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Post by Robin on Aug 24, 2006 8:27:28 GMT -8
Mmm. It feels a little bit like a book I read once, Icy Sparks, about a little girl with Tourette's growing up in a small town. The plot, as far as I know, doesn't sound like that book, but the sort of atmosphere does. I like it.
I only see a couple of minor grammatical errors. I think that if you spell 'mama' with an o, it has two ms. Like 'momma.' But Iunno. It's minor, and not so much an error as something I'm not sure about. And, well, you should never ever doubt what nobody is sure about. =D Gene Wilder moment.
And, at the end, why did the dad get his shotgun? D= I'd think shooting at the bees would only make them madder. But it's cool. Because this is just an idea, and I sometimes do stuff that doesn't make sense in my ideas, too. XD
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Post by Robin on Aug 10, 2006 19:19:22 GMT -8
K. This is a Roni/Sid/Kit interaction piece. I don't know if this would go into the main story that I'm working on, either whole or in parts, but I felt like I needed to write it because I don't know a lot about how these characters all interact. I'm going to be doing a lot of this kind of thing for now because holding together any kind of plot is impossible for me right now (Yu-Gi-Oh ate my brain...if you don't believe me, go to neumanstudios.com...I made that layout, and that delusion could only come from a severely rotted brain), but I need to keep writing if I'm going to keep my mojo. I'm not even sure that I haven't LOST my Kit mojo, because I lost my By Blood and Iron mojo, and my Wyatt skills are severely diminished. So this may be a bit sloppy; I don't know. You tell me.
PS: The first half - up to 'Roni was short for Veronica' - was written a long time ago, when I thought I'd be going somewhere with Roni. She's more of a background character most of the time.
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The week before Carolyn came to Wyatt and co., Marty got sick and was forced to stay home for a week and a half. During the time, I had to entertain myself, which was harder than it seems. During that time, I stuck close around Sid and Roni who were, out of our circle of friends, the best choice for somebody wanting to take their mind off of glum thoughts and a sick friend. And they could do that without giving you financial worries, too. We never went anywhere that cost money. It was always a bike-ride up a hill just to see who could make it first and push the others down, a hike up into the woods to spring all the traps we could find just to piss off some hunters (we didn’t have anything against hunting, it was the concept of pissing somebody, anybody, off that fascinated us, not necessarily the springing of traps and saving of animal lives), a sleepy afternoon spent in Roni’s bedroom frowning up at the posters on her ceiling, posters forming a collage that she called her ‘little piece of heaven,’ frowning and wondering how she could like or even appreciate the talents of the people portrayed in her little piece of heaven.
Some days, Roni would turn the music all the way up in her room and lock herself and her boyfriend – It was the school’s token black kid, Lance Conrad, at the time – inside, and it would be just Sid and me, and on those days we wouldn’t talk much. It was a characteristic that I appreciated about him. What he liked best, and what he was happiest doing, was pleasing everybody, and the best way to please everybody is to be flamboyant and ridiculous, which I suppose was what he liked best to do anyways. But when he was alone with one other person, he didn’t have to please but one person, and he could act on whatever cues he picked up from that other person. So when he was with me, he was quiet. We talked a little bit, but I was never one for heart-to-heart, soul-to-soul talks, even with Marty, because a lot of the times Marty understood my troubles without me having to say a word, and there could be the comfort of understanding without the near agony of admittance. They say that people are supposed to talk it all out, but I never have, and never will. All that needs to happen is a release of some sort, which always comes about if a person looks for it, whether that person talks or not. So Sid was quiet when he was with me, and when Roni was around he was his usual loud and flamboyant self.
And then, there came the Friday when, sitting at the top of a hill and nursing bruises from numerous Sid-induced falls, we were all silent. Both Sid and I were uneasy in the silence, and kept clearing our throats, casting looks at Roni, who was staring someplace above our heads with a thoughtful expression on her face. The sun shining behind her created a nimbus of light tinted pink at its inner rims around her head, courtesy of her most recent dye-job; a dusty purple. “You guys aren’t going to believe this,” she said after some time, talking slowly like a girl in a dream. “If you’re going to tell us you’re an alien or something, shouldn’t it wait until all the guys are around so you don’t have to suck out our brains twice?” Sid asked, though his heart didn’t seem to be in it. Though he had been just as uneasy with the silence as I had been before, now he seemed to languish in the fact that Roni was talking to us, looking not at her but at her shoes. “I’d rather tell you two first,” she said. “Well, tell us, then, if you want to, and make it snappy, because I’m getting tired and I think Kit wants to go see if Marty’s feeling better.” His words were snappy, but his voice was weary, the kind of weary voice an old dog will use in an attempt to ward off a group of hyper puppies. ‘I’m old, I’m tired, and I feel like shit. So please, kids, just cut off my balls now so I can get some sleep.’ She cast him an icy look that would have been comical if it wasn’t for the bitter twist to her mouth and the fatigued down-turning of the corners of Sid’s. “Since ‘snappy,’ seems to be what you want,” she said, “I’ll give you snappy. I’m pregnant.” Sid blinked, but that was it. “I expected something like that,” was all he said, and then he ducked his head down. “How could you expect it?” she asked, waspishly, and where her eyes had been ice before they were venom. “What did you expect me to expect?” He kept his head down, but his voice was startlingly clear besides that. “You’re always up in that bedroom, that sex room, humping on somebody. You’ve probably done almost everyone in school now. I haven’t seen you take a girl up there yet, but I bet you’re gearing up for it! Whose is it?” The last statement was so sudden that the poison in Roni’s eyes faltered for a moment before returning, more potent than ever. “Well?” “I don’t know,” she said, and her voice was so quiet I wasn’t sure if it was for emphasis or because she was really off guard. “You don’t know? Of course you don’t know!” His head was up, his cheeks flushed and his eyes bright with an anger that I’d never seen on his face before. “How would you know? When there are so many possibilities it would be impossible to know!” “Sid, stop it!” “Why? So you can get an abortion and go on with your life? That’s not how it works, Veronica.” “I know it’s not.” Her voice sounded miserable. She drew her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on top of them. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” The flush in Sid’s cheeks crept up to his ears in embarrassment, but the fire didn’t leave his eyes. I knew it wouldn’t. “Then why don’t you figure out what you are going to do? Get your shit together!” “I can’t think when you’re yelling at me!” Neither her eyes nor her voice were teary, but they were strained, and she held her fingers to her temples. Sid’s face turned crimson. “I guess since I’m such a distraction, I’ll take my leave. Kit, you coming?” He didn’t wait for my response, just stood and stalked down the hill. I sat there for a moment, looking at Roni. She didn’t seem to notice me. For some odd reason, all I could think of was that Roni was short for Veronica. And then I got up, and cast one last look at her. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled; for what, I don’t know. “S’okay,” she said, but I don’t think she really heard me.
