[2928] Dead Skin — short story
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Posted Jul 27, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC · edited
255
I really enjoyed this piece!
I was drawn in by the first image, and even more so when shown the context: the narrator aware of his audience but still hiding in anxiety, and the Dad—preoccupied with the wider world outside the estate—taking notice but not reacting.
The parents play an interesting role. On the one hand, they impart a sense of order on the narrator’s life
I was sent off to play my Xbox in the living room.
I waited to be sent to bed but no one came in.
while still showing respect:
My parents discreetly noted the new policy and fell in line.
(This subtle military language is used to great effect, by the way.)
On the other hand, they seem distant. I think the “retrospective” aspect comes through strong here, as I feel the narrator looking back with the awareness that his insecurities often led him towards false/exaggerated assumptions:
My parents must have noticed but said nothing, and I took their silence as an endorsement of my tormentors.
Also, he always sees his parents through windows or in doorways, which reminds me of the way some old cartoons don’t show the faces of adults. I think that’s a great way to convey that sense of separation and growing up/apart.
The order/predictability beginning to slip away is nicely evidenced by the intrusive Gerry, who torments the parents, and his son Matty, who in turn torments the narrator. Again, looking back, the narrator depicts Gerry almost as a caricature, while his depiction of Matty, with whom he had closer contact, is a little more nuanced:
His obvious talent for comic acting made him a devastatingly effective bully; the other kids were already covering grins.
Similarly, the other neighborhood kids are depicted as a faceless group of identical kids led by Matty. I think this slightly cartoonish positioning serves the story well, and it’s clear to me, especially by the end, that the childhood bully left a deep imprint on the narrator's memory, while less interesting characters have inevitably faded into the background. Overall, I think the piece shows the lasting power of negative memories and how they inform personalities and behaviors, but also the way in which memories get distorted over time. That was my interpretation, anyway.
I like how his personality comes through in the last scene; these lines felt very relatable:
I carried on mauling the sandbags, watching but not watching
It was my instinct when frightened to affect boredom
I made an effort to stand straight, to remain outwardly composed
I collect things. I won’t say what exactly, because I’m told it doesn’t matter.
This line drives the point home for me. I also like how, in that final paragraph, the tone is somewhat detached and resigned, not overly sentimental.
A few things took me out of the story a little bit:
Sitting in the silent kitchen surrounded by those past versions of myself, I recalled a forgotten image from several years before: the accidental glimpse of a corpse at an open-casket wake. My hair stood on end. Something in the way my image was reproduced on the photo paper, that excessive and unconvincing polish, seemed to mimic the bloodless sheen of that old man’s dead skin.
I kind of like the part about him looking at the past versions of himself, but this “forgotten image,” though evocative, feels kind of contrived. It also doesn't seem necessary at this point in the story. I think it might be interesting if it were instead the adult version of the narrator having this experience, but I can’t really see this with a twelve year old.
At first I thought it was going the way of this line:
I sensed big changes were due, the trappings of adolescence imminent, or something grandiose like that. A ride of such importance...
which works better for me personally—because it's tongue-in-cheek.
Also, the Xbox and then Ronnie’s phone were jarring to me at first; I wondered what decade this was (because at first I was envisioning the ‘80s or something). But then again, this was probably intentional, and the sudden appearance of the phone with its "hypnotic glow" does go hand-in-hand with the final scene—like the narrator is just having fun playing games, and then suddenly, inexplicably, the “game" has changed and he has to learn the new rules and adapt.
Overall, I think your prose is fine-tuned and expressive, and the language lends itself well to a story told by an adult looking back on the drama of his childhood. :)
Hope that was helpful!
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Thank you for this great critique. I'm glad you enjoyed it and even more glad you got what I was trying to do (whether I did it successfully or not!):
Overall, I think the piece shows the lasting power of negative memories and how they inform personalities and behaviors, but also the way in which memories get distorted over time.
You've identified a few parts that I suspected were weak, and explained why, which is very helpful. Thanks!
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Overview:
This is some really good work. Sometimes all I crave is some clearly competent prose, and you’ve certainly got it. There are a lot of stand-out sentences, paragraphs, and details here. The scenario itself is highly enticing too, and the story convinces me that there are many other stories not written in these particular pages.
