Creative Writing Critique's topics - tribe.net

Critique please

theralle — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:27:49 GMT

It's been a very long time since I've been here. I'm rarely even checking into Tribe these days...I've got a far-too-full plate and find that I don't have much time for writing.

But, I recently wrote up something that, if you have the time, I would like feedback for, if you can, that is. Anything that you have to offer will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Tell Ring Lardner that he can sue me if he wants, but the Emperor is still as naked as he was the moment he was born.

The ‘odor’ of ones pedigree determined everything for me when I was an idealistic and motivated honor student through my undergraduate years. I was, indeed, an honor student, but at a public university. The ‘public’ part of the university that I graduated from bestowed a distinctly ‘bargain basement’ note to my pedigree’s odor and thus I was marked upon graduation: Page but never Bibliographer, Copy Editor but never Managing Editor, Bridesmaid but never Bride. This is a particularly difficult thing in life to accept when one is a bit smarter than ones peers and more than just a little motivated to achieve success as I was then. I bore my “place”, as it were, with the tacit understanding that my days as a Bridesmaid were temporary and did my best to camouflage the chip on my shoulder.

Upon graduating, the job market proved to be anything but sympathetic. For every editing room position that I was denied, there were five offers as a “receptionist,” a skirt, a piece of window dressing that never advanced beyond the lobby unless it was by way of the bedroom and even in that case, the advancement went no farther than the mail room. I couldn’t resign myself to my Hyacinth Robinson position in the publishing world. So, I put my search for work in the publishing industry on hold and took a position as a Reading Room Archivist at the library of the public university’s library from which I received my degree. It was a safe, quiet environment for me to lick the wounds heaped upon my battered ego, to regroup, and to plan another strategy for rising above the ridiculously low and unfair expectations assigned to me by the odor of my pedigree.

At about the time that I was beginning to feel restless, restrained by a corset that I’d outgrown before I’d even donned it as an Archivist, feeling a need to go out and try to crash through the cultural wall that blocked my entrance into the publishing world, 18 months into my position as the Reading Room Archivist, I happened to spot a flyer displayed in the library near the circulation desk;

Rutherford Smalley, Ring Lardner/Algonquin Round Table Specialist and
Managing Editor of Heliotrope Fiction Magazine, will be heading up a round
table critique next Thursday in the Parker Goss Room of the library from 8am
through 4 pm. Bring your best fiction for his insight and opinion. Pre-registration
is required.

There was a phone number with a prefix for the library for information and registration and another phone number for Rutherford Smalley at his office at Heliotrope Fiction Magazine. I ripped the flyer off of the wall and carefully folded it up small enough to fit into my pocket.

I want to write. I want to capture the number one spot on the New York Times best seller list for 12 consecutive months. And, I want to wallow in all the power and glory that this achievement brings. I want all this, but I don’t expect it. When I graduated, I hoped to get my foot in the door with a publishing house in some editing capacity, a capacity which would, at some point in the future, allow me to grow into something vaguely literary, a commentator or reviewer, perhaps. Once I’d established myself as a commentator, I’d hoped to be able to bargain my way into getting some of the fiction that I’d written published. It’s not what I hoped for, merely what I’d expected. As I just mentioned, I’d hoped for a type of success that was much more immediate. It’s sad that I hadn’t even achieved what I’d expected, much less for what I’d hoped. Seeing the flyer nudged my ambition up into the driver seat of the judgment making centers of my neo-cortex. I, while pretending to be a reporter for a wholly fictional underground newspaper titled with anything that came to my mind, decided, in a moment fueled by the most naked of competitive urges, to call Rutherford Smalley at Heliotrope for an interview. Through the course of this ‘interview,’ I was going to find out what tickled his vanity enough to get noticed. Then, I was going to take this knowledge to my voluminous stack of unpublished fiction, sort through the stack to find the most promising piece, beef it up to ensure that it hits home with Mr. Smalley, and then, with a day off from my job, show up next Thursday with a piece of tailor-made fiction that would be sure to catch Rutherford’s eye.

“There’s been no good satire published, perhaps even written, since 1933.” Rutherford spoke with authority and a British accent.

“None?” I asked, keeping my questions to a single word. I’d hoped to lead him into as much exposition as possible and I’d gotten the feeling thus far in the conversation that he’d talk up a blue streak as long as I didn’t interrupt him. He was a man who seemed to enjoy the sound of his own voice and the thrill of voicing his own opinions.

“None.” That British accent. “The Algonquin Round Table period was the most fruitful and productive period in the history of American satire. Every bit written published after that was and is rubbish.”

“Rubbish?”

“I remember discussing with Ring - ” Lardner? “ – not long before he passed, the dearth that seemed to be emerging then of refreshing, biting humor in American Literature. The situation has only gotten worse since then. These days, I don’t even finish reading the pathetic and humorless manuscripts that get passed on to me.” This last sentence made me wonder why, exactly, he was agreeing to moderate the round table. Was he doing this with the desire to find someone who would shatter the modern norm of dismal satire or was he doing this so that he could brow-beat some poor as-yet unpublished writer in order to massage his own ego?

“Ring?” Ring Lardner? Rutherford Smalley had spoken to Ring Lardner before he died? I wondered just how old Rutherford Smalley could be. And, what was it with that British accent?

I finished up the phone interview with a fist full of unanswered questions regarding Rutherford Smalley, his acquaintance with the late Ring Lardner, his British accent, his age, questions which I worked to set right researching with tools available to me because of my job in the reading room archives, abstracts, bibliographies, connections with other and larger libraries. According to my research, Ring Lardner died in 1933. That meant that Rutherford Smalley had to be in the United States before 1933. From 1933 to the present was a good 75 years, plenty of time to lose a British accent if one had a British accent to begin with. But again, according to my research, Rutherford Smalley was from small town Illinois and graduated from an exclusive Ivy League University in 1970. Rutherford Smalley, in a polite circle, would be known as faux. In my world, populated with bargain basement pedigrees, he’d simply be known as full of crap.

I sat down with my stack of promising (or so I hoped) fiction, looking for anything Lardner-esque when the most wicked idea popped into my Bridesmaid’s brain: I could copy something by Ring Lardner and submit it for critique next Thursday as my own work to see if Rutherford Smalley was wise to the plagiarism. If, like his British accent and his first hand intimacy with Ring Lardner, his knowledge of Lardner’s writing was false, I’d go to my grave with the satisfaction of knowing that my bargain basement pedigree, the degree from the public university that is, had more meat to it than his mere façade of intellectual excellence from this exclusive Ivy League University. If I never found a job in the publishing industry, the nature and knowledge of Mr. Smalley’s conceit could sustain me well into the sweet hereafter.

As I already mentioned, job as Reading Room Archivist had perks – access to abstracts to not only everything in our library, but also to everything in the libraries with which we had loan agreements. In another University’s 20th Century American Literature archives, there was a single copy of a collection of short stories written by Ring Lardner. As luck would have it, I was able to have instant access to the book on the internet. I stayed late that evening at work looking for the perfect story in this collection to plagiarize and I found it: A little gem of a tale titled “Stop me – if you’ve heard this one.” The piece was perfect for what I had in mind. It tells the story of two young playwrights, Jerry Blades and Luke Garner, and their first meeting with a charming ‘globe trotter and banquet fixture,’ Henry Wild Osburne. Through the course of this meeting, Garner had occasion to describe to Osburne a mystery, of sorts, that Garner encountered on a recent trip. The details of this mystery were many and exact; a train ride to Chicago, the presence of a young woman who was dark, about 25, well dressed and in possession of a J. S. Fletcher detective novel, a quixotic dinner at a table with 3 complete strangers that involved the aforementioned young woman and one of the men at the dinner table, and long after dinner when everyone had retired to their individual cabins, the young woman making a request of Garner to go look for the man from dinner in the Club car and to deliver to him a hand written note that she’d prepared. Two years after this initial meeting between Osburne, Garner and Blades, Blades and Garner were at a banquet and, somewhere off in the crowd, they overheard Osburne telling a rapt crowd about an adventure that he’d experienced – it was identical with exception to a few minor and insignificant details, to the story Garner had told him two years earlier and Osburne was telling the story as though it were his.

I flipped open my laptop, opened up a new MSWord file which I titled “Stop me – if you’ve heard this one.” And started, “On a certain day in the year 1927, Jerry blades and Luke Garner, young playwrights, entered the Lambs’ Club at the luncheon hour and were beckoned to a corner table by an actor friend, Charley Speed.” Forty five minutes later, I’d polished off the file ending with my name, the date and a word count. As much as I was looking forward to tripping the pompous and phony Rutherford Smalley up, I hadn’t considered the possibility that he’d recognize the plagiarism until the morning of the round table standing outside of the Parker Goss room at 7:45 am. This new revelation caused me a brief spate of anxiety and I fought with the urge to leave before Smalley arrived. But I didn’t leave. My curiosity concerning the outcome of my ruse outweighed my fear by a long shot. I stood and waited with 10 copies of my manuscript – one for Rutherford Smalley, one for myself and eight for the eight other participants of the round table.

As luck would have it, my manuscript was chosen to be first for reading and critique that morning. Feeling every bit the cat who ate the canary, I passed out copies to Smalley and the other eight members, then sat down feeling a psychic canary feather tickling the tip of my nose as I did so. Before the end of the morning, I was to see that providence would provide me with an opportunity to thumb my nose at the possibility that Smalley would recognize the plagiarism.

It didn’t take long, perhaps about a half of an hour, for the eight members of the group to start to uncomfortably fidget and rustle. I noticed two of them glaring at me as though I’d committed some social blunder such as burping or farting. A third young woman laid the manuscript, unfinished, face down on the table in front of her and stared intently at me in silent disbelief. A snicker from a young man at the opposite end of the table told me that just about everyone at the table knew what I’d done. Except Rutherford Smalley. Every pair of eyes in the room, except Smalley’s pair, were on me. Smalley’s were eagerly devouring my trap. I grinned broader at the 16 accusing eyes, then turned my gaze to the 98-year-old-who-appeared-to-be-only-56, the one with the Springfield-Illinois-British-accent who was racing through ‘Stop me – if you’ve heard this one” so quickly one could almost imagine smoke rising up from the surface of the pages in front of him.

Just as the industrially designed clock over the door ticked 9:30 am, Rutherford Smalley slammed the last page of my manuscript down on the table in front of him, got up onto his feet, rubbed an affectedly weary hand over his forehead, and asked me in his British accent, “What is this?”

In that instant, the amount of time contained within four clicks of the unforgiving hand of that industrially designed clock, I made a decision. If Smalley recognized this plagiarism, I would come completely clean, owning up to my doubting that he’d ever known Lardner let alone his being able to recognize Lardner’s work. If Smalley didn’t recognize the plagiarism, I’d go to my grave a supremely happy individual.