I didn’t have Marty’s gift of subtlety, and probably never would, and so I went to find Sid. I expected that he would be at the park – he had never been subtle, either – and that was where I went, and where I found him. He was sitting against the fountain with his head in his hands, his fingers white against the black curls of his hair. “I know that’s you, Kit,” he said as I approached. “You’re the only one who walks like a Jew at the country club.” “What about Wyatt?” I asked, sitting down next to him. I was rewarded by a harsh chuckle. “He walks like a duck-footed Jew at the country club.” He looked up at me and smiled crookedly. “It’s not the same thing, trust me.” “I trust you.” His eyes were dry, but he scrubbed at them with the back of his hand anyways. “What am I going to do about Roni?” he asked suddenly. “Technically, you don’t have to do anything. You’re not the one with a baby growing in you.” He snorted. “She’s my little sister. It’s my job to take care of her. If she was my older sister, it wouldn’t matter, but that’s not the way things turned out.” “This isn’t like some school bully, man,” I said. “If my sister got pregnant I wouldn’t bother with making all her decisions for her.” “You don’t have a little sister.” He looked at me appraisingly, as if deciding whether or not I was trying to be funny. “Yeah, but if I did.” He laughed, but didn’t look at me; he stared off into the distance like a man gazing at the place he has been told he will die at. “What am I going to do about Roni?” he asked again.
I didn’t have an answer.
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Post by Robin on Jul 25, 2006 14:20:26 GMT -8
=oooo Poor Alexander.
"here"
Here makes for choppy reading. I'd use 'there.'
"skin on my neck and I didn’t like the feeling of crying onto skin. "
I'd just make it 'neck' instead of 'skin on my neck.' Because you use skin really soon after it and it doesn't work out quite right.
"do"
Did? Did makes for smoother reading.
"feel my feet. He was so heavy"
I'd like this better if it was "...feel my feet, he was so heavy." But that may not have been the effect you were going for.
"He hurt me."
This line might work as well if it was 'he did.' But that'd be your call.
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Post by Robin on Jul 25, 2006 14:23:21 GMT -8
Spank you.
Yeah, I know what you mean about word choice. I know the ending needs a lot more work because I'm a pansy and can't write scenes that are sexually graphic, but I'll end up going through and fixing the damn thing once I get my shizzit together.
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Post by Robin on Jul 20, 2006 23:25:56 GMT -8
I terminated it. Behold the result of what happens when nature calls my mind.
This is in the same mold as most of my stuff, except it's from Chris's point of view. The original Chris, not girl Chris who's now boy Kit.
I sort of chickened out at the end and didn't do much...graphic...stuff. I'm always scared to write anything graphic. Except when it comes to guts.
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I don’t know why I never just went with my gut instinct on things that year. If I had done that, it would have saved me, not to mention the rest of Wyatt and co., a hell of a lot of trouble. But things didn’t really seem to go the way we wanted them to then. Sid, or maybe Kit, would have told me, if I had expressed this feeling to them, that a certain Roland Deschain of Gilead would have called it ‘ka.’ I would have called it bullshit, if I had known it was going on at the time, and done my damnedest to fight it. But I supposed the only thing that really matters is that it happened, and what’s in the past is in the past. Except if it was really in the past, I wouldn’t keep thinking about it, or replaying those events over and over. For Kit and Wyatt, the unforgettable events came about with the deaths of Marty and Carolyn, but for me, it came of the day Roni and I made love. It surprised me even later, because for most people it would have been the day that she told us all she was pregnant, or the day that she went and got an abortion. But for the group of us, for Wyatt and co., I think we all remember the cataclysmic events. Not Carolyn’s funeral or even the crash itself, but the escapade at the bar before and the thorough intoxication of every party involved; not Marty’s funeral or the announcement of death, but the delicate moments before his heart actually stopped beating, and for me, not Roni’s abortion but the feral moments before the fact and the tender moments afterwards. Feral days I’m a sex craze, I put it in with my animal ways. Third Eye Blind. Except if anybody had had animal ways that day it would have been Roni. There she had been, her brother in the hospital, and yet she had still been not only willing but perfectly delighted to get to know me biblically. I had almost hated her then, but I never could, really. After all, I had been the one who decided to take it upon himself to tell her about Sid’s accident. It wasn’t as though Marty or Wyatt or Kit was going to go tell her right there and then, but they would have, eventually, if I had not.
But I went, and that is all that matters.