However, I mean that as critique as much as compliment. There are lots of things here that it pains me to see you under-utilize. What is the scene with Gerry for? Is it just characterization for Matty? That’s not nearly a good enough reason for that long of a scene non-sequitur, and it isn’t doing a good enough job at that characterization either. I really thought his racism was going somewhere, but it just doesn’t and that confused me a lot. Why is the whole story a character remembering something? Considering that we don’t find that out until literally the last paragraph, I don’t think there is a good answer (in the text) to that question. The common theme here, and in a lot of what I felt about this story, is that there are these glimmers of uniqueness buried under stock characters. Framing a coming-of-age story through a character abandoning their childhood fantasies is good, but tying it to such a visceral physical act (the hanging) is what makes it something special. Focus in on that, turn those inventive details into inventive paragraph into inventive scenes into inventive stories. You’re almost there, you just gotta do the work of spelling it all out in something other than summary.
I also don’t think you wanna be in the past tense. It’s getting you into syntactical awkwardness all over the place, and it didn’t exactly help with the clarity issues I had either. You asked if the retrospection is coming through. It is, but I think you’re aiming at the wrong target. Sometimes a story about childhood should be about going through it, viscerally and in the moment it happens. The memory-focus just hurts the pacing and gets in the way of the really good work you’re doing on the childhood theme. It’s clear what your story is about on that front, and I mean that in the best way. I just want you to focus in on it. Getting into the present tense and excising the flash-forward ending ought to do that nicely.
One of the big changes that I recommend is to tell the story in a linear order. This could, potentially, force you to solve two issues at once. First, it fixes all the confusion I felt around temporality, which is getting you in a lot more trouble than it’s worth. Second, I think it would make you notice just how much you’re shortchanging the reader on scene work. What you do have is really good, but I want to see more of it. “I had to imagine my way around it: before a jury of fellow soft toys dug out from deeper in my wardrobe, Major Cuddles was tried and convicted of spying for the Moore family and sentenced to death” is an elegant pair of sentences, but what if it was an elegant pair of pages instead, a tension-soaked scene as the centerpiece for a story about (literally) throwing childhood out the window. Maybe that’s a different story than the one you have here, but I think it’s one worth writing.
My last point, and the one that you are so close to but not quite reaching, is about character uniqueness. This story is a really small scale, focusing on just a few individuals and a pretty short interval of time. I enjoy spending time with the situation, but what I really want is to enjoy spending time with the charecters. They’re not bad exactly, and your excellent prose does a good job of tricking me into thinking they might be good, but there’s just not quite enough here to reach the point of great. You gotta push yourself to figure out the weird character quirks, the things that might not always show up on the page but that sometimes do as that little bit of seasoning that makes a character memorable as more than “the bully” or “the delinquent.”
Line-by-line:
I don’t think I know what this means. I read it as “To everyone’s surprise,” which (I think) would be a far cleaner way to say it. If you mean something else, I think you can still definitely find a better way.
Something about this paragraph really vibes with me. I think it’s your sentence pacing, which I’ll note is quite good throughout the story. Mixing up sentence lengths is just the beginning. You take the next step and begin to feel out a rhythm to how the syllables fall on the tongue or the mind. It makes everything just that much more of a pleasure to read.
This is a fantastic detail. It’s one of those ones where it only seems obvious after you read it, which is the kind of reader engagement that makes a page come alive. Well done.
This is a fine list, but I can’t help but see potential for it to be doing some more character work. We don’t know much about the viewpoint character at this point (and that’s fine, the story hasn’t been going that long and we do know enough) and this is such a good way to sneak in some uniqueness. Venus fly traps is a bit odd and mad cow disease helps me date the story a little bit, but what’s something that ONLY this character is afraid of? These are the kinds of questions generally confined to writing prompts, but I think that they can be a treat when allowed to bubble up in the story itself.
This is a bit of an awkward non-sequitur in this paragraph. I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to glean from this information that I didn’t already get from “whenever Gerry went to the bathroom he and Mum exchanged vigorous wide-eyed shrugs.” Maybe it’s left over from an older revision? Feels like one of those.
I don’t think what Mum says here is intimidating or intense enough to match your description of how it was said or its notable place in the character’s memory. Perhaps that dissonance is an intentional bit of characterization for Mum as wanting to be strong but lacking the ability to act it, but that’s an obtuse reading even for me. It’d probably be better if you used some more interesting description of what she says, or have her say something more interesting because “Oh just fuck off” doesn’t really do much without your dialog tag.