“What’s what?” I had no choice but to revoice the question since there was nothing decisive in Smalley’s initial query. I wasn’t sure whether he knew what this was or not.

A smile slowly began to bloom through his thin, bloodless lips. “You’re the cheeky one,” he muttered ‘cheeky’, a typically British word for ‘sarcastic’ in his something-like-British accent. “Not quite Lardner, but close. Certainly close enough to show a world of promise! I think you know what that means.” He chuckled and reached down to pick up my manuscript. The remaining members of the round table were dumb struck. “It literally screams ‘Ring’! What you need is the right editor. I’m sure I can find a publisher.”

“No! No! No!” Mr. Snicker-at-the-end-of-the-table shouted. He stood up. “I can’t believe that this is happening! This is so wrong!” He stared at me but only briefly. He swiveled his glowering gaze over to Rutherford Smalley. “You can’t be serious! Don’t you know what this is?”

“Young man,” Smalley spoke to him without looking at him, his eyes still riveted to me. “I know exactly what this is. It’s some of the best contemporary satire that I’ve seen in a good many years.” On a certain day in the year 1927…contemporary?

“You simply cannot be serious!” Mr. Snicker-at-the-end-of-the-table screamed at the ceiling. “This has to be some sort of seriously wrong joke! I can’t believe this – where’s the hidden camera? Where?” He rotated his head around, mocking the movements of someone looking for something hidden in the pattern of the library’s state-of-the-art gray and beige geometric patterned wall paper. “Where? This just can’t be! Certainly you, you,” he hissed, “Rutherford Smalley, world renowned Ring Lardner authority, can see what this is!”

“Again, my good man,” Smalley, this time, turned his head slightly to look askance at Mr. Snicker-at-the-end-of-the-table. “I know exactly what I have here. I’m taking it from your, oh, ‘tone’ that you don’t agree. But, I must remind you, of the two of us, I’m the one with the PhD from an exclusive Ivy League University in 20th Century American Literature. Of the two of us, my dear Sir, I am the one with a Peabody Award. Of the two of us, I am the only one with a Pulitzer.”

Mr. Snicker-at-the-end-of-the-table threw up his arms in exasperation, slumped down into his chair, reached down for his back pack and then stood up. “You’re a feckless boob!” He yelled at Smalley as he stomped out of the Parker Goss Room.

“I thought it was very good.” Ms.-staring-intently-at-me spoke up tentatively. Smalley nodded approvingly at her. “Very much like,” she cleared her throat, “very much like Ring Lardner.” She lowered her gaze down to the manuscript in front of her on the table and kept her gaze there. There was a very low chorus of assent that followed her statement. “Very, very much so.” Here, she raised her right hand to cover her mouth in what appeared to me to be an effort to suppress a giggle.

“You’ll need a publisher.”

“I don’t plan to publish it.” I really didn’t. I didn’t relish the idea of being sued by the current owner of Ring Lardner’s “Stop me – if you’ve heard this one.”

“Trust me, you do.”

“Trust me, I don’t.” I could hear a muffled snicker from one of the paper rustlers.

“You really do. Don’t be a fool.” This comment brought that muffled snicker, as a loud guffaw, out into the open from the same paper rustler. It landed in the air between the ten of us as a massive seizure, a Tourette’s type of explosion, an unholy gut bomb. Smalley glared menacingly in the direction of the guffawer inducing a formidable silence.

“I really don’t.” I wondered if Smalley would ever recognize himself in Osburne: A phony little man in love with the sound of his own embarrassingly loud voice, a hollow show piece whose only specialty was pedantry, unwittingly gets exposed.

Perhaps, if I’d used an outlandish nom de plum such as “Bozo the Clown,” “Xena the Warrior Princess of Fire” maybe, or even the obvious “Ring Lardner,” Rutherford might’ve been able to conjure up some semblance of a clue. Or, perhaps not.

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 0 replies

dublit writing contest

Stefano [Dilagare] — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:28:29 GMT

Hi there, here is a writing contest for this month that may be of interest for many of you.
They have quite good $$prices and solid review process.

Check it out:

www.dublit.com/contest

Cheers,

Stephan

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 0 replies

Please critique, Short Story "The City Bus"

mad mark — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:26:31 GMT

“The City Bus”

By: Mark Stegman

The city bus was a heavy dead dragon being dragged along by a knight forced into service for minimum wage. The dead zombies inside sat silently not knowing that they were alive; they waited in limbo to get back to their lives. The bus was heavy, loaded thick with the air of silence, loaded thick with the weight of the engine rumbling loud and smelling thick diesel fumes. The lone reddish pink light of the interior of the bus lit the silent people sitting next to one another, yet a mile apart from each other. They averted their eyes from one another and looking at whatever is not a person, unless their happens to be an unfortunate walker by, then the entire bus takes brief notice; if the unfortunate walker by happens to be a beautiful women, then the men continue to look well after a short glance, there is nobody speaking, a sad trip.

The bus roars and halts, the riders lean forward together in g-force unison. At this stop no one gets off, but a jester boards through the front door. Tis’ a modern day jester, not a decorated hatter colorful banjo toting feather in the cap wearing jester, but an ordinary jester that one couldn’t tell if this funny man was a jester at all or anything but a crazy man smiling like he is at everyone as soon as he boards the bus. His sudden presence though, like color in a black and white world, like rain on starched bleached desert sand, strikes sparks in the lines of reality in the bus. The rider’s on the bus became conscious of the reality of the bus, like the past was pre-life and suddenly time was born, awaken by the stimulus of oddity. This man saw the space between the people and laughed out loud and beamed smiles around the space. He sat next to a giant of a man who has been frowning at everyone since he boarded the bus. As the jester sat next to the large man, all on the bus saw the space in the air between all the people become filled with colorful electric photons zipping and spiraling, snapping, hissing, whirling, and then dropping, halting as each person averted their eyes, looked away from each other shyly with curt smiles. Yet as the sullen riders saw these dim glowing laser beams zipping and whirling and the unaffected smile of the colorful jester, they began to smile. Faintly at first, their smiles enforced the dim lines of energy’s paths and they began to open just faintly, showing colored plains of green and blue. Thus the jester laughed at the exposing awareness and some of the older people began to giggle. Children jumped into the aisle and swiped at the speeding electric lines zinging about, moving right thru their tiny chests harmlessly. They jumped right into their pathways waving their tiny hands; they could feel the pulse of communal electricity in the laser lights. The young teens and hipsters began to shed their cool pose and began awing and talking of these strange energies exposed. “What could it be?” They asked. The elders, being much wiser, knew that what was being exposed was there all along. “It’s only the pre-existing reality.” The older folk told the young teen-agers. The colorful Jester has made it all become visible.

Through all the laughing and kids at play, even the bus driver was smiling and could be heard laughing, there was one man not stirred, one man actually stirring in his own homebrew of hate. He was a brown wall impenetrable; this the jester thought most amusing, and laughed and “hahad” and sent playful arches of energy toward the giant man. The man looked up and with his eyes said

“What the hell you looking at? I’ll kick your ass!” His silent words reflected off the inside of the brown wall surrounding him and broke apart, fragmenting into the air. The jester frowned mockingly, momentarily stunning the giant. While the giant sad man looked confused, for he has never seen anything like a jester, or anyone ever make faces at him like that, the colorful jester swooped his hands up through the brown murk wall surrounding the giant. The people gasped and became silent, their chatter stunned, everyone turned and watched. The jester, taking the dripping brown softball size murk ball in his hands, rolled it into a ball. The giant looked up and speaking through his eyes once more said,

“Huh?”

“What?”

And “Dha?”

The jester smiles a wide grin and quickly shaped the mud into a dove and opens his hands like a magician. A brown dove flew upward to the ceiling of the bus. The happy people gasped and cheered and laughed; the children “Oohed” and screamed for more. The giant took a sudden interest that quickly faded and vanished. The jester turned, turning his smile upside down. At the same time the dove turned upside down and melted before everyone. The crowd on the bus went silent. The jester asked the giant with widened eyes, “Do you see what happened? Do you get that?”

The giant, finding hidden language in ancient energy patterns, growls back, reverberating low waves that bang into each other and creep through the brown wall surrounding him that said, “You can’t possibly understand my hurt, my pain, my anger!”

The jester once again arched his outstretched stretching hand sweeping up ward thru the giants murky wall scooping a heaping handful into his hands. He shaped it into a circle then with one gulp, he swallowed it. The people on the bus choked on their own teeth stunned. Then the bus broke into laughter. The laughter on the bus was quickly curtailed as they saw the jesters face suddenly pale and green.

“He bit off more than he can chew.” One of the old ladies near the back said as she watched the colorful man intently. They watched the jesters eyes speak.

“Ahh yes, a big bite indeedee, painful like all emotion, made of energy, made of light, and(he grunted) with that(he shifted in his seat) we can ( another grunt) make anything into anything we want(He opened his mouth and echoed loudly a rictorious burp). He lifted a leg passing a tsunami fart that literally blew the hair up of the sad large man next to him. A moment of silence then everyone, including the giant, cracked up rolling with laughter ( some farting as they laughed making more laughter). The giant lifted a leg, the hole bus ducked and covered (as if that would help the nuclear affect of such transformed energy, the giant burst out laughing and screaming(no fart); the understanding was made.

The bus had stopped, the driver laughing and wiping tears from his eyes; the jester departed and disappeared unnoticed as all the people were doubled over in laughter with tears of life in their eyes.