I went to the Boyle house, and knocked on the door, and waited patiently while footsteps clattered down the stairs and Roni finally came to the door, all elegant dishevelment and chapped silkiness. I won’t pretend that she didn’t seem intoxicating; she was bawdy, but she managed to make that bawdiness debonair, if anybody could dig that. She didn’t smile when she opened the door, only looked me up and down and frowned. “What’s got your panties in a bunch, kiddo?” I scowled at the name – I was older than Sid by a year and the difference between Roni and Sid was at least that much – and then she did smile. It was a toothy smile, full of teeth that weren’t exactly straight but shone bright as if she had had orthodontic work done. I didn’t quite trust it, but I was torn up enough by Sid’s injury that I didn’t really pay much attention to it. “It’s no smiling matter,” I told her, and regretted it immediately afterwards; it sounded petulant and pouty, but she stopped smiling. “If you’re going to tell me something, tell it to me. I don’t like to play with words.” The way she said the last part made it sound as though she was suggesting that she did like to play with some things, but I chose to ignore it, and instead glared at her. She was unimpressed. “Sid got hurt,” I said. The lady remained unimpressed. I raised a hand to brush my hair out of my eyes, a hand that had been apparently trembling unbeknownst to me, and said, “He got his head cracked against the fountain and had a brain hemorrhage.” At that she raised her eyebrows. “Well, is he okay?” “If he was okay, I wouldn’t be coming to you, now would I? I’d let him tell you.” I don’t know if it was me finally caving in under the emotional pressure or her being especially irritating, but let me tell you friends and neighbors, Uncky Chris was shaking like a leaf. “I meant if he was going to be okay, as in not going to die okay, Captain Obvious.” She was eying me as though I was a rabid animal she expected to bolt or rear up and bite her or black out or all three. I opened my mouth to tell her that of course he was going to be okay, maybe tack on a sharp rebuff, but all that came out was a wordless squeak, and then I fell forwards into her arms almost without knowing that I did so. She stiffened for a moment, and then her hands were there, stroking my hair and back in the thoughtless way that mothers will stroke an infant to soothe it. “Easy, Chris,” she said, and her voice was softened dramatically. “Easy.” I didn’t cry, but my breathing came in ragged gulps and my throat felt like it was lined with fishhooks. The weight of her, the soft glory of her breasts under the coarse fabric of her tee-shirt, was comforting; even the velvety brush of her arm against my face as she smoothed down my hair was comforting. She pulled me inside, one of her hands ceasing to brush my hair as she closed the door.
“What has your panties in a bunch, huh?” she said, and I felt her hand return to my head. I made some sound, said some word like ‘Sid,’ and she made a disgusted noise. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you had a thing for my brother,” she said, half-joking. “Not him,” I said, and I was relieved that my voice wasn’t tearful. Choked, maybe, pained, maybe, but not tearful. My cheek had been pressed against her collarbone before, but I had straightened and we stood eye-to-eye. I couldn’t help noticing how her breath caressed my cheek, warm, and found myself wondering what toothpaste she used. “Not him, huh?” Her voice was laughter, and not the grudging kind that she was prone to when she was around me usually. And then, abruptly, her lips were pressed against mine; soft, like her breasts, and with a maddening tightness to them that had me surging forwards before breaking away, gasping. “You’re Sid’s sister,” I said, struggling to keep my voice from trembling or cracking like it wanted to. “Yeah,” she said, blinking at me as if in astonishment at my ignorance. “Did you just now figure it out, Sherlock?” “N-n-n-no, it’s just…damn it, Roni, it’s like you want him to have a heart attack.” Alternating tracks of hot and cold raced down my spine; alternating images flashed in my head, Sid with a dribble of blood out his ear, Roni with the sleeves of her yellow tee-shirt hacked off to show off her shoulders, Sid with a dribble of blood out his ear, Roni with the sleeves of her yellow tee-shirt hacked off to show off her shoulders, Sid with a dribble of blood out his ear, Roni with the sleeves of her yellow tee-shirt hacked off to show off her shoulders.
I backed away, reluctantly, but then she was there again, laughing softly in my ear, pushing me slowly and insidiously up the stairs and to her room. I muttered something about Sid, and she practically hissed angrily. “I’m cheering you up, pretty boy,” she said in my ear, her voice nearly a snarl, and she ran her lips over my eyelids in a way that was too delicate to match the growl of her voice. “You’re too pretty to look so depressed.”
And then she was pushing me down on the bed, fumbling with the buttons of my jeans, and I was doing the same to her pants, the reluctance fading and growing paler. And then our clothes were gone, and miraculously, blissfully, we made love.
It was not until later that I realized that Roni was not on the birth control pill. If she had been, we wouldn’t have had to bear half as much of her griping about cramps.
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Post by Robin on Jul 15, 2006 21:06:11 GMT -8
Ahaha bitch. Poor Lewis.
"know how he watched you drink your first drink – sick, perverse, if anything, and how he drank from you, taking you unawaresâ"
It flows better if it's something like "I know how he watched you drink your first drink, an act sick and perverse if anything, and how he drank from you, taking you unawares..." At least I think so.
" like some dying animal in a trap, which I was."
The 'which I was' is sort of misplaced. It's like 'Jean-Baptiste Maunier sang like some beautiful lark. Which he was. The songs he sang were like beautiful songs of beauty. Which they were.' Except not as bad. It's just sort of awkward.
"soft with understanding and sympathy"
I'd like this better as 'soft and understanding and sympathetic,' but that's just me. It'd work either way.
"moved in another virgin"
In on or in with?
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Post by Robin on Jul 15, 2006 0:46:10 GMT -8
It's not my usual story setting. This is completely new characters, and VAMPIRES, which is something I never do. I made up this whole scenario where this chick gets sugar daddies and then one is a vampire and he's like 'hoe let me make you a vampire' and she's like 'no girlyman' and he's like 'f u =(' and then they go through this long thing where he tries to convert her and he uses her son to get to her and she goes all Detta Walker on all their asses and then finally she gets turned into a vampire at the end and eats her son and then it's over. I may wake up in the morning and be like 'oh man what was I thinking I gotta get rid of this shit' but for now it sort of tickles my fancy. Be aware that 'now' is two o clock in the morning. So yeah. But if this actually turns into something cool that'll be totally tits.
