather large one. He rose and the furious man jumped back. Calen smiled apologetically, explaining that he must have fallen asleep. He apologised again for the inconvenience and asked for the bathroom to freshen himself before leaving. He could see that they wanted him to leave immediately, but he kept smiling at them again, producing a set of keys and his driver’s licence. In the bathroom, Calen washed his face slowly; letting the water drip over his eyes, nose, down his chin and down the black band on his wrist. He could hear the new inhabitants arguing over something. He looked at himself in the mirror, the face of a stranger stared back at him. Calen sighed; he’d have to warn them about the armchair. He had been unable to get it fixed.
THUD! Too late!
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EllePepper reviewed Version 2 -
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mrkawaiipenguin reviewed Version 2 -
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First, I call a “built in wardrobe” a closet. (4th Sentence) Same sentence, “as it sank to a heap”, what’s happening? I thought the overcoat was already in the closet. The sixth sentence is a little confusing. I think it’s just wording. I’d imagine if he didn’t care for the mail his attention wouldn’t be on it. At least not enough to fail to realize that someone else was sitting in “her” chair. Next “he couldn’t help it”, what couldn’t he help? I’m confused. After that “he saw him”, use an adjective to show the reader and not confuse them.
In a whole, the first paragraph is filled with action but I don’t see anything. Is it a big place? Are there a lot of windows? Is it noon or midnight? Is all his furniture gone? There is too little detail.
I like the second paragraph a lot better. There’s less going on but I know where he is. I can feel his confusion and his wishes that “she” was there. Though it could be combined with the third paragraph. The phrase “apparently mystifying” is not something I’d associate with cops. Things might baffle them though the wording is just not right.
As for the rest of the story, I’m very confused about what’s happening and why. The time line is skewed and I’m not sure why I know the new people’s names. I have a lot of questions after finishing reading this. I’m unsatisfied as it seems very incomplete. I wish I knew more.
Keep writing, I love your overall style. Review mine and you’ll get more in depth return of your own.
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poetking reviewed Version 2 -
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good, but punctuation and layout need to be watched whilst you are putting your ideas in print, keep this going, then re-read your work before you move onto your next chapter, if you do that each time, you will improve your work ten-fold! i want to read more of your work
brianna319 reviewed Version 1 -
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This is really good. The storyline is really interesting, not knowing what’s going on and never really understanding even at the end. The ending is wonderfully written, and it has a funny twist. The fact that Calen understands, but no one else seems to is funny.
drowsingmuse reviewed Version 1 -
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Take a good look at your sentences. Really tear them apart in some places. There’s a lot of comma usage that makes some of the sentences long or awkward. Also, pay attention to word choices!
“He was too tired to notice anything really.”
—You could end this sentence differently and make it a lot stronger. “Really” is sort of a weak, throwaway word.
“At first he thought he was dreaming of Lisa in the hospital and that his dream had some pretty impressive smell- effects.”
—This sentence has a lot happening. You could probably break it down or rework it so that it’s clearer and stronger. Also, you bring in the idea of “smell-effects” which (for me) brings Philip K. Dick to mind. But you don’t add anything else like this to the story. So you probably want to rid the story of this oddity or make it part of the story.
“A male nurse opened his eyes.”
—In this sentence, you mean a male nurse physically pried open the main character’s eyes. You probably want to make that abundantly clear, otherwise it seems like you’re switching point of view randomly.
“It was apparently mystifying for them, whatever it was that had laid him out ought to have killed him by the doctors’ accounts.”
—Another sentence that can probably be broken down into two separate sentences. Try to write with one main idea per sentence. When you put too much in one sentence, it makes it harder to follow.
“When he returned from hospital, it stopped looking likely that he would follow-up on this acquaintance. Calen was glad that no one showed for the grateful thank.”
—You skipped ahead, leaving some stuff out here. Did he ever plan to find out if he had a nice neighbor? I really didn’t get that impression. These sentences are awkward and don’t really express the situation well. I grasp what you’re going for, I just think it can be done a lot better.
“In a way, he hadn’t expected to see the stranger back, the event filed away as some anomaly in the back of his mind.”
—Confusing. He forgot it. But now he sees the stranger and he remembers? You’re telling the story but sometimes you’re skipping a step or two in the narrative. Going from A to C, as it were. Explain things a little more and the story won’t suffer. It’s an interesting story and at this point I’m curious about the stranger and the armchair.
“In his bid not to be this person, not to be this mad crazy man, he reached out for him; but the stranger pulled back, he flinched.”
—I understand the action sequence, but it could use some help. It’s significant that the stranger flinched. Make it significant in the narrative. Don’t just throw this little encounter away by shoving it all into one sentence.
“He woke up in hospital again. This time it was the police looking at him. Calen was sure he preferred the male nurse. The nurse had at least looked down at him with a smile… a great big wide-ass smile beaming from his brown face, almond eyes smiling beneath a cap of curly black hair.”
—In a story with very little description, I found this out of place. I think you could probably even skip over the description of the stranger, saying simply that Calen told the police what he could remember? It might work that way. I’d have to read how you wrote it to be sure; just a suggestion!
“Another attack in so many months, he hoped they would write it off as the first one. But the police had different thoughts, they were convinced that he knew more than he was saying, more than he was able to tell them so far.”
—The police involvement is understandable, but it becomes something of a loose end. And since the story is from Calen’s perspective, you could push that here, making him aware of the police or suspecting they were watching him more closely than was apparent. Generally speaking though, I’m not sure the police would be suspecting the victim. Also, this raises a very, very important question. How did he get to the hospital? After the first time, we suspect that he has a helpful neighbor. Did he hear the noise and call 911? Did the same neighbor call again?