Mark Stegman 5/30/2006

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 4 replies

Simon Cowell Critique My Manuscript

Helene — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:01:33 GMT

Knee Deep in the Friend-Zone by LG Putzer

Chapter 1

I wasn’t having the best day in my life. As soon as my friend Jenna, who I secretly wished could be more than a friend, found out what I’d done, I’d be lucky if she would still want to know me.
The truth is, the pressure got to be too much for me. I was desperate! I know you’ve all been there: Everyone is counting on you, your parents are already bragging to everyone they know. You need to make the grade. What would you do in my position? Let opportunity pass you by?
I’m Robert Isaacs, but everyone calls me Bobby. Jenna Richards and I have been friends since kindergarten. Well, that’s where we met. We were both kind of disasters at the time—I had to wear a brace on my leg because I had broken it in two places falling out of a tree I’d climbed on Labor Day weekend, and Jenna had to wear special glasses a few hours every day because she had what they called a lazy eye. One of her eyes didn’t see as well as the other, so they gave her glasses with one lens popped out where the bad eye looked through it, and a pitch black lens to cover up the good eye.
The other kids made fun of her, and no one would play with her. I knew what she was going through; I had trouble making friends, myself. I was really shy when I was in kindergarten.
One day Jenna sat next to me and said, “Hi, would you be my friend?” As they say, the rest is history. But that was years ago. We’re fourteen now, but we were thirteen when the story I’m about to tell you happened.
Personally, I think people should just skip over thirteen. It’s the worst age to be. They should place a ban on middle school and let us get to the good stuff: high school, dances, and, marching band.
I almost forgot to tell you: I play the trumpet.
I still find it embarrassing to talk about what happened, even though it’s been like a hundred years since I did it.
It all began in the spring of eighth grade. Jenna, my other friend Steve and I were in gym class.
Jenna and I met Steve in the first grade, and we could tell right away that he was really smart. He had the good sense to yell at the other kids when they made fun of Jenna or me. So, anyway, Mr. Billings, our gym teacher, was trying to teach the class the joys of baseball. Okay, so some of us have athletic ability and some of us play the trumpet. Is that such a crime? Anyway, it was my turn at bat. I could feel Mr. Billings’ bulging, bloodshot eyes on me. I got a really bad cramp in my stomach as I tried to position my hands on the bat the way he showed us to do.
This girl, Angie, who was destined to be the youngest Olympic gold-medalist baseball pitcher ever, was pitching. She had an arm that could knock out Chris Kramer, the school bully. I’ll tell you more about him later. Anyway, she pitched the ball. It was just a stupid softball, but when Angie pitched it you would swear it was a regulation-sized hard ball, like the ones they use in the professional games.
Do you need me to tell you that I swung and missed?
“Strike one!” Mr. Billings yelled out, as if he was a real umpire. “It’s a baseball bat, Isaacs, not a violin! Just swing it!”
Mr. Billings made a lot of us feel like we were worthless. He had to have known someone in a high place to get away with being so sadistic all the time.
Anyway, we each got to be humiliated three times before sitting back on the bench. I readied myself for the next pitch.
“Striiiiike twoooo!” Mr. Billings yelled, throwing up his hand with two fingers in the air to make sure we knew the number of times we’d failed. “Jesus, Isaacs, my four-year-old daughter can swing better than you!”
People wonder why teenagers have self-esteem issues.
Then Angie was kind enough to pitch me a ball I could actually hit. I ran down to first base as if my life depended on it—which it did, come to think of it.
Jenna was watching.
I can’t explain what it was about Jenna. For years we had been the best of friends. The three of us were inseparable since the first grade. Well, not every single minute. Sometimes Jenna would go hang out with Rainy Jackson and do their mall thing that girls like to do. Or if Steve were out of town, Jenna and I would just hang out together. Like last year during spring break, Steve had to go down to Florida to visit his grandparents, so Jenna and I decided to keep each other company and hang out playing video games at each other’s houses. Jenna would listen to me play my trumpet and tell me what songs she thought were good.
It was great. We spent the week going fishing, watching movies and riding our dirt bikes.
Jenna was a pretty could dirt bike rider. There’s this place in the park that has really cool dirt bike paths with hills and ramps and stuff. When there wasn’t snow on the ground, Jenna, Steve and I would go riding there all the time. In the winter we’d go ice-skating on the pond.
Anyway, Jenna and I got to hang out over last spring break.
One day we decided we’d ride the paths at the park. We both got up early in the morning. Actually, Jenna got up early one morning and came over to wake me up. Both of my parents had to go to work, but Penny was fifteen at the time, old enough to look after Jon and me on her own.
Jenna rang our doorbell. It was like seven o’clock in the morning, so both my parents were awake, getting ready for work. I could hear what was going on downstairs from all the way in my room.
“Good morning, Jenna.” My mom greeted her. “What brings you here so early this morning? Bobby is still asleep, honey.”
“He is? He told me to come over as early as I could,” Jenna said. “He wanted to get a head start so we could get to the dirt bike paths before all the other kids got there.”
“Oh,” my mom said, “Well then, come on in. You know where his bedroom is.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Isaacs.” Jenna ran up the stairs.
I could hear her running down the hall to my room, but I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to get out of bed so soon. It felt too good to just be able to lie there not having to rush around getting ready for school.
“Bobby!” Jenna pounded on the door. “Hey! Wake up! Get your lazy butt out of bed!”
I pretended to be asleep, but suddenly Jon was shaking me. “Jenna’s at the door.”
I opened one eye to find my little brother hovering over me, fully dressed. That was a first. It was a morning ritual for my mom to come into our bedroom and practically drag Jon by his legs out of bed so he would get ready for school. I was pretty sure I knew why Jon was dressed now, and I didn’t like it. He was planning on tagging along with Jenna and me to the park.
“Bobby, get up.” Jon pulled the pillow out from under my head, hitting me with it.
“Ouch, you jerk!” Bolting upright, I grabbed the pillow from my murderous freakazoid brother’s hands. “Cut it out!”
“Bobby, I know you’re awake.” Jenna was still standing outside my bedroom door. “I’m coming in.”
She barged in to catch me in my T-shirt and pajama bottoms. It was really embarrassing, having her see me like that.
I think that might have been when I first started to have these new feelings about her.
“Bobby, quick, get dressed,” she said.
I jumped out of bed, grabbed some clothes from my dresser drawers and ran past Jenna to the bathroom. I could hear her talking with Jon, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying over the noise I was making brushing my teeth. I could guess what the conversation was about, though, by the tone in Jenna’s voice.
Jon was trying to get her to talk me into taking him with us to the park.
After I finished getting dressed, I ran back into my bedroom and put my sneakers on. My parents had already left for work by the time Jenna and I ran down the stairs to the kitchen. Jon trailed close behind us.
In the kitchen, Penny sat at the counter in her bathrobe and slippers, eating cottage cheese from the container. Her hair was a mess. It was obvious that she had just rolled out of bed.
“No,” I told my brother, “you can’t come with us!”
“Why not?” His voice was whiny.
“Yeah,” Penny butted in, “why can’t Jon go to the park with you guys?” It was just like Penny to take Jon’s side. I always felt trapped when I was stuck in the house with just the two of them.
“Because he’ll just get in the way.”
“I will not!” Jon said.
“You guys are so selfish!” Penny glared at Jenna and me like we were the two meanest people in the whole world. She turned to my brother. “Forget about them, Jon. You and I can hang out together.”
Jon smiled at Penny, shooting Jenna and me a dirty look. I didn’t feel like staying around for breakfast with the two of them, so I went over to the pantry and grabbed a couple of breakfast bars.
“Jenna, here. Catch.” I threw one to her.
“Thanks.” Catching the bar with both hands, Jenna stuffed it into her backpack as we left.
I didn’t know what had started it, but I’d never gotten along with my sister Penny. She was bossy like my older sister, Stacy, except Stacy was bossy in a protective way, and Penny was just plain bossy. It was annoying! She enjoyed torturing me.
I think maybe it all started the day I was born. Before then, Penny was the youngest, the family favorite. Then I came along, and suddenly Penny wasn’t the star of the show any more. Right from the start she was jealous.
Anyway, I was happy to be getting away from her and heading for the park with Jenna.
“I’ve got an idea,” Jenna said. “Let’s see who can ride course A the fastest.”
“Okay. Who gets to go first?”
“You can, if you want.”
“What are we going to use to time ourselves?”
“We can use my watch.” Jenna unbuckled the wristband. “See? It’s got a second hand on it. We can take turns timing each other.”
“Okay.” I rode off to course A’s starting line.
Following on her bike, Jenna parked alongside the trail. “When I say go, okay?”
“Yeah, I’m ready.” I had my foot on the pedal of my bike, which was in the upward position. That way my take-off would be more effective.
“On your mark, get set…” Jenna paused strategically, to add a little suspense. “GO!”
Pushing down as hard as I could on my dirt bike’s pedal, I was flying down the course in seconds.

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 2 replies

Preface to a book on Sexual Abuse - critiques welcome ( Mature Subject Matter )

Simeon — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:34:48 GMT

Author's note: This is intended to be the preface to a book I'm writing about sexual and physical abuse. It will be a memoir - every word is true. The story actually gets worse after the preface. The preface will be in the third person, although most of the book will be in the first person. Feel free to tear it apart. Thanks for your feedback.

“Come here, please” he summonses her into his bedroom. Her heart constricts, knowing what will come next. It has happened before.

Entering the room, she sees him lying on his bed. He unzips his pants and pulls his penis through the fly. He doesn’t even bother to open his belt, possibly fearing that his wife will walk in the room. With his index finger he points to his penis, a silent instruction. At times like this he says very little. He doesn't have to.

She strokes his flaccid penis, and it becomes erect. It seems so huge to her. At least as big as her hand, maybe bigger. Up and down, she continues to stroke. He pulls her closer, holding her by her hair. A wave of revulsion overcomes her. Her chest heaves with self-loathing. It is almost impossible to keep from throwing up, but, imprisoned by his hands, she continues anyhow.

He starts to moan, ever so silently – a sure indication that worse is soon to come. The moans and groans get quicker, closer together. More intense. The penis throbs in her hand. Faster, faster she strokes, as much to get this over with as to please him.

She braces herself for the familiar sticky mess and the pungent smell that she knows she will soon experience. He explodes in a river of wetness. It spurts in her face, her eyes, in her hair, over her clothes. It comes in a seemingly never-ending gush. There was so much of it - an unwelcome invasion.

Satisfied, he does up his zipper and lies on his back.

‘You can go and play now”.

“Bye, Daddy”, she replies. The joyous skip in her step belies her internal agony. She puts a playful smile on her face in case she bumps into her mother.

Leaving the room, she relieves her revulsion the only way available to her. She goes to the bathroom and throws up.

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 1 reply

Critique of a short story

mad mark — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:54:37 GMT

Hello fellow lovers of the prose; I am in search of some good people who want to read a short story near completion and critique it in all and any form. I have posted shorter stories on various tribes but have not received any replies. Does that signify the writing is shit? I do not know; whether or not any one read the story, liked or dis-liked the story, or puked over the writing style remains a complete mystery to me because not one person left a comment on any of my post to offer any insight. I need some feed back. I do not have fellow students to read my crap, and my freinds are professional slackers. The two short stories I have in mind are pretty quick reads, ruffly 15 pages typed, with lots of dialougue. drop me a message at my site. Thanks. madmark

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 1 reply

Desperately seeking another brain

Meredith — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 13:15:01 GMT

Okay guys and girls, this is my first post and it is a bit needy I apologize, but I have a deadline. I have written this short story that needs to be handed in. I am not sure how this works... and I am still a little hesitant to just post it. However, I would still like some good minds to share some thoughts. Is anyone interested?