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Noises in the other room. That girl, that demon child that Mark had sent to torment her, sliding around in the dark with her son. Luke. The much-abused name rang in her mind, a mere whisper of its usual shriek, but an intense whisper, the kind of whisper that let her know that the primal part of her, the part that she knew everybody had but that had never really bothered her until that girl began working Mark over, would have no qualms with ripping out both their windpipes just to keep him from consumption by that girl. Luke. She stirred on her bed, folding her hands first across her chest and then bringing them up and cracking the knuckles swiftly, so swift that there was almost pain, and in the dark she would feel a smile of satisfaction flickering across her face. Now wouldn’t it be nice to crack that girl’s neck like that and Luke. She wanted to get up so badly, wanted to go in there and end whatever it was they were doing and whatever it was Luke thought they were doing. He would think she was going to take his virginity, yes, he would, up until the very end when her teeth sank, sharp as needles, into his neck and the pain came sweet and silvery and she took his mortal life instead. So why don’t you go in there and do something yes do something and keep your son your son at least for a little while longer do it do it Luke. She was sitting up; her feet were sliding out of bed. Her conscious mind told her not to do it, told her that what she would see she wouldn’t like one bit, but the primal one, the autre, it controlled matters with Luke. Always the matters with Luke. It was as if it had no care for what happened to her except when it needed her. Then, it would sink her claws into whatever it deemed necessary, even her son himself, and woe to the person who said otherwise. Yes woe to the person even you I could kill you now I could let her take you she’s crazed now you know it and she’ll play with him but not with you and he’ll be so angry oh Mark will be so angry he may just kill Luke himself and make you watch and then make you eat your own heart oh wouldn’t that be Luke. Her hand reached out, almost of her control, though some dim vestige of her conscious mind was supporting the movement but, spiteful bitch it was, added a bit of tremble just to make the autre angry. Oh, and was it angry. Luke. The. The door was open. There they were, just now turning to her with bleary doe-eyed surprise, the girl on top of him with her lovely dark hair hanging in her face like two panels of silk, her hands like long white butterflies positioned on his neck, caressing with a lover’s touch that was meant for the blood underneath and not the vessel carrying it. She heard the silken hiss of indrawn breath. “You bitch,” the girl whispered, her voice harsh and no complement to her elfin features, her eyes losing the glassy deer-in-the headlights look and narrowing, and she was off of Luke and in front of her in the liquid blur that still amazed her after all these months. The girl’s hand came up, slashed across the side of her face. Stinging pain came, and it was almost welcome. And then the girl’s hands were locked around her throat, squeezing, and her own were doing the same, the girl wearing an expression that suggested that the blood in the body she was throttling was not worth drinking, she feeling a snarl contort her face that was as much the autre as it was herself. “Did he invite you in?” she grunted, twisting her body and thumping the girl against the wall, trying to maneuver her head into a position where she could snap that swan-like neck, watch the will-‘o’-the-wisp, ghost of a pulse under the chin from a recent feed dissipate quickly, drop the body in the backyard in the old woodpile and burn it until it was nothing but ashes. “I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t, Bonnie,” the girl said, and that the vampire knew her name wasn’t as surprise. The girl’s head was beginning to be bent at an odder and odder angle, and she kept waiting for the tell-tale snap. “He doesn’t own the house, you know.” Squeeze, bend. Squeeze, bend. Tighter idiot squeeze tighter do you want her to throttle you before you can break her little milksop neck look she’s killing you can you even breathe anymore I doubt it you’re lucky I’m here you can’t hold your breath at all but I can so you’re a damn lucky bitch now break her neck she’s just a vampire who tried to turn your son go you bitch Luke. Squeeze, harder, twist. There was a little pop, and the vestiges of light that had been in the girl’s eyes dissipated. The butterfly hands fell away from Bonnie’s neck, and she stood, rubbing at it distractedly. Luke was sitting on the bed trying to focus his eyes. How pretty his eyes are, she thought fondly, and was glad that, for the moment, the autre had gone. She checked him over quickly but, though he was flushed and heated and far from orientated, he had not been bitten. And that, at least, was a relief.
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Post by Robin on Jul 13, 2006 19:03:19 GMT -8
You're veeery welcome.
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Post by Robin on Jul 13, 2006 18:48:21 GMT -8
There's a lot more action here than usual, or at least the proportion of action to musing is a lot bigger. But that's cool. I liked it.
Anyways.
"The footsteps were smart and not secretive"
Since you go on in this sentence to refer to her as her, and since not secretive is sort of choppy, I'd go for something like 'Her footsteps were smart and brazen' or some other synonym.
"word made me pause in mid-step."
It's a word, yeah, but it's a thought, so maybe you could consider having it as .'the thought made me pause in mid-step.'
"So what was death, really? Should the question be ‘what,’ or ‘who?â"
He doesn't ask direct questions, right?
But then again, this piece isn't so much a thinking piece for him as it is an emotional piece, so I think you could get away with it.
"her flesh like silk and ending in a knife-like tip of a fingernail."
Sort of an awkward sentence. Maybe 'her flesh like silk, the tip a knife-like fingernail.' I don't know. That stunk. It's sort of a hard thing to set up.
"young women lay"
Is it 'lie?' I wouldn't know, I suck at grammar, but 'lay' doesn't sit right with me.
"œYou speak like such a flower from those dirty lips"
Excellent imagery, but the delivery could use some work. The flower bit should have something to do with the words. Like 'you speak such flowery words from those dirty lips.' Or something. Something more eloquent than what I could put out. XD
" know how you used to drink, Lewis. Vodka on plain days and wine on afternoons when you were so fortunate to lie and stroke your lover’s lap. "
I would add something before this, like 'do not tell me of wine' or something. But that's just me. It'd make it blend more seamlessly with what Lewis says.
And that's all I have to say. Words are always getting in my way. Anyway, I love you.
Haha Art Garfunkel reference.
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Post by Robin on Jul 11, 2006 18:26:12 GMT -8
Pt. 1 -
"It was still difficult to think about, however, while I adjusted to this milestone, this sudden difference in me."
This is a bit too blunt for Lewis, 'specially since he goes right after this to have a sentence that's the pinnacle of bluntness.
"had he known?"
Lewis doesn't usually ask direct questions, right? I'd probably change it to something like "...and I wondered if he had known." Something like that. Same with the sentence after it, although that works with the setup of it.
"I saw the hurt driving down into his heart"
Sort of an awkward sentence. Maybe something simpler, like "I saw the hurt written on his face" or something. As it is right now it's sort of not really fitting in.
"atremble"
A rather odd word. You've used it before, I think. I know the way the voice is made Lewis is all gung-ho about romanticizing stuff, but this, I'd probably change to something simpler. This thing is all 'agghhh romantic moment' and it needs a simplified version of Lewis's usual voice. Not changing it, persay, just...simplified.
"We fumbled blindly for a moment, awed by the sudden fullness of each other, the contrast against our previous drunken kisses."
This sentence isn't unclear, but it also isn't clear. You aren't looking to be Hemingway here, but you also don't want to muddy the waters any more than you have to. Probably make this sentence a bit more clean-cut.
"And God his tongue was a coil of heat from those frozen lips, scalding my insides with an almost cruel sensuality. "
The 'god' just sort of trips the reader. You don't really need it here. The sentence conveys the same amount of emotion with or without it.