“It was not just about the armchair he said to himself, it was the principle of it.”
—A pet peeve of mine (even though I am often guilty) is ending a sentence with the word “it”. See? I just did it there. Seriously, though, ending a sentence with “it” is weak. And in this sentence, you use “it” three times. That’s a lot! Make your story stronger. You have a very interesting premise and a lot of potential. Back it up with the narration.
“as they staggered under the weight of the 8ft plus home suite piece.”
—I was really confused when the story switched from Calen (and what I consider his point of view) to these two new guys. I caught on after a moment, but this sentence is awkward. Just a detail that’s a little too much. You could just as easily call the sofa cumbersome or unwieldy.
—After reading the story, I have a few questions. Take them or leave them, but here they are:
-What happened to Lisa? Did she end up in the hospital because of the stranger? If it had been her favorite chair, why? If she could sit in it, why can’t anyone else? You don’t have to answer these questions for the reader necessarily. But you do need to have the answers as the author, I think.
-What happened to Calen after his breakdown? It’s sort of off-handedly said he sold the apartment. Did he Rip Van Winkle a little on us? I don’t get exactly what happened there. I almost got the sense that Lisa was always sorry but the stranger was there to make Calen sorry for something. Almost like he’d always blamed Lisa or was never willing to take his share of the blame. But now he would learn a lesson? Food for thought.
-The story premise is really interesting, but I feel the ending isn’t as good as it could be, almost like you got to the end and just wanted it to end. I don’t think you even need the new guys to meet the stranger. I like the idea of Calen having a personal demon. Like a Raven who says “Nevermore” that drives him crazy, yes? (Poe, the Raven – if you don’t know what I mean)
Good stuff to work with. With some editing, I think it could be a really good story. Sort of Twilight Zone-esque. Work on your sentences, definitely. And I think you need an ending that lives up to the hype of the earlier parts of the story.
Questions? I’m happy to clarify.
Good luck!
Misticism reviewed Version 1 -
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You have potential and your writing is intriguing, however there is a disjointed feeling to it. A minor few issues I have are the spelling and punctuation errors, the descriptive paragraph about the nurse and the police (too much detail for very unimportnant characters), and just generally a sense of too many words to get across your intent. I think the ending is lacking because it is unclear how he got to that point and you did not resolve who the stanger that knocks you unconscious is or what his motives are. That was a big thing to leave hanging. Go there. I expected you to play more on the resolution of unexpressed grief and perhaps that the stranger was there for that reason or maybe something related to the girls passing, then suddenly you threw the main character into some future scene that was irrelevant to this story. It kind felt like you bailed. The point you should flesh out is the relationship with the deceased and the supressed feeling of the main character. This could be a good story if you work on it.
titanicbrittanic reviewed Version 1 -
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I was not exactly clear on what happened in the last chapter… I realize that the apartment now belongs so to someone else, but I was not clear on how it had changed hands. Otherwise, this was an entirely worth reading.
I notice that you refer to it as ‘her chair’ for a long period before writing any about what had happened in Calen’s life to make him as distraught as he is. I appreciate the fact that you build suspense, but when you finally release the information about the relationship you go through it almost as if listing it. You add no detail to a possible climzx of the story. If she was his love of a lieftime, doesn’t she deserve more than three lines about what made her that special someone? This is just a thought for you to build on.
I would also like to understand who the man in the chair is, but I can assume that you may not know yourself what he represents. Perphaps he represents a past time, the time before the stress came into Calen’s life.
I also appreciate the fact that you classify this as a 60’s kind of scifi story; you did an admirable job attempting it.
Lunajamnia reviewed Version 1 -
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Amazing. Very descriptive. I am slightly confused, though-is the chair like a time machine?
DCAllen reviewed Version 1 -
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I enjoyed this. The structure of the story is its strength. I was genuinely interested in finding out who the stranger is (but then just a tiny bit disappointed in the end that it’s left open). But OK. The weakness is a very loose prose style that aches to be cleaned up.
Proofreading notes and other observations:
he knew what day it was, Calen grunted. (If Calen does not grunt this sentence, Calen grunted needs to be a new sentence.)
follow-up (with the hyphen) is a noun or an adjective. The verb is spelled without the hyphen.
“What are you doing here?” (Is this line spoken by Calen? If so, it needs to be on the same line of dialogue as the one before it.)
They were dishevelled (The antecedent for They is not clear here. This would be clearer if you put all the description in an embedded phrase and used police as the subject of this sentence: The police, pasty faced and steely eyed, clearly looked as if they wanted to be somewhere else. Or similar. I’m sure you can do better.)
thoughts, they were (comma splice. Remedy: use a colon here.)
Apparently, strangers (But this is one stranger. It’s actually a stranger that Calen, by now, could describe – and does in the next paragraph.)
break the impasse (break sounds like the wrong word here. The dictionary gives overcome, but that sounds awkward in this case.)
he cried and bawled and wept (awkward. I know you probably like this, but all these things mean that he cried.)
that they still yet to carry (auxiliary verb missing?)
belonged to someone else. = else?
RisingJester reviewed Version 1 -
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You have an interesting story and a very unique twist at the end, but you aren’t very clear on many things. Like just who Calen is, what he does, or what he looks like. And aside from a couple of missing words here and there like “the” as in “the hospital”, its a very good story, I would look over it again to find all the places with missing words and fill in the few plot holes about Calen. Over all I really enjoyed this story. Good job I look forward to more.
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