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 1 reply

First Short Story - Memories (Be Kind)

Phill — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 09:18:58 GMT

Memories.

As any responsible parent knows, you can see accidents waiting to happen. The spider-like steel igloo frame, its legs painted silver, with a bright cherry red eye at the top, was surveying its prey, and emanating an intense magnetism to the children in the park. “Hello” said the spider to the fly.
Jack dressed scruffily, like an extra from some Dickensian drama, threw himself with vigour and determination at the task at hand. Upon the first attempt he slipped awkwardly on the second rung, banging his shins. He would not be beaten. Determination secreting from every pore of his young lithe body, he tries once again. Onwards and upwards, his little legs pumping like pistons, firing him to his ultimate goal, until finally, arms thrust into the air in salute to his ascension, he reaches his summit. The perfect mountaineer, decked out in Beckham garments and ripped jeans, had come of age!
“Be careful Jack!” his mother’s words formed perfectly and succinctly came out as if spoken through a vocoder, and then played back at half the speed. The warning served as a constant reminder to ward off the frailties of life, but in this case went unheeded. The potential accident already registered in the mind of his mum, playing back in real time, ready to haunt her. A wave of guilt slammed into her heart like a runaway juggernaut - ploughing through a shop window. A split second before the accident, Jack turns to look at his mum, his sweet little bow of a mouth in a fixed grin, “Look what I can do mum!”
Shoelaces. Jack had not mastered the art of shoelaces and this was to be his downfall - quite literally. He tripped and fell headlong into the uppermost rungs of the climbing frame. He bounced like a ricocheting bullet, and then seemed to pirouette like a drunken ballerina in a quest to test gravity. The floors looming gape, ready to consume another playground victim.

**-------**

The restaurant was partitioned into four irregular shapes. This was a feature of the Victorian workhouse conversion, and it added a warm, homely presence to the once austere abode. The white oak blocked floor contrasting favourably with the deep plum velvet curtains and scatter rugs. In the far corner of the room - a bay window, partially adorned with curtains and a healthy fog of dust, still allowed the full moons lunar glow to shine on the polished table. Two red candles, welded with wax deeply into a pair of matching slim wine bottles complimented and almost upstaged the moons best efforts. A redolent air of garlic, accompanied by the pungent aroma of fried peppers, floats across the room, whetting the appetites of today’s customers.
Bev sat first, in the corner with her back to the wall ensuring a bird’s eye view of tonight’s people parade. She enjoyed her food almost as much as detecting what others were eating, and more importantly, what they were wearing! Tonight, resplendent in white, her bobbed ebony hair and perfect subtle makeup completed her. I had never seen her in this light before. She was glowing. I was lost in the sapphire, grey-flecked pools of her eyes. Abandoned to her sweet bell dream laughter.
“I love you”, she whispered tenderly, and it almost made me drop the ring to the floor. I had been fumbling uncontrollably with both the ring and my thoughts, for the past ten minutes, and the words, so carefully crafted and rehearsed earlier, now tumbled out as gibberish.

**-------**

“Dad! Dad! Are you filming?” Jacks little face, flushed red from carrying the double dingy water park ring to the slides start point, had a smile to die for. His mum accompanied him, as ever, and was busy settling the float in the shallow pool, which served as the embarkation area for the ‘Grand Canyon White Water Ride’. There was no doubt; this was the parks main attraction. Once they were both settled in their seats, a park attendant quickly manoeuvred the ring to the lip of the slides highest point. Over they come, spinning and slamming into the side wall, which in turn spins them in the opposite direction. I can hear above all else, Bev’s scream of glee, as I point the camcorder in their direction and follow their progress downwards. They soon pass me, so I utilise the cameras zoom function to good effect. As they approach the bottom, the liquid crystal display informs me that the battery is hungry, and without any more notice, goes on strike.

**-------**

The heavens opened on what was, until that precise moment, a perfect day. The two bicycles, Jacks to the front, and mine to the rear, matching each other for pace as they made their way. The macadam path; once at home to trains, now was the home for pedal power and not steam. We had climbed the four miles to the zenith, rested, eaten copious amounts of chocolate and drank ourselves silly on diet coca cola. Jack insisted on being the leader by announcing to the world “I’m the leader, I’ll say when to go!” a quote from ‘Mothears’ in the Disney classic ‘The Aristocats’. We raced ahead, oblivious to the deluge. There would come a time soon when Jack would no longer want to play, so for now, I relished every moment. Drinking from the cup of companionship until my thirst was fulfilled.

**-------**

The last stud did not want to go in. The starter motor had four studs, which positioned the bendex in line with the ring gear of the crank, and try as I may, the thread would not bite.

**-------**

“Two please love, and try not to burn them, you know how I like my toast!”

**-------**

Jack got out of the pool to rapturous applause. He had been swimming for thirty-five minutes non-stop and had accomplished his mission effortlessly. My heart felt as if it were expanding in my chest. I felt so proud. I looked to my wife and tears filled her eyes – she too, in awe of our offspring. I squeezed her hand and gave her my look; the one that speaks volumes. The one that relates my eternal undying love.

**-------**

The room is mostly white. There are no walls, just a drape, suspended from an oval wire support. There is a bed; engulfed in a pristine white top sheet. There is a small, frail human shape creasing the otherwise flat surface. Adjacent to the bed there is a bank of machines affixed to trolleys. One machine, an Electro Cardio Graph is playing a one sided game of tennis with a reluctant, fading heartbeat. Another regulates oxygen; its concertina-like pump creating a rhythm that no one dances to. In the bed, a comatose, skeletal waif, with a sunken sallow mien lies motionless. His face, almost grey in this monochrome environment, shows signs of a previous aneurysm; the left side mocking its counterpart with hideous effect.
Just then, the faintest of smiles appears on the right side of a wrinkled old face, which in turn sends a solitary diamond-like tear, slowly cascading to a slightly, one sided, upturned smile…….

The ECG flatlines, and somewhere, down the distant corridor; a buzzer heralds the end of a good life full of wonderful memories.

**-------**

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 4 replies

WRITERS WANTED...

Richard — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 09:48:25 GMT

Poets, novelists, essayists, short story writers, playwrights, journalists...If you write and have a site that you would like to like to mine, then I would like to hear from you. A reciprocal link will seal the deal...PLUS you will also have access to my new blog, where you will be expected to post your excerpts and related material on a regular basis. Oh, wow! He’s got to be kidding! All of that FREE publicity and exposure!

Ayup...I have my reasons. But I’m also very interested in helping to promote my peers whenever and however possible. And my current project just worked out that way. So, if you interested, please get back to me ASAP. There will be limited space!

The 2 sites in question are as follows:

The Portfolio: http://rdklove.googlepages.com

The Portfolio Blog: http://rdkpf.blogspot.com/

Serious inquiries only, please.

RD Kennedy

For those of you who are NOT writers but enjoy quality literature, this also applies to you, because ALL visitors/readers WILL be allowed to post comments on the work they read. You may also know happen to know some writers, who are always looking for another place to promote their work and gain additional exposure. (We’re almost as bad as musicians!) Be SURE to spread the word and ask them to check this opportunity out, as well. You know how it works...

rdk1421@hotmail.com

(Please mention WRITERS WANTED in subject line!)

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 0 replies

The Second Coming (A sketch for a one act play)

Eric — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 21:30:56 GMT

Mid-afternoon on a busy commercial street, left of the stage is a junction and far off is a huge billboard ad:

A movie based on Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses
Stars Sean Connery, Ewan McGregor, Catherine Zeta-Jones etc.
Directed by Zach Snyder, screenplay adaptation by Hanif Kureishi

A crew of three from a local TV station.

"Battery's dead, what time do you got?"
"Nine past three."
"Okay, let's get this over with as fast as we can... ready?"
"Ready, which one?"
"Over here."
"Excuse me sir... ma'am can we have an interview... can we interview you just for a sec..."
"Do you believe in The Second Coming?... what the..."

Nods, shakes head, waves off and refuses to be interviewed, shrugs, laughs, giggles, etc.

Replies:

"What?"
"Absolutely"
"I don't even believe in the first."
"Are you kidding me?"
"Go to hell!"
"Yes of course..." (Then quotes a number of passages from the Bible)
"Come again?"
"If you give me a twenty, I'll say whatever you want me to say."
"You mean multiple orgasm?... oh... I beg your pardon."
"Fuck you!"
"Uh..."
"Of course! Aren't you ashamed of asking such a question?"
Etc.

Bum:
"You mean you didn't know?... the guy already came here... I mean He... Him... He and I shared a bottle of rum the other night... or was it last night?... hmmm... I was the only one who knew about it... about Him coming back! You see... He told me..."

Reporter:
"Yeah, yeah, yeah, right."

TV crew:
"I think we have enough."
"I had enough."
"I think so too, that'll do."
"Let's get out of here."
"Okay, pack up."
"Let's go..."
"Did you get that broad's number?"
"Which one?"
"Miss second, third and fourth coming."
"Oh yeah, had it in here."
"God I love this job."
"Me too"
"Yeah"
(Laughs out loud)