"ohh God"
Should it just be 'oh?' It's a bit more grammatically correct, and it reads the same either way.
"trembling"
Quivering? Shaking? You use tremble in the passage right above it, and there's not that many words between it and the other one. It's best to use a simple synonym if you can.
Buuuut, the end is cool. As always.
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Post by Robin on Jul 7, 2006 12:31:14 GMT -8
Thanks, cupcake. <3
I'll probably get around to cutting out some stuff later even if you don't. I'm getting very nitpicky about this whole story.
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Post by Robin on Jul 5, 2006 23:32:29 GMT -8
This comes just after Kit's mom left his dad and Kit pretty much is all pissed and goes to the park, but then some fool gets into a fight with a dude in the park and the fool can't shoot a gun and so Kit got grazed by a bullet and passed out. It's a lot cooler than it sounds. Well. Maybe not. But I haven't written that part all the way yet and this one's done so nyeh.
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How I got to Marty’s house when I woke up, groggy and aching, sprawled next to the dingy old fountain with blood caked on my face and shirt, I don’t know. But I made it, and though my first thoughts upon awakening had been that his parents could at least drive me home or to the hospital or whatever it was that I needed to do, I was, for some reason, relieved to find that both their cars were absent from the driveway and all the lights were on in the house, Marty-style. And when I stumbled up to the door and found it unlocked, I didn’t hesitate to go inside, even though he wasn’t expecting me and would probably, with my luck, hit me on the head with a frying pan or something ridiculous like that. But he didn’t. He must have heard the door open and had crept into the entryway, and he saw me before I saw him. “Oh, Jesus, Kit,” he said, and rushed over to me, looking me over with a friend’s franticness and a mother’s critical eye. “There’s blood all over your shirt,” he muttered, almost to himself, and ushered me into the kitchen, where he forced me down in a chair. He turned to bustle around in the cabinets and then back to me with his arms full of bottles of antiseptics and aspirin and God knows what else.
He set the armload on the table and knelt down next to me, pushing my hair aside to look at the damage. When I hissed and drew back he pulled my face straight with his free hand, dabbing at the graze with some paper in his other. “Hold still,” he said, not unkindly. “It’s all matted and clumped. Somebody clopped you good, huh?” He didn’t ask me what had happened, and for that I was exceedingly grateful. If it had been anybody else, even somebody that I valued almost as much as Marty like Chris or Sid, there would have been the questions, and though getting brushed by a wild bullet wasn’t anything that most people would be reluctant to relate to others, the questions themselves would be awkward and uncomfortable and that was something that I didn’t want from Marty. It was part of the reason that I was so close to Marty; his intuition. He could chatter like a talk-show host if he felt that whoever he was in the company of at the time wanted him to chatter like a talk-show host, but if he felt – no, knew, Marty didn’t just feel things, he knew them – that a person didn’t want to talk, he could remain quiet for as long as was necessary. In the silence broken only occasionally by the rattle of boxes or bottles as he dug around for this or that, I could hear music playing faintly somewhere, probably from his bedroom. It was the new Semisonic CD he’d bought – Pleasure EP, it was called – and it was playing the Gift. Normally, Marty made me listen to his Semisonic music so often that I could almost recite whole albums by heart, a phenomenon which generally came about the third day of listening to the album straight through, but he’d had Pleasure EP for two weeks already and hadn’t made me listen to it at all. I only knew the snippets that I had picked up as he listened to it on his headphones, or listened to it without urging me to ‘heed the music, young Skywalker.’ I knew a good deal of the Gift, though. He listened to it most often out of the songs on the album, and second most often of his Semisonic music overall, right under Sunshine and Chocolate. By the time I started paying attention to the fact that the music was there, the song had progressed to the chorus, and by the time I started to amuse myself by puzzling out the lyrics, it was on the second verse.
I went on a mission to the town where you lived, dark, dusty places you've not seen in a while. Certainly Marty’s childhood had been some dark, rheumy, arcane thing, growing up before his father gave up the rituals of Catholicism and before they moved too far away from their family to attend regular Mass or anything like that, some mystical place that I had little understanding of and could never hope to understand better.
I want to seek the basements where you hid, I want to see your face as a little child. What had Marty been like as a kid? He’d moved to our town when we were ten, and though we’d been friends for almost the whole time he’d lived in our town, I couldn’t remember what he’d been like then. My other friends were the same as they’d been then; maybe a little starey around the eyes, a little dirtier around the mouth, but in essence the same boys who’d jumped out of trees and played video games with me five years ago. He must have been the same, too, only I probably wouldn’t know. I had only really started to look at Marty as a fluctuating person in the past few years, always just accepting the traits about him that were extraordinary in the same way that Sid, Chris, Wyatt, Sam, Robert, and the rest of the gang just accepted that Marty and I were gay. It was like the way a boy will regard a girl as only his playmate and best friend until they hit that stage in their life when chests begin to bloom and hair begins to grow in the places where it’s least wanted, except then the boy will start to want the girl sexually, whether he feels that way about her or not, and I didn’t notice Marty’s quirks because I wanted him that way. I noticed them because I loved him, and until then, until Pleasure EP and a wild bullet in the park, I had never questioned that, either. ‘Questioning never was your style,’ Sid would have told me in one of his rare lucid, useful moments. ‘You, my dear Kit, are Roland Deschain’s real-life counterpart. You only start to pick at a scab if it presents an immediate problem.’ He’d never said that, of course; such moments of lucidity weren’t beyond Sid, but when he did have them he wasn’t likely to waste them analyzing my psyche. Roni’s, maybe. Wyatt’s, probably. But not mine. Sid got me. He didn’t quite understand Roni or Wyatt. He wouldn’t want to screw up that understanding by trying to complicate things. That was the difference between Sid and me. I thought things over too much once I got it on my mind, but I wouldn’t actively look for something to think over. If Sid got the itch, he brushed it off and moved on, but he was always looking for something that he could use to tangle everything up with.