I have two notes here. First, the resolution to this spat with Gerry feels pretty unsatisfying. You could fix that either by playing the scene out a little bit more (if you’re okay with revealing that kind of information at this juncture) or by embedding the scene with a little more intrigue (if you’re not). Second, the transition out of the flashback is really jarring. This is especially bad when the transition in was so smooth. This can be fixed in all sorts of ways, even with something as simple as an extra press of the enter key.
You’re firmly on the wrong side of “show don’t tell” when you talk about his comedic talents. You might be able to trick the reader into not noticing this by putting the sentence after he actually says the joke, but that would be worse than just not having the sentence at all. The joke in and of itself communicates both that he is funny and that he bullies. If you want to communicate that the other kids are also assholes, you can keep the “the other kids were already covering grins” part as its own stand-alone sentence, which would actually be pretty good I think.
It’s only at this point that I realized we never actually exited the flashback. While it’s possible to chalk that up to be having a bit of a headache as I’m doing this, I do think this raises some alarm bells. I will have to go into those alarm bells later, once we actually do exit the flashback.
Baring some passive voice issues, this paragraph is really good. It’s a concise ode to being desperate to grow up, to finally be “mature” after so long stuck as a child. That said, it leaves me all the more confused about the temporality. Are we flashing back to mere weeks ago? It’s such a short amount of time that I don’t really understand why it’s in flashback at all. There are better solutions than this.
So this is where the flashback finally ends, I think. To be honest it feels less like a flashback and more like doing some funky non-linear shit. Was it worth it? Not this time, I don’t think. All it does is force the story into a past-tense that, still, it doesn’t feel like it wants
This is a dream critique. I finished this story two months back, became disillusioned with it, and just left it languishing in my drive. I wasn't hoping for much when I flung it up on here yesterday, but you've managed to find loads of really interesting things to think about and offer good tips and deep solutions. So your criticism has actually managed to get me interested in the story again.
I wrote this with the intention of submitting it to a specific competition with a word limit of <3000. I didn't bother submitting in the end, but it might explain how shallow and sweeping some of the characterization and scene-development is. It's the first time I've written a story with a wordcount looming and I won't be doing it again. The practice of Japanese footbinding springs to mind.
Yeah, I had problems with the shape, positioning and execution of this scene. The point of it was to 1. Show how the other kids came to know about Major Cuddles (via Gerry to Matty) and 2. To show Gerry's misogyny, in the hope of providing some sort context for his son's actions with the girl at the meat plant (you read his comments about rights as a race thing, and reading it back I can completely see how I've left that interpretation wide open). But I agree that the whole thing comes off as a bit inapropros and cursory.
This was tough and I clearly didn't nail it. I was more intending this response to be, while clearly principled and self-asserting, a little pathetic and impotent. The shock of what Gerry has jokingly implied (that women should be beaten) renders her angry but ineloquent. "Oh just fuck off" is the best knee-jerk response she can muster. But here I am explaining it, which proves your point—it doesn't land.
Great question: the first few drafts were, while written in the past tense, linear, with a different ending in which he cycled home from the meat plant and cut the bear down with scissors, the story ending right there as the bear is falling. But I worried that this straightforward chronology was a bit flat and simplistic, plus there was a maturity of register and reference in the voice throughout that didn't really suit the cogitations of a child. So I rewrote the ending as a present-tense flashforward and went back through the story to plant little grammatical arrows towards it ("I can see it now"/"which I am surely now imagining"/"Once—it may have been the same summer"). This was when I should have considered a framing narrative, with a future tense section at the beginning as well as the end. But honestly, I was precious about my opening paragraph, probably one of only two paragraphs in the story I still stand by, so I didn't have the guts to change or move it.
I still thought the end's flashforward would be a good way to bring out the themes (changing or "shedding skin", and how early experiences/trauma/peer and parental influence present manifest in odd ways). But only on reading your critique did I notice how convoluted it became. Here is a chronology of the story's events, with an order of when it appears in the life of the character in brackets on the right:
What a mess!
Thanks so much again for your thoughtful and genuinely constructive critique; it's a rare thing. Usually, I write a story with great enjoyment, finish it, hate it, abandon it forever. You've made me look at a two-month-old orphan in a fresh light, and if I can't fix this story I feel like I'll still be able to apply your strand of analysis to my next one and reap big benefits. You're an excellent reader and critic. Thanks.