Lights out

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 0 replies

Chapter 5

blissananda — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 20:15:32 GMT

Chapter 5

So there I was, minding my own business at the famous Kahena beach. Writing in my journal. Drinking my beer. The waves more calm than usual. A typical Sunday afternoon as the freaks gather at the islands only nude beach for the weekly drum circle. I sat under the cool shade of palm tree, sandy feet, looking Zen, when I saw her form the corner of my eye. Unspeakable beauty gracefully descending the rocks, past Hanna and Tommy selling cinnamon rolls. Her hair dancing with the wind, tangling in cheap plastic sunglasses.
Many goddesses graced the beach that day but for some reason she hypnotized me. Like a magnet, she claimed my attention. Out of conditioning or reflex, I had to look away, pretending I cared about anything else. But my heart beat stronger and faster as she came closer. She set her backpack in the sand by the tree next to mine, kicked off her sandals and drank some water. Glancing around as if she’d seen everything a million times before, she promptly striped naked and strolled into the ocean. Her thin necklace glistened in the sunset, creamy coffee skin and a hint of a tan line. As she walked, her ass cheeks danced like two enlightened peaches who had been lovers for countless lifetimes, happy but not surprised to find each other on the same branch of the same tree.
She swam. I played drums and wondered the ethereal bliss. My mind going here and there. Later, as the sun departed, I sit by the fire, scribbling something with what’s left of the light. She sits next to me, hair and wind blowing. Fire light glowing on her smile. “What are you writing?” She asks.
“Well. I guess I was writing about you.”
She grins. Her eyes light up. “Really? You were writing about me? No way.”
“Yeah. I was just chatting with the universe about casually manifesting some profound bliss. And, well, here you are.” Or something like that.
“Yep, here I am.” She said laughing. “That’s funny cuz this morning; I was asking the universe for basically the same thing. Crazy huh.” A half smile of understanding.
“It’s so crazy, nothing couldn’t be more sane.”
We both grin. Blissful third eye contact. The fire pops and casts dancing shadows on the grinning wrinkles around our eyes and the dark cliff behind us. The moment almost dissolves into awkward silence. She sighs and shivers, showing her palms to the flames. “It’s getting cold.” she says. Her nipples perky and pointy.
“Here.” I say, revealing my Tibetan monk shawl and wrapping it around her shoulders. She grins again. Her eyes glowing orange.
“Mmmm. Share it with me.” She demands, as I hoped she would, throwing half the shawl around me.
“Ok.” I put my hand under her arm pit. She puts hers around my waist. Resting her head on my shoulder. “My name’s Blaise by the way.”
“Blaise by the way.” She says. “That’s a strange name. Were you born by the side of a road or something?”
And soon we were cuddling more than chatting. She told me her name was Sapna. She used to know what it meant but could no longer remember. She was born near Mumbai, but grew up in southern Oregon. She had come to Hawaii to study Yoga. I asked her why she didn’t just go to India to study that. “I’ll never go back there.” she said. “India has nothing for me. Hawaii has everything”
I remembered India being the kind of place you either Love or hate. I started to tell her a bit about my travels to India. She was very interested at first, but soon interrupted me. “Come on.” She said, standing up and taking my hand. “I want to show you something.”
Up the cliff and around the vines, we climbed to a cozy grassy ledge above the ocean, frothing and fertile. It had a nice view of the fire and drummers. Stars like smiles. The moon making love to the sea. We sat in the grass with our feet hanging over the edge, quietly sharing the shawl. Fingers restless, we began to explore. Hers on my back tickling like a spider. Mine on her shoulders, neck, side and then the thighs. The rhythms of the universe guiding our hearts, our blood, our skin.
There was a moment of hesitation. How far did we want this to go? How far did we not want this to go? There was no turning back. The fact that we were having this conversation psychically, was such a turn on, the answer was clear. All the way.
Sapna pounced me. My head hit the mossy rocks but I barely noticed. Soon we were one. The pain of the past was a forgotten fog. Love and bliss is all. Receiving the joy of giving joy. This way and that way, it went on without time. The drums, the waves, the palm trees, our hearts, all things together and interconnected, shining and fearless. The mist from the waves soothed the skin. You could taste it in the air. She was on top, holding me down, pulling me up. Her sweet warm juices caressing my hips. Pure life.
And then, suddenly she dug her fingers into my sides, so tight. Arching her back to look at the moon we howled together in a sea of simultaneous orgasm. The drums reached a climax too, as a huge shooting star lit up the sky. Everybody saw the star. Everybody felt the sacred power of that moment. People began howling and laughing and crying. The sea became calm. Sapna and I cuddled under the warm shawl and gently drifted to dreams.
I awoke the next morning with the sun piercing the horizon. It was cold. I was alone. Only a ribbon of smoke from the fire remained. She must have gotten cold and left. Disappointed, I walked to the edge of the cliff for a morning piss. Fortunately I looked down and saw that Tibetan shawl dangling above the ocean from a jagged lava rock. Could she have rolled off the edge during the night? I fished the shawl from the rocks with a stick and searched for any sign of Sapna. I hoped she was alright. The shawl smelled vaguely of her, but more of the salt water it was dripping. What happened? What should I do? I asked about her for the next few days but no one seemed to know her. Several months later, in India, I learned that Sapna means ‘dream.’

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 1 reply

The Return of the Roomates

deepak — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:27:11 GMT

When God was making human beings, he made two kinds of people—one whom you would call your friends and the other roommates. Roommates are what single people call “family” when stressed to prove their social adeptness.

If you don’t have a family living with you, you should at least have some hooligans running around your room, calling you names for no reason. Or a better description would be people running around your room and dirtying anything they can lay their hands on; restroom, kitchen, living room, or any other place where your right to use it is negotiated by their right to litter. They litter and you clean. And the world goes round and round as you go round and round in your pursuit of cleanliness.

My mum says, ‘stay close to your roommates, for they are your immediate contact in case of any emergency. Ask them to cook food in turns. Don’t fight with them. Listen to their problems. Help them.’ You heard it right, ‘don’t fight with them and help them.’ Are you kidding me? Tell me how can you not fight with someone you live with? Fighting with someone who steals your privacy and your toilet paper is inevitable. And moreover how can you not fight with someone you see everyday—the same set of people, complaining how their life is a waste, or how they have been wasting their life by watching TV all day.

A better reason to fight with your roommates is over the restroom. You walk into the restroom and a million and one strands of hair welcome you with their blonde fuzziness. You mumble, ‘who let the dogs inside the restroom,’ beneath your breath. And then you find yourself cutting a lonely figure in the mirror. “Why did God make restrooms?” Even more strangely, “why did he make hair?” and if he made hair, “why didn’t he use Titanium?” And if he did all that crap and messed up terribly with his job of making a clean race of people, “why did he fuck you up by making you allergic to dirt and filth?” “Why can’t you be a possum running around with abandon, hugging slime and grime with a happy deportment?” “How about a hog?”

Clutching your head with your hands, you contemplate flushing yourself down the toilet before better sense prevails over you. You take up the job of sweeping the hair off the floor, but it goes all in vain. You realize soon after that the hair can’t just be swept off like that. You need contraptions of the magnitude one requires to wipe out a country. And you have none. You have a cloth and a soap-spray, that’s it. You can either run away to the distant land where no one takes showers or stay in the restroom and clean the hell out of it with your hands. So you stay and clean.

There is no person I know who lived on this planet and never fought with his roommates; be it washing the dishes or emptying the washer; there is always a source of clash that leads to two bulls’ locking horns. “You just don’t talk to me.” And then there is silence, a silence so profound that the sound of the wall-clock rends their ear-drums. They then run to their rooms and pretend as if they were marooned on a deadly island without any other humans for several hundred miles.

If things like these happen to normal human beings, then I am no Frankenstein. I have been living with roommates for close to a decade. A decade full of memories: “you didn’t clean the kitchen-top,” “you are a hairy monster,” “you ate my Bananas and drank my milk,” and “you owe me a hundred bucks; yeah not a hundred, just seventy.”

I have been through several flocks of roommates. Ranging from people who didn’t know what cleanliness meant to people who thought shedding hair was an art, and not cleaning the hair-ridden restroom was even a profounder art.

“Either we will watch the movie or the TV will stay turned off,” Mr. K said.

“What?” I said.

“Fuck you!” Mr. K. said.

“If you’re not going to eat all of that Chicken-curry don’t touch it. I am going to eat it,” Mr. K said.

“It’s mine. I’ll do whatever I want with it,” I said.

“Fuck you! You just wish you could,” Mr. K said.

“You don’t tell me about your girlfriends. You’re so sick. I hate people like you,” Said Mr. K.

“Why should I tell you anything? It’s my damn life,” I said.

“Because I’m your roommate. Fuck you!” Mr. K said.

“Please clean the dishes,” I pleaded.

“Hmm,” Mr. G replied.

“Yeah, I am talking to you,” I pleaded again.

No answer.

“Please clean the restroom, too. I don’t want a natural rug in it,” I pleaded once more.

“Yeaaaaah,” yawning, “I love Ghazals,” Mr. G replied.

I have a special place in my heart for the house I live in now. I moved in here three months back and entered into a world I’d never seen before. A palatial house with a separate room for pool and shoes—can you beat it?—a separate room for shoes; a room for a soul like me and an equally big if not bigger room for shoes. A twenty-foot ceiling, paneled with glass-windows every two feet, hangs above my head. Three couches, one rust colored and two mahogany, a brown-colored coffee table, and a thirty-two-inch flat-screen TV, boasting over six-hundred channels, occupy the living-room. A kitchen sits right beside the living room, with a toffee-colored wooden floor, in contrast with an off-white carpet everywhere else. As you enter, the pool table is on the left, the shoe room on the right. Then there is a flight of stairs to the upstairs-rooms, one of which is mine. The kitchen and living room are further away from the main door. On the second floor is a lobby, serving also as the stairs-landing, which overlooks the kitchen and living room, and at the end of the lobby is my room. My room is stacked with books, laundry, a chest of drawers, a table and a chair, and a full-sized, brown-colored bed, covered with royal blue sheets and a black bed-spread. Clipped to the head of the bed is a reading lamp.

“We live in this house by rules,” said Mr. Landlord.

“No eating anywhere but in the kitchen. No shoes but in the shoe-room. No food and drinks upstairs. No dirty dishes. No dirty kitchen. No littering,” said Mr. Landlord.

I stood there listening to what I relished as the words of God. Cleanliness was finally within my grasp. I was finally going to be the man of my dreams—a clean-freak. Could I have asked for more? With every rule come exceptions. And the exception to the above rules was exclusion of Mr. Landlord. It’s not that hard to understand why. Mr. Landlord owns this galactic house. And with the house comes immunity from all obligations.

“I told you no rice in the rice-cooker after midnight,” Mr. Landlord said.

“Why are the red-beans still in the pot?” Mr. Landlord said.

“No. I don’t want to listen to why you have to go upstairs with shoes. Even if you were dying, you couldn’t take shoes upstairs,” Mr. Landlord said.

“Hey, did you see my other shoe?” Mr. Landlord said.

“Yeah, it’s on the lobby on the second floor,” I said without making any eye-contact.

I washed, cleaned, and dusted the kitchen more than I changed my underwear. But things didn’t seem to stay clean. On any given Sunday, there were more dirty dishes in the sink than the number of books in my room, which was one hundred six when I counted last. Semi-cut lemons, bottles of alcohol, and napkins were strewn around as if they were jewels in the crown of the house. Unidentified mail which never found hands of its recipient found a permanent place in the living room. Mr. Landlord preserved the mails as if he needed them as evidence against someone. The couches never saw any cloth to clean them nor did the carpet see any vacuum cleaner for removing dust. What they saw, and all too regularly, were parties and people rolling around, drunk.

I witnessed everything like a guy who sees people walk past him and become insurgents. I wanted to trounce them, but couldn’t really garner enough courage. So I, always, stood there with my mouth wide open and eyes gawking at every instance of littering, doing a little more of Gandhigiri, in a vain hope of embracing equality with everyone around me, not in terms of the wealth, but in terms of abiding by the rules, for real.