I had been staring rather pleasantly at nothing as these thoughts ran through my head, and then Marty cursed and startled me out of my reverie. “Somebody clopped you a damn good one,” he said, almost marveling. “It looks like a bullet track.” “That’s ‘cause it is,” I said, and was surprised to find my voice came out as a crackling husk, and cleared my throat discreetly. He frowned, and looked at my face as though he could see what had gone on in the park by looking into my eyes like some crazy TV psychic. “Are you involved in the mafia, Kit?” he asked, slowly, as though it was a serious question, but unable to control the corners of his mouth from quirking upwards. I laughed, a weak, somewhat screamy sound, and shook my head. “It was a stray bullet. Some idiot was having a fight and didn’t know how to shoot a gun.” “How long were you out?” he asked, suddenly professional. “Out?” “You passed out. I know you, Kit. I’d expect Chris or Sid to stumble around dizzy for awhile, but you’d just black out and stay out until you’d adjusted to the shock of it.” “I don’t know,” I said lamely. “It wasn’t all the way dark when I got hit, so maybe four hours?” “Next you’ll tell me that you spent that time in a puddle,” he said, amiably enough, and tugged jokingly at the back of my shirt as if testing to see if it was wet. Then he sighed, and got to his feet. “Do you want me to drive you home, or something? My mom’s car is in the garage.” “Yes…” I began, and then faltered. “No. Marty, can I stay here for the night? I don’t really want to go home right now.” He must not have had time to curb his impulses before he blurted out “Why?” It was such an un-Marty-like thing to do, to bring up things that were so delicate without first consulting his instincts to see if it wouldn’t be too painful for the other party in the conversation. “My mom left,” I said, and the bluntness of my reply seemed to startle him into a more normal state. He shook his head, glanced at my face, and then looked at the ground. “And your dad…” “Wouldn’t touch me,” I finished. “But he’ll be up all night crashing around and crying. I don’t want to be there for that.” I kept most of the disgust out of my voice, but it was difficult when I kept comparing my old man to Chris’s dad, who wouldn’t think twice about sucker-punching his son if his beer wasn’t cold enough or his pot wasn’t sweet enough. I didn’t like to admit it, even to myself, but I was jealous of Chris. It seemed like he had a reason to complain (he never did, but he would have a reason if he ever wanted to), and I didn’t have jack shit to justify the drugs and the alcohol and everything else. For a few moments there, I was afraid Marty would figure that out with his bloodhound nose and knack for something akin to mind-reading, but he only nodded sagely, and, as far as I know, mistook the disgust to be directed at my mom for leaving my dad and making him such a wreck.
“Come on,” he said. “You can sleep in the guest room. My parents won’t care.” I stood up from the chair and stumbled a little, and he was there with his arm around my waist, steadying me, and there was just the slim but steady and reassuring weight of Marty supporting me, the warm and clean smell of him – like the pages of a book not yet old but not new, either – and it was good.
I slept better in his guest room than I had since my mom first began to talk about leaving.
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Post by Robin on Jul 3, 2006 21:09:33 GMT -8
Silly Gabriel. Why is he so randy?
"I arrived home and Gabriel was there in his car, waiting for me,"
Maybe 'I arrived home and Gabriel was waiting for me there in his car?' It flows better.
"Gabriel, with his arms around me, those eyes, the concerned half-smile on his handsome face."
I don't quite see the point of this fragment.
"œWhat do you mean? Lewis, do not be ridiculous."
Add Lewis to the end of 'what do you mean' and take it away from the beginning of 'do not be ridiculous.' It flows, sounds, and looks better. Aesthetically pleasing, say thankya.
"my knees a fault support"
Faulty?
That's all I can find. Ees short, senhorrita.
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Post by Robin on Jul 1, 2006 8:49:59 GMT -8
More Marty stuff. This one focuses on Sid, may it do ya fine.
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Sid had always seemed so indestructible. He never seemed vulnerable at all, not even when he was in the throes of delirious laughter, snot running out of his nose. I can’t remember him ever being sad or depressed or any other synonym for the feeling, not even when his date to junior prom, Cynthia Swanson, stood him up for Robert Dolman. He just took his sister along. I think maybe that was why we were all so traumatized that day in the park when Sid passed out. You expected Chris Stevens to get into fights; you expected Robert Dolman to get into fights; you expected Wyatt Dreier to pass out, not Sid. But then, Sid had always been all about doing the opposite of what others thought he would do, or of bringing about a result that nobody had really expected. And really, nobody expected anything bad to happen at a park, anyways. It was a park, for god’s sake, and what could a park be except for benign? Walking there, with Sid attempting cartwheels around us and with Marty grinning like an idiot, it didn’t seem that it could be. Like the cumulus clouds resting in the sky like bloated sheep, the allure outweighed the possible danger of it. We would not have stayed at home just because those bloated sheep seemed to be getting a little dingy around the edges, so we would not have stayed away from the park just because there were other people there. A mother or nanny taking a baby for a walk in a stroller didn’t pose any immediate threat; nor did a group of ‘shady’ looking young men loitering around. It was the park.