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 0 replies

Taking a Flight

deepak — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 23:38:23 GMT

Carelessness comes naturally to me. If it wasn’t for carelessness then I would not be able to afford the everlasting smile on my face. It’s a trick that I pull off in my mind. I, confused, try to diffuse unwarranted excitement by not letting out any emotions. The heart keeps its monotonous beating intact and I just reflect myself in the pool of foolishness.

I have to travel from Atlanta to Champaign, on my way to the maiden project at my first job. The flight is at 7:55 P.M. I have taken the day off work; or rather I came back before the clocks announced midday. I have to jump into the closet and filter out the right clothes for the incipient professional life. What should I wear? Do these pants need ironing?—now, ironing is something I cannot handle. My back whimpers and my hands complain. The rigid body shape and the mental clarity required to complete the job has never been my forte. I foolishly toss and turn the pieces of my professional garb in anticipation that perhaps the creases and crinkles will find their way out of them, but no, it has never happened and the possibility of its happening in the future seems equally disappointing.

Somehow I have selected the fine pieces of attire and glided them into a stack inside the bag that I borrowed from Jess. The stashing away of clothes and toiletries has preceded insanely running up and down the stairs, switching the dryer on and off, and an intermittent engagement at the pool table. The time has been drifting away silently; its footprint so gentle and vague that I don’t realize its passing by. Around 5 P.M., Jess comes over and the seamless time slows down to dispel boredom from the air. Everything comes to a standstill and I lose sense of time.

At 6:20 P.M, standing at the Marta station, I am thinking carelessly about the thirty miles I have to travel. The time has never been an issue and will never be in the future. Without paying for the ticket, I enter the platform and soon after board the southbound train. The time is ripe for showing some artistic tendencies, so I unzip my laptop bag and pull out a book by David Sedaris and start perusing it. My legs hold my sole bag within their hairy stiffness, while my hands glide from the back of my seat to hold my chin, the book, and the back of my head, one-by-one, almost without my knowing about it. I am stuck to the pages of the book, which is quite a laugh. The stations appear and then disappear. I stay inside the train; the airport station is the last on the north-south line. People drop in and drop out as the train makes progress toward its destination. I, unaware of everybody, carry on with the emotionless task of reading.

The clock strikes 7:20 P.M. as I find myself at Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport. Now, I hate to be at airports, but the Atlanta Airport goes a step further by producing its enormous and crowded façade. This place can very easily win the ‘biggest labyrinth in the world’ award. As I enter the airport, I, notwithstanding being from Atlanta, find it hard to spot the south terminal. ‘Where is it?’ ‘Where is this south terminal?’ I snake my way through the human road-blocks, present everywhere with no concern about the sense of direction, commonsense, and my being late. ‘Am I late?’ “Well, it seems I am.’ ‘Where is Delta, now?’ ‘Why can’t I check in my bag?’ ‘Why can’t you issue me a boarding pass?’ ‘Why is it too late to board the flight?’ ‘Ok I will run, but where should I run?’ ‘This bag is mine.’ ‘Are these fluids over-sized?’ “That cologne is my favorite.’ ‘Damn it.’ ‘How long does it take to reach the ‘C’ concourse?’ ‘Am I on drugs or is it really a kilometer to the ‘C’ concourse?’ ‘What about the‘D’ and ‘E’ concourse, how far are they?’ ‘Why is this elevator taller than the Empire State building?’ ‘These tunnels look like the ever-extending cornfields of the Midwest.’ ‘I cannot even see the other side of the tunnel. It looks far, too far.’ ‘Then comes the ‘C as in Charlie’ concourse.’ ‘Another elevator.’ ‘First you go down.’ ‘Then you go straight.’ ‘And then you go up.’ ‘Is it some kind of a joke?’

I take more than fifteen minutes to reach the C24 terminal. The underground length is followed by the glitter of the over-ground fancy-world where people throng the shops to beat boredom. ‘The flight is delayed.’ ‘The weather is bad.’ ‘The flight is canceled.’ ‘The flight never existed.’ ‘Go home.’ ‘Come tomorrow.’ ‘Pay seventy five dollars and fly some other time.’ I don’t know why you want to fly.’

As different thoughts are going through my mind, I am running to find the C24 terminal. After I have traveled up and down the terminal, I find out that C24 is a further level down. ‘What do you mean the flight has left?’ ‘It’s still not 7:55 P.M. How can the flight leave before its time of departure?’ ‘What should I do now?’ ‘What do you mean you don’t know?’ ‘I need to fly today.’ ‘Why would I come to this colossal airport if I owned a private jet?’ ‘Can you call the flight back?’ ‘Ok, don’t call security I am leaving.'

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 2 replies

The Hitman and The Girl

deepak — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:32:08 GMT

I was a hitman. I hit people, not with a baseball-bat, or a cricket-bat, or the infamous hockey-stick, but with a bullet, a 7.62x39mm bullet. A bullet, which when moving at 710 m/s, spurted blood with merciless precision— beautiful, indeed. I wanted the blood to reach further distances with every shot, just as a baseball hitter wants the next home-run to break all records.

It was a psychopathic condition, but I seemed to enjoy it. I didn’t know what a psychopath was until my girlfriend told me. She said she wanted to do me because I was a psychopath, the likes of whom she hadn’t been with before. When she said that, I took my pistol out, put it on her head, and did her as if I were doing my normal job. She liked it. She liked the fact that I was a merciless psychopath. She once said, ‘we stick around well, you know what I mean.’ And I gave her that bad-guy look and replied, ‘give me a bullet and a head and I’ll show you what sticks around even better.’

She brought me a phone one day. A Motorola Razr. She said, ‘Hey, Vicky, keep this phone with you all the time so that I can stay in touch with you. Not in touch with you, but you know what I mean.’ So I stayed in touch with her, not as much with the phone as with her. The phone just like any other electronic device started to weigh down on me.

It’s fine if you’re taking care of a girl or a gun, but a phone, absolutely not; for something as ridiculous as a phone you need to be really demented. I hated taking care of the phone. Keeping it in my pocket, I would take it out several times every hour just to check whether it was working or not. With guns in my pocket, the phone seemed out-of-place. The light would always be on, but the bars on the far left top-corner seemed jittery. They would disappear on me every time I stepped out of hiding. In hiding, they were in surplus, more than the number of spoons I had at my place. It was weird. A phone? Why would anybody require a phone?—only if someone wants to carry something in their pocket. But if you’re so insistent on carrying something, carry rocks, or guns. What about bullets? I knew how lonely people were. Who did they think would call them?—not I. I could put a bullet in their head, but I couldn’t call them. One day a guy called me and asked me to hit him. Why? Because no one ever called him. So I hit him. A 9mm bullet hammered into his head, because no one ever called him. Cool.

I was about to hit this man the other day when my girl called. I didn’t know what a booty call was before that conversation, so I got scared when she announced it to be a booty call. Was I required buying her new boots? I didn’t like taking her out shopping, so the thought of new boots scared me. I rushed back to her, leaving my job untouched. And it turned out that the booty call was something else. If not as scary as taking her out shopping, it was enough to make me sweat.

Vicky, don’t be a dog, now. You like it, don’t you?’

I didn’t disagree with her, but I really wanted to return the phone, which had started all the sweaty, tiring, rocking, drama. I wanted no more of that phone. I wanted my freedom back. I wanted to feel that I could pop open anyone’s head without having to fear about its terrible ringing sound. But it didn’t happen. The crazy phone stayed with me.

Things got a little quiet between me and my girl. I enjoyed a lot more time with my guns. I stashed away the phone so that it would die its natural death and leave me alone. But no, it didn’t stop bothering me. It kept ringing and ringing, and I was booty called again and again. Away from my guns, I started to wither away. Just like a gun without bullets, I was rendered useless.

‘Hey Vicky, let me get you a Blackberry, so that I can stay in touch with you even more, well not in touch with you, but you know what I mean.’

Blackberry. That was it. My decline. A cool name but a horrifying product. I was no longer a man. I was a Blackberry subscriber. Internet. Email. All that other crap too. Just a click away. No, I didn’t need any clicks. I needed my gun, for god’s sake. Blood. Crap. Thud. End. Everything just a click away. I wanted some of those clicks. Heavens knew it, once I had the Blackberry, I was booty called more than ever. Actually, I spent more time taking care of her booty than my guns. I didn’t want any calls anymore. I wanted my guns. I wanted them all.

‘Hey Vicky, let me get you a laptop. That way you can be even closer to me. Much closer.’

And so I got this Laptop.

A “black box,” I’d say. Two layers sandwiched together, with buttons on one layer and a TV-like screen on the other. Switch it on, and the fan starts throwing out heat waves. I very rarely switched it on, but whenever I did, she was here and it was cold.

‘Why do I require a laptop?’
‘Vicky, you require a laptop, because it makes you human. A laptop makes you a complete man. Before the computer you were a primitive man, but now you’re a modern psychopath. I haven’t done it with a modern psychopath, so I bought you a laptop.’

Laptops make a person human? How? Guns and bullets make people human. Whack a head or two and enjoy the feeling. But no, I was required to open the damn black box and search for ways to satisfy her booty. Google, Yahoo, and all those Chinese herb names that can help men grow stronger and bigger. What crap! What about a gun and a few bullets to help a man grow stronger and bigger? What a waste! Where the hell are my guns, I shouted? And she said, ‘Yeah, come on.’

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 0 replies

Dissonance Theory

-ty — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 18:22:07 GMT

I wrote a story that was turned into a screenplay
for the apple insomnia festival
below is a link to the video
and the original story
i would like it if you guys saw both
and told me what you thought about them

edcommunity.apple.com/insomni...item.php

blog.myspace.com/index.cfm

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 0 replies

Creative nonfiction for critique please

Bucky — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 05:57:12 GMT

This is my first posting to the group.

I wrote a version of this recently that was too dry and analytical. This is a more lyrical and stylized version of the same true story. I feel like it is close, but a little bit... umm... disjointed? I think I might be too close to it, so I am putting it out there for comment and criticism.

Thank you in advance!
- CJ
--------------------------------
Eastern Wind
by Christian "CJ" Jacobsen

Night time drops fast and hard in the Balkan winter. The dull light of the day gives up by early afternoon, and night comes down like a concrete block.

During the day, the wind is formed in the soft and sophisticated winter of European skiers. Layers keep you warm and deflect this western winter coming down from the forests and mountains of northern Italy and Austria.

Then you shiver. Look up from what you are doing. Check behind you. Something is different. Something has changed.

The wind. It comes from due east now… from the steppes it blows across the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria. Unhindered, the wind gathers the cold as it sweeps across the fallow plains and frozen waterways of eastern Hungary and Serbia. You feel the change instantly. Through your layers the cold needles from the east freeze your skin and chill your bones.