As Sid finally managed to perform a cartwheel, Marty grabbed his foot so he couldn’t go full cycle. “How long can you stay like that?” he asked, slowly letting go of his foot. “Forever!” Sid crowed jubilantly, even as he tilted and fell flat on his back. Wyatt and Carolyn stopped whispering to each other for a few moments to look over and snort at the sight of Sid, cross-eyed in staring in his own personal parody of death, and Chris poked at his inert form with the toe of his sneaker. “Get up, candy ass,” he said, amiably enough. “Fee, Fie, Foe, and Fum are coming to ask if they can utilize your asshole.” He pointed to a group of ‘shady’ young men who were making their way over to us with the slow, slouching walk that college drop-outs trying desperately to reassert their manhood will use. I don’t think they were college dropouts, but they walked like them, and that can be enough, at times, to categorize them as such. “Don’t they know they can get some weird parasite from doing dead dudes?” Sid asked, his voice carrying the patronizing undertones of a schoolteacher’s. He got up, using Chris’s proffered hand so heavily that he almost tugged the blonde boy down. When Sid was up, Chris glared daggers at him, rubbing at his wrist, and Sid placed a pinky to the corner of his mouth in an eerily accurate imitation of Shirley Temple, curtsying and rolling his eyes, grinning. He was still grinning when Fee, Fie, Foe, and Fum stopped in front of us. “Is your friend all right?” the tallest of them, Fee, asked. Chris opened his mouth to reply, but before he could Sid had hopped forwards and grabbed Fee’s hand and was pumping it up and down vigorously. “Right foine, I am, aye, and what aboot yerself, me foine man?” He was leering hideously, and I had difficulty containing my laughter. Marty elbowed me in the ribs to get me to shut up, but he was ‘coughing’ into his fist, and from the subtle up-and-down movement of his eyes I knew it was Sid’s failure to relinquish his grip on Fee’s hand that had sparked this. Sid slowly let go of the other boy’s hand, eyeing him up and down. “Ye don’t look so foine, ye ken,” he said, the leer fading. “How do I look then?” Fee demanded. Sid sighed, and we could see him tucking away his Irishman’s voice for later use. “You look like a…like a…” He paused, trailing off as if it pained him to be so devastatingly honest, then just burst out with it. “Like a wild boar somebody trained for the circus!” The insult itself was not very cutting; it was how he delivered it that caused us and even Fie, Foe, and Fum to laugh appreciatively. “Today might not be so boring, anyways, Aaron,” Fie said, covering his mouth with his hand. “Shush, Dean,” Aaron said absently, but there was also a smile playing about his lips. That smile made me uneasy, and I tapped Marty’s arm to get his attention, but he just punched me in the arm hard enough to make me wince and glare at him. Wyatt wrapped his arm around Carolyn’s waist and frowned. “Why is it always us?” I thought I heard him whisper, but it was faint and he could have said anything. After a few moments of silence during which Aaron’s smile grew broader, Sid tapped his foot impatiently and gave an exaggerated sigh. “If it takes you that long to devise an evil plan, you have no right slouching around like Evel Knievel or somebody.” Chris punched him in the arm, scowling, but he ignored him, as usual. Aaron shook his head, and I noticed his hands clench into fists. Sid was being particularly annoying; not cutting or anything like that, but annoying. It was what he did, and what he did best. He even irritated us at times, and we tuned him out, but it never seemed to hurt him. He would just return to his task with renewed vigor the next opportunity he got. He was like elastic. And yet, the next lines Fee/Aaron spoke seemed to rob him of that elasticity, at least temporarily. “If you don’t shut your little trap for awhile, you fag, I may have to shut it for you.” Sid shut his little trap, opened it, shut it, and then opened it again. “I’m not a fag, Kit is!” The words were blurted out in the helpless way that everything else Sid said was, except most every other time the way he said things suggested that no matter how you responded, he would respond with something even snappier. There was something vulnerable about the way he said that fateful phrase that left Chris wide-eyed and Marty shaking his head and Wyatt and Carolyn silent, for once. There was nothing any of us could say to counteract the statement, because, all vulgarities aside, it was completely true. And somehow, the way things seemed to work out that summer (“Ka,” a certain Roland Deschain of Gilead would have said, to which most all of us would have replied as Eddie Dean of New York: “Kaka”), Fee/Aaron threw a punch, and not at me, at Sid. Tensed as he must have been for something like that to happen, the shock of it knocked him off balance and almost to the ground; he managed to lift himself up to normal height and take his hand away from his cheekbone, where I could see a vicious bruise already budding. There was a momentary pause, an inhaling of breath, and then we had all fallen on each other in the violent, devil-may-care practice of rabid coyotes, or wild pigs, or bull elephants in musth.
I don’t know who I hit only that the ratio of defense to offense was about fifty/fifty. For every punch I dealt out, I can recall another landing somewhere on me, the most painful a hit on my collarbone that sent me stumbling back and to the left. In short, it was a blur, with the only clear thing being the ending, where Fee/Aaron knocked Sid’s feet out from under him and sent him crashing down onto the fountain that had once been the park’s crowning glory. There was a loud crack – and loud would be an understatement; deafening would be an understatement – and then all other sounds ceased immediately. It was as though the crack truly was deafening, and all sense of hearing had been lost to everybody. “Sh-shit,” somebody said weakly, and then Fee, Fie, Foe, and Fum were gone, either unwilling to see what would happen if Sid had been hurt badly or unwilling to intrude on a group of friends. Either way, they were gone, and we were alone with Sid slumped against a fountain with his face pale and ashy and his eyes half-open.
Chris was the first to kneel down next to him. He whispered his name frantically, slapping at his face gently, and finally Sid’s eyes opened a smidgen more. “Shit,” he said in an unwitting imitation of the first person to say it earlier, his voice the feeble, trembling voice of a very old man. “Can you stand?” Chris asked anxiously, and we all bent in closer to hear the verdict. “I could,” he grumped, “If you weren’t all hovering over me. What are you, the Jetsons, now?” Obligingly, we stepped back, and Chris heaved Sid to his feet. “You don’t look so hot,” Wyatt said, and Carolyn nodded her assent. “Awful,” she added, hiccupping into her hand. Her nails flashed a lovely sea green color in the cloudy gray light; that I remember with intense clarity. “I don’t feel so hot,” Sid allowed, using one hand to support himself on the fountain and the other to feel at his head gingerly. And then, promptly, he swooped around and vomited on the gravel surrounding the fountain. I tried not to watch; I had always told myself that watching people in such a vulnerable state as puking was rude and, what’s more, sadistic, but I couldn’t help myself. It was fascinating the way the muscles in his jaw and throat worked as he choked and coughed, the fruits of his labor bringing up, at first, what seemed like a gallon of white, chunky puke that looked too much like clam chowder for comfort, and then, as his stomach emptied, ropy tangles of mucus mixed with the last few dregs of its contents. “As if I need another reason to hate clam chowder,” I murmured softly. Marty looked at me sharply, his eyes flashing in that dangerous gray-to-blue way that meant he was perfectly at ease with giving me an earful if I was trying to be cute at a time like this, but he must have seen on my face that I didn’t mean to say it at all, and turned back to Sid, who was leaning heavily on Chris, his eyelids drooping. “Don’ feel so hot,” he mumbled again, his voice becoming more unclear. He turned his head to look at Chris, who was frowning. “An’ whass your prollem, uh?” “Your ear is bleeding,” Chris said, his voice trembling but the words the clearest I had heard anybody ever speak. Sid frowned and reached up a hand to touch his ear. The furrow between his eyebrows deepened as he pulled his hand away and held them in front of his eyes, swaying slightly. “Fancy tha’” he said, forgetting to tack on a bad British accent, and fainted. He would have fallen to the ground if Chris had not caught him and lowered him gently to the ground, kneeling down as he did so and holding Sid’s head in his lap. Marty stood there gaping like a fish for what seemed like eternity, and then I grabbed hold of his shoulders and shook him, hard, hissing his name through teeth I had clenched over the pain that had settled in my lower gut. He blinked rapidly and almost lost his balance for a moment, and then seemed to gain his senses. “I’ll go call an ambulance,” he said, and raced off to the payphone. I heard him babbling into it incoherently and almost smiled at the thought of the operator telling him to please slow down, sir. And soon, the ambulance came, and Sid was being loaded into the ambulance, and Wyatt was saying he’d pay for a cab for us all to go to the hospital, ‘cause Carolyn wanted to walk home; she wasn’t feeling well. We all agreed, Chris rather hollowly, and in what seemed like a few blurred moments we were lounging around the waiting room, just four kids bothering the other waiters with our drumming fingers and tapping feet and voices thickening as mucus does in the throat in the few crummy days before a cold clears up completely and everything is as it should be. We sat there, thinking of nothing in particular except Sid; Sid, crashing down onto the fountain with that sound that could weigh worlds; Sid, blurry-eyed and mumbling, not eloquent at all but still frighteningly charming; Sid, lying pale and ashen on Chris’s lap, a dribble of blood leaking out of his visible ear, a trickle coming out of one nostril, a trickle that we hoped to God was from a punch to the nose and not the crack to his head, even though his face was unmarked except for that trickle of blood and his nose looked like it always had.