It is dark. The eastern cold is here. This is a night when families gather round a fire that never seems to be quite big enough, quite bright enough, or quite warm enough.

I am somewhere in Bosnia i Herzegovina, also known as BiH, or just Bosnia. I am driving a large delivery truck down a small two-lane road. At irregular intervals my headlights illuminate uninhabited villages that still show prominent evidence of the battles fought here recently. More often than not, the village or town is mostly inhabited, with only the most badly damaged homes and businesses still abandoned.
The heater in the truck is trying valiantly but I still have on my layers, my jacket, my gloves.

This is a deeply creepy part of the world. In daylight, the path the Yugoslav army took through these idyllic villages is obvious. Huge gaping holes in the walls of homes indicate the tanks came from the east. Deep scars from machine guns ring bedroom windows, the only testament to some local villager who stood their ground for a few minutes before being crushed under the onslaught of the Yugoslav army. The light of the day illuminates the depressions in the ground where the tanks rolled and a path of young trees among old growth forest indicates where the army came through the woods.

At night, the scene changes. I catch brief glimpses as the headlights illuminate details of the roadside destruction. A peek into an abandoned living room through a hole left by a tank round. Splintered door frames sticking up out of the rubble of a demolished home. Bullet holes tracing an upward arc along a wall.

The single most disturbing thing to see is just as night falls. The countryside is littered with cemeteries, some official, next to a church, and others stand alone in fields or at the edges of villages, cemeteries built according to need. Some with graves in neat rows, others more hastily built.

In every one of these cemeteries, families and friends of the deceased come out every night and light a candle in front of the grave markers. One a simple stone marker capped with the crescent moon and star of Islam. Another with the Star of David. Another with a cross. And another with the double-bar cross of the Serbian Orthodox church. All these graves, side by side, most with a single candle inside of a red glass candleholder like you would expect to find on the table at some kitsch Italian restaurant.

Each glass globe shields the flame from the wind and casts an eerie red glow onto the grave marker.

Coming around a bend in the utter darkness of a Balkan winter, and seeing a clearing in the trees with hundreds of these red flickering tombstones is a sight that will forever cause a tightening of stomach and shoulders. As I write this, more than five years after the experience, goose-bumps rise on my arms.

The sight itself is enough to leave an indelible impression. But as they say: it’s the thought that counts.

Consider this: Every day, someone goes out there and lights a candle at one or more of these graves. Every day, that person plans their trip to the cemetery. Every day, that person checks if they have a candle for tonight, or if they need to go by the shop on the way home from work. Every day, that person kneels in front of the grave of a friend, family member, loved one, and remembers them. Their life. Their vibrancy. Their times together that impels this person to make their daily pilgrimage to this grave.

During that Balkan winter the chill needles of the eastern wind, the wind from the steppes, the wind like icy concrete, cold and gritty on your cheek, the wind from the Ukraine that has been gathering the cold like a mother gathers a frightened child to her breast, the wind blows across the remains of the Balkans. The cold stones scream of the life they represent. Scream to the deaf wind.

And another person kneels down, lights a candle for the dead.
-------------------------------

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 10 replies

Apple Insomnia Film Festival

-ty — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 22:10:18 GMT

did anyone else participate in this?
I would like to watch their results

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 0 replies

Life, Love, and Living (Chapter 2)

deepak — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 15:20:34 GMT

On a dark, scary night when a spooky silence has descended on the streets of Delhi, a van is trundling through the streets with music blaring out of it. The driver is drunk or perhaps sleepy at the least. The moist alleys of Delhi are numb with sweat; unendurable heat has permeated the ambiance. People are standing at pan-shops, which are bleakly lit, and so is the nearby area around these shops. Stray dogs are wandering about the streets for food, but many of them get kicked as they approach the men standing at pan-shops. It’s a typical situation for 1 A.M. in Delhi. The roads are nearly deserted, except for a white van with loud music roaring out of it. The sky looks clear and the stars ominous.

A man is running as fast as he can in the opposite direction of the van. He’s frantically skipping about toward a dead body: the body of the girl to whom he was hoping to propose. He’s hoping that the girl might be alive. But his hopes are crumbled under the immense tires of the white van. He’s helpless. He looks around, but finds no one. He looks at the dead body. She is gone. She is as frigid as an electric wire without any current. The circuit was broken by the tires of the white van. She was broken by the white van. He looks into the eyes of the dead girl, and he sees himself staring back. There are marks on her skin—marks left by the tires of the white van. A white piece of plastic sparkles into his eyes. It’s the evidence. He grabs the plastic and covers his eyes in disbelief. Something has been permanently taken away from him.

Mohan awoke from a long, disturbing, night’s sleep. He had to visit Lina at the hospital. He was thinking about how four years back Parul was struck by a car on the same road, and coincidentally around the same time of the night. He had been with Parul for years, all through high school. They were great friends. That dark night changed a lot of things in his life. He had been struggling to forget Parul, but to no avail. He was stuck in the hole of painful dreams. He needed to run out, unshackled, and embrace life with his old happy disposition. Where had those days gone when the only thing he cared about was the pimples on his face?—he asked himself.

“One of the bones in your left leg is broken. A few minor bruises and some weakness; that’s all,” said the doctor.

Lina was alone at the hospital. Jay had recently gone back to fetch new clothes for her.

“How’re you?” asked Mohan.

Lina stared at the ceiling and refused to reply back.

“What did the doctor say?” asked Mohan, again.

Still no answers.

“What did I do—tell me? What the hell did I do? Why are you behaving like this?” burst out Mohan.

“Yeah…. You didn’t do anything. That’s the only thing you did—you didn’t do anything?” whimpered Lina.

“Oh, please! What the hell did the doctor say?” cried Mohan.

“He sadly said that I am going to live,” said Lina.

“Who is taking care of you?” asked Mohan.

“No one,” replied Lina.

“Yeah, Mister Mohan, that’s what I was talking about earlier with Miss Lina. I need someone to take care of her,” said the doctor.

“I think Jay will be able to take care of her,” said Mohan.

“No, I got into this because of you, so you have to take care of me. I want you to take me to your house and take care of me. You made me suffer. You. You are to be blamed. You. I want you to take care of me. You,” said Lina.

“Ok, then. It’s decided Mister Mohan. You can sign these forms and take Miss Lina home,” said the doctor.

“What the hell happened to that bastard Jay?” said Mohan.

Mohan brought Lina to his house. He lived in a small, one-bedroom apartment; actually it was not an apartment but more of an accessory room in a shack of a sculpture-workshop. Mohan was a sculptor. After graduating from school, he went to an art college. He stayed at the college for two full years, before deciding to quit. After two years, he realized that art could not be taught; only the tools, which are precursory to anything, can be taught, the rest has to come from the artist’s heart. With the money he earned as a part-time waiter at the local bar, he bought the shanty in which he brought Lina. The house was long and without sufficient ventilation. The entrance to the only room was through the workshop. The room was small, but nicely furnished. There was a small studio couch at one end, and a nicely upholstered divan on the far end. In the middle, beside the window, was a neatly kept bed, with a huge, twelve-inch-thick mattress. There was no TV, no music, nothing to disturb him from his painful, recurring dreams.

Mohan shifted the divan to the workshop and slept on it.

Right at the moment when death was clawing in for its final blow a fiery hand appeared, swimming in the water. Perhaps, it is one of the ways death embraces a drowning person. Just before the transition from life to death occurred, the hand, holding fire in its soul, lugged Lina outside the sea of pain.

The next morning when Mohan entered the room, he saw Lina staring at the ceiling. She shifted her focus from the ceiling to the burn-mark on Mohan’s right hand. Witnessing Lina’s icy stare, he, quickly hid his burnt hand underneath his shirt.

Mohan took good care of Lina - cooking whatever he could manage, transporting her in and out of the bathroom, walking her around with the help of a walker, taking her out for fresh air, and showing her things about sculpting. They rarely talked. Everything that Mohan did was like a doctor: there was painless indifference infesting his feelings. There were actually no feelings. Lina wasn’t aware of this. She had started to think that the accident had brought Mohan nearer to her, but she was wrong. They were neither close nor far; they were just trying not to think about the past. Lina had at least learnt this much after the accident, but still she craved for Mohan, always speechlessly though.

One day when a post about the accident sent by the police department arrived, Mohan had an excuse to talk to Lina.

“What was the color of the van?” said Mohan.

“I don’t remember,” answered Lina.

“This report says it was white,” said Mohan.

“If the report says white then why are you asking me?” mocked Lina.

“Because the van hit you and I thought you’d at least remember that much,” poked Mohan.

“I don’t remember,” said Lina.

“Was loud music coming out of the van?” asked Mohan.

“Yeah, why?” answered Lina.

“Did you recognize the driver?” asked Mohan.

“If I saw him again I would” answered Lina, “but why are you asking me all this?”

“I want you to help me find the driver,” requested Mohan.

“No. I have better things to do in life,” said Lina, even though she wanted to say ‘yes.’

The next day when Mohan asked her to join him for an ice cream cone, which was apparently Lina’s favorite food, she promptly said ‘yes,’ and he purposefully chose the same road, St. Stephen’s Road, where she and Parul were struck by the same white van. He parked the car close to their school, right across the street from where the accidents had occurred.

“I want you to look at the cars while you’re eating your ice cream,” said Mohan, “and I will bring you anything else that you want; we are going to spend a few hours here.”

So it became a ritual for them to spend hours at night eating ice cream, pizza, Bombay-burgers, bhel-puri, pani-puri. Anything that Lina fancied was brought to her with alacrity.

“What’s your favorite food?” asked Lina.

“I like spicy things, like pani-puri with extremely caustic spiced-water. I like stuffed paranthas with potatoes, my mum used to make them for me. I love rajma-chawal, chole-chawal, dal-chawal. I like simpler things, nothing sophisticated,” replied Mohan.

“Take this,” Lina said after a few days.

“What’s this?” asked Mohan.

“Nothing, just something for you to eat,” said Lina looking out.

“Thanks,” said Mohan looking at the rajma-chawal and aalo-paranthas.

Thereupon Lina started cooking for Mohan. She cooked everything that Mohan loved though she never asked about it. She just looked for cues from whatever he said.

One day a similar looking white van with loud music blasting out made its way through St. Stephen’s Road. Mohan fired-up his engine and followed the van like a starved tiger following its prey. The night brought about denouement to a longstanding problem.