At some point, I figured that hoping to God might not be such a bad thing, I began reciting as many Hail Marys as I thought I could under my breath, except when it was so low-pitched my Marys began to sound like Martys, and after it had been going on for a few moments I decided that Marty was as good as Mary and ran with it, a thought that somehow filled me with adrenaline should Marty find out that Mary had been replaced, at least temporarily, by him. And apparently the adrenaline showed, because eventually I felt Marty’s hand on my shoulder and jumped about an inch out of my seat and opened my eyes so wide it felt that they must refuse to yield any wider and would resort to popping out. “What?” I asked, rather stupidly, and he smiled the sad smile that was the most any of us could muster. “You’re shaking. And muttering something. I was going to ask if something was wrong.” “Really?” My voice sounded empty and false to my own ears. “Yeah. You have been since Sid played dead earlier.” At that statement a cold lump of ice settled somewhere in my stomach and transferred the contents of said stomach to my esophagus. “Oh, God,” I said thickly, and got out of my seat as quickly as possible, racing off to the bathroom with Marty’s questioning eyes burning on my back.
In the bathroom, I didn’t even look for a stall that was clean. I just slid down on my knees in front of it and emptied my stomach on it, vomiting a substance that was, thankfully, nothing like the chowder Sid had projected earlier. I lowered the lid, grateful that the toilets here had any lid at all, and rested my head on it, cooling my face against the ceramic, allowing my heart to stop fluttering frantically like some bird that just discovered what it meant to be in a cage. As a sense of normalcy returned to my bodily functions, I begin to think clearly again, no more Mary/Marty mix ups, no more clam chowder nightmares. And, for once, there were no prayers or Semisonic lyrics. There was Slow Motion; Third Eye Blind. I couldn’t say exactly why it was that it was a Third Eye Blind song that came to my mind at that time, but the closest I could come is to say that I thought of Semisonic and prayers on days that were reserved for Marty. That day was Sid’s, so, Sid’s music would come to mind. And, if that wasn’t it, maybe it was that Semisonic music just isn’t fucked up enough to sum it all up. If anything was fucked up, it was that tauntingly slow, melodious song, Slow Motion. And so lyrics from Slow Motion came to my mind. See my neighbor’s beating his wife because he hates his life, there’s a knock to his fist as he swings; oh man what a beautiful thing. Hadn’t there been a sort of warped beauty to the fight? A blur, rose-tinted by the mind’s defense mechanisms; wasn’t that one of the most lovely things ever? At the time, it seemed so. And then, As death slides close to me, won’t grow old to be a junkie wino creep, wasn’t that Sid’s life in a nutshell? Marty’s mom would always say how Sid would grow up to be a heroin junkie. It always struck me as odd how she had said he would be a heroin junkie, seeing as we all smoked pot, but later, after reading and watching and learning the rhythms of life, I could see how it could happen. All it needed was the discovery that a new kind of drug provided a better high than either pot or the humor he clung so closely to, and he was done in. Eddie Dean of New York could have said as much, courtesy of Henry Dean, the great sage and eminent junkie.
And eventually, the ceramic grew warm beneath my cheek and I stood up, stretching my legs, which had gone to sleep. I stumbled back into the waiting room, feeling washed-out and emptied-out and still terribly shitty about Sid, but overall, better. When I sat back down Marty leaned over to tell me in a low voice that the doctor said that Sid had had a brain hemorrhage, but it had been minor and he’d probably be fine; they were keeping him on drugs to prevent seizures until they were sure all the danger was past. And as I nodded, the trembling wavered in my limbs. It came back, of course, strong as ever, but it wavered.
By Sid, it wavered.
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Post by Robin on Jul 1, 2006 8:59:09 GMT -8
Have I seen this before? I think I saw where Jared brought Lewis a victim.
"which stung my toes harshly with unseen teeth."
Too matter-of-fact. Usually Lewis is all 'show show show argghhh emotions', not 'yeah this is what happened, bitch-hoe, and don't make a fuss. '
"Delirious, I trembled, lonely and cold, so cold I could feel nothing but the pain, raw as a whip crack with every slight movement."
I don't know if you need the delirious at the beginning of this. I mean, you need something there, but delirious doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the sentence.
"The wounds on my neck stung like burn marks"
I'd switch the wounds and marks. 'The marks on my neck' 'burn wounds.' it just works better.
" I would have leaned into the hand that ran over my exposed skin like one would pet a cat."
Sort of a confusing sentence. I'm not sure how you could make it clearer without making it a huge confusing sentence, though.
And the ending is good, as always.
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