He clutched the piece of plastic he had scavenged from the accident scene. Right before he overtook it, he veered out of his lane to block the white van. Lina had no clue what was happening. She silently looked at him and the discarded food. In the mad frenzy that ensued, Mohan jumped on the brakes as soon as he was ahead of the van. The van bumped into their car which caused Mohan to lose control of the car. Lina was hurled out of the car, breaking the windshield. Mohan got out of the crushed car from the driver-side door and found himself writhing in front of a truck speeding toward him at 60mph.

Deepak Maini
dee.maini AT gmail.com

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 0 replies

Life, Love, and Living (Chapter 1)

deepak — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 18:27:10 GMT

Lina and Jay were sitting on the bed in Jay’s bedroom when Jay jumped off the bed and smiled his mischievous smile and confronted Lina with a question.

“You know what your problem is? You need a boyfriend. Why don’t you get a real boyfriend? You are beautiful bordering on being sexy; especially when you wear your low-cut blouse and short skirt. If you ask me, the whole reason behind your depression is your inability to accept men,” smilingly said Jay.

The room in which they were sitting had a colorful spirit to it. The three walls were painted sharp white, while the fourth one stood out with its lavender blueness. Right in the center of the blue wall hung a circular mirror with plenty of metallic spikes jutting out just like sun-rays. The bed, on which they were sitting, huddled with feathery upholstery, looked like an Olympic-sized swimming pool; Lina and Jay disturbing the surrounding air with their animated talking, just like swimmers ruffle the water. Accentuating the mood of the room which was upbeat just like Jay’s character, was a couch the color of a Dove; spotless and unblemished. There was more furniture, which just evidenced the need of variety in Jay’s life— Jay liked to change things around.

Lina and Jay were school friends. They were together for almost eighteen years before deciding to undertake different careers, and so different roads. They were opposites in many aspects, but they knew each other so well that the differences melted into a kind of thread that held them together. It appeared like their belonging to a secret fraternity where they knew so much about each other that if God had problems deciding their fate in their afterlife, he could gleefully consult them

“Why don’t you let me take you out, tonight? We can eat out and have fun,” said Jay.

“Why? Where are your bimbos, today? I didn’t expect this from you—to ask me to fill in for your girlfriends,” replied Lina.

“Well, I asked them not to disturb me tonight. I am with you today, so that you can take advantage of me. You can do whatever you wish,” jokingly said Jay.

“Why don’t you help me take off my clothes. I need Mr. Sex Therapist to help me realize that I am wasting my life thinking about the past. I need to forget everything and enjoy an intimate moment with you,” reciprocated Lina with a playful look.

“Yeah, let me help you.”

As soon as Jay approached Lina with calculated steps, as if he were setting foot on the moon, Lina grabbed hold of a pillow and started hitting him. Jay, anticipating her moves, had already set his eyes on the remaining three pillows on the bed, so he jumped for them and started a pillow-fight.

“I didn’t want that guy to interfere. Anyway, I got her number,” said Jay on their way back home from a restaurant.

“It was hilarious. That guy could have killed you. You must develop an eye for single girls. I cannot see you being beaten up by some random guy; I need my friend to get away from a dinner unscathed. But what did you say to make her give you her number despite her having a boyfriend?” asked Lina, laughing.

“I just asked her to visit my modeling studio. I told her about her bright future in modeling. Did you see her? She had such a juicy ass. I stared at her, pretending to size her up for a modeling project, and she was happy to let me ogle at her. Her name is Shivani. I’d bet you anything that she’ll be there tomorrow, first thing in the morning. And by the afternoon, she’ll be rolling in my bed. You missed the opportunity, Miss Lina,” replied Jay with confidence bubbling out of his lungs.

“Yeah, I am going to repent the opportunity for all my life. Wasn’t it the one-hundredth opportunity to hump you that I missed today?” quizzically spoke Lina.

“Why are you being grumpy?” asked Jay.

“I am not grumpy. I am just happy to see you happy. I sometimes envy your life. You have such a happy life,” said Lina.

“You know why you’re so depressed. Because you let the past ruin your life. Look at me- I don’t care a hoot for what has happened today and what is going to happen tomorrow. I am right here, with you, living my life, and being happy about it. Who knows if Shivani will come to my studio tomorrow or not. If not Shivani, then someone else; this world is full of chicks. You just have to reach out for as many as you can. I want you to stop thinking about Mohan, once and for all” said Jay.

Mohan was another student from Jay and Lina’s class. He was the only person Lina ever loved. From the first day in school, when he arrived from Mumbai in the sixth standard, to the time he saved her from drowning at the senior farewell party—Mohan had done what nobody had ever done for Lina. She still vividly remembered the day four years back when she arrived at the farewell party. She was known as the prude of the class, as she refused to sleep around, and everybody, especially the girls, started to talk down to her. She saw Mohan standing at a distance in his black, pin-striped pants and white shirt. He was a tall, handsome young man with a beautifully chiseled face. His jaw was low, wide, and drooping, which gave him the look of a Greek warrior. His hair was always cut short. He didn’t seem to smile often, but when he smiled it looked as if the sky were gyrating with teeth representing the stars, and his beautiful mouth the whole universe. His somber manners weighed heavenly on one’s heart; the way he walked, with his steps breaking the shackles of time, descending upon earth with a momentous verve. His face had that grim silence, which one relates only with the matters of extreme seriousness. There was a personality that had enslaved many a heart, without even knowing the dire repercussions it brought about to its victims

She had a very good friend- Priya, who worked as a flight-attendant now; Mohan was Priya’s cousin. No one knew that Lina liked Mohan; not even Priya. Priya was another character in the class, one with ungainly ways and a very poor sense of dressing. Lina helped Priya to get along in the class, but she could only help her so much. Close to the end of the party, a group of bullies were trying to throw Priya into the swimming pool, when Lina bumped into them and started shouting for help. Leaving Priya, the group got hold of Lina, instead, and threw her into the swimming pool, knowing very well that she didn’t know how to swim.

When you’re drowning it feels as if you have been snatched from life. You are doomed to breathe in nothingness. It’s like running a hundred-meter dash in the Olympics, but the air is replaced by a vacuum; you’re supposed to run one-hundred-meters without a single ounce of oxygen—drowning is so relentless. Water fills up everything around you, leaving you helpless and belittled. You smell water as it makes its way up your nostrils and down your windpipe. Water, which is the essence of living on earth, morphs itself to become a deadly force, which sees you as a petty insect, writhing for pity. You appear cheated out of life; the life which once promised you great things, now struggles to provide you with enough to live on. It’s a moment of great solemnity where you see life slowly drifting out of your heart, first, then out of your lungs, and finally out of your head. Everything slowly approaches a standstill, except for your body, which makes every effort to overcome the weight of imminent death, a death that starts dawning on you with every second. The hands move erratically in hope of something to cling onto, the feet paddle the water in hope of generating enough thrust to take you to the shore of life, and the body, shuddering with every passing second, twitches to free itself of the burden of pain that has overcome it. You collect the remaining life and make the last effort to hold onto the fiery hand that appears godly, as the messenger of death brings it upon you.

“You remember about the reunion on Sunday?” asked Jay.

“Yeah. I don’t think I am going to be there. Mohan might show up, so I don’t want to put myself in front of him. You know I lose control over myself when I see him. But I don’t want to ruin your reunion. You should go,” answered Lina.

When Sunday came, Jay went over to Lina’s in the morning and pestered her so much that she finally agreed to go with him.

“Today, I am going to introduce you to every guy in our class. I know that you know them, but, today, I am going to present them as potential boyfriends. You can choose whoever you want and take him home,” said Jay.

“No thank you,” replied Lina.

Mohan had not arrived yet. Despite her earlier indisposition to attend the reunion, now when she was there, the only person her eyes were savagely searching for was Mohan. She went around hearing people crowing about their successful sleep-arounds, especially girls. She even got to talk to some guys, who teased her and asked her about Mohan. Finally, Mohan arrived. He looked lost; he had a look of distrust on his face. Tiredly, he walked around meeting people and saving Priya from any embarrassment. He was wearing a dapper black suit and a maroon tie, which made him look like an emperor walking about his royal abode. The disinterested smile, which momentarily etched his face, showed more than what he was trying to hide behind it. His face bore no resemblance to the earlier Mohan. He looked in need of someone; someone to hold him and help him fight off the venom, he was carrying within himself.

“How are you, Mohan?” asked Lina.

Mohan turned around, hearing an unknown voice, and said, “I am fine, Lina. How are you?”

“How have you been? It has been more than four years that we last met,” said Lina.

“Yeah, it has been a long time. These four years have been like a century for me. Every second has weighed so much on me. Anyway, what do you do, now? Are you still the goofy Lina I always knew?” asked Mohan.

“I thought you didn’t know me,” answered Lina with a jittery voice.

Mohan looked at her for a moment, and the moment seemed to stretch to infinity. They kept on looking at each other, and then a tear trickled down Lina’s face. Right at that moment, Jay, busy with all of his girls, turned around to see Lina crying. He scampered though the crowd and stood in front of Mohan.

“I’ll kill you if you ever come close to Lina,” thundered Jay.

Hearing this, Mohan looked deep into Jay’s eyes. He didn’t say a word. He started to walk away, but Jay got hold of his arm and shook him as if he were interrogating a murderer. Mohan gravely disentangled himself out of Jay’s tight grip, and started to move away. The emotional deluge had just overflowed the depths_of sanity for Lina. She wrested herself free of social norms and started running blindly toward the road where her car was parked. As she reached the road, a car winding its way through the darkness of midtown Delhi struck her.

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 1 reply

rabbit growing roots

drusilla — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 01:03:18 GMT

I want something
real bad
but I don't know
what it is

I'm pacing
and panting
without moving
always late
for a performance
that has never
been scheduled
in a hall
that doesn't exist

The lettuces
and waiters
are long gone
so I listen without moving
and dine on the sound
of cutlery scraping
a fine china plate
whose clay
has not yet
been dug
from the ground

And my
unblinking pink eye
studies the woodgrain
and fine lacquered line
of an instrument
that hasn't
been invented
to play music
that has yet
to be written

I want something
real bad
but I don't know
what it is

Surprised
to find my
paddy-paws
rooted in soil
I think
I shall never flower
I have no
technicolored
perfumed petals
that I care to unfurl
all pointy and licking
at clouds and sky
but my fine new roots
will spread and know
the carroty secrets
deep within
the rocks
of this place
this place
that doesn't exist

Still
aboveground
I do not move
but the incidental
days and nights
race around my stillness

Racing
belowground
I keep pace
with the swirling, twirling
days and nights
getting closer to knowing
whether I belong
to the gardener or
the garden

I want something
real bad
but I don't know
what it is

I don't, I don't
I don't know
what it is

posted in Creative Writing Critique - 1 reply

Creative Writing Critique's topics - tribe.net

Critique please

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