Constructive Criticism Needed.
 

I like to creatively write from time to time because I'm an art-fag, this is for another site that has occasional competitions. Just want some critique before I throw it up half-assedly and make a fool of myself.

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"It's done."

I hate it when I wake up and hear cryptic words on my voicemail. My life is not interesting enough for these daily cyphers. Not even remotely. Whenever Jessie asks me about them, I just tell her that they're nothing. I can't really be bothered to explain it to her, so I just grab her hand as it sneaks it's way across my stomach. I don't know why I like it so much, her hands always feel like they're trying to burn a hole into me. There must be something sadistic about wanting such an incendiary touch, but I welcome it every day like it's my last. Our last. Even her lips are calloused and cracked.

I guess it might be a bit misleading to say "her," though. I knew from the night that I got into the cab with Jessie, even though all the nerve endings in both of our bodies were tingling from the ecstacy. Though the taste of his tongue might fool you, he hasn't gone through the operation yet. Every time we lay in bed, after the collars and cuffs have come off, I always ask why he wants to do it. The only thing he'll tell me is that it's only partly because of that whole "I was born a woman blah blah" nonsense. I don't care either way, though. I'm a very progressive person sexually, and I don't really believe in all that "preference" nonsense. When I get an itch, I do what I can to scratch it. Sometimes it just requires a woman with a little bit more to offer. It's kind of weird being the boy-toy in all of this though.

We're driving down the road, and she can't seem to stop her mouth from moving. It's such an ironic turn of events, at night she dominates while Portishead plays in the background. During the day, she waxes poetic about me being part of her "karass." It's part of Vonnegut's religion of Bokononism, about how I'm one of the people that seems to be entwined with her by fate. She says that in Boston, she'd made a lot of mistakes, and that this trip to the desert with me was her way of escaping the bridges she'd burnt. It seems I can only really appreciate her when her mouth shuts, though. Looking at her, her head is tilted onto her shoulder, a small, yet extremely content smile plasters itself across her cheeks as her bony finger-tips caress the wind as it passes underneath her fingernails.

After a few hours pass in comfortable silence, we stop on the side of a hill as she puts her head against my neck and grabs my hand. Her fingers always feel like they're inflamed; tendrils made of pure fire that sears my flesh while she smiles and acts like I'm enjoying it all. "Why are you with me?" she asks.

"I'm part of your karass," I say.
"That's not what you really think," she says. "I know you're just saying that to entertain me."
"Then shouldn't that say it all?"
"You left quickly, do you have any family?"
"No," I say, bluntly. A bit uninterested to continue.
"No job?"
"Not for awhile."

She doesn't even finish the conversation before grabbing my hand and pulled me out of the truck. Past the fence, she's spotted some old-looking oak in the middle of a field, and she's leading me to it like a moth to a fire. We stop as she stands underneath the broad and expansive reach of it's moss-covered vines, reaching out like diseased hands to the heavens, and she just smiles gleefully. "I'm so glad we've made it this far," she says."

"We've not even to the desert yet, we still have days of driving," I respond.
"I know, but I'm just glad to have left," she started. "There're some things I didn't tell you about."
"Oh?" I act, feigning intrigue.
"Yeah," she continues, hesitantly. "Do you know who John Dillinger is?"
"Of course," I say. "He was one of the last American gangsters. Got facial reconstructive surgery to evade the police and died during th operation."
She smiles before continuing, "Let's just say I'm making it a bit farther than John Dillinger."
"What exactly did you-"
Before I can even get the words out of my mouth, she interjects. "Do you have a knife?"

I don't say yes, I just pull it out and hand her the butt-end, and she starts carving backwards. My initials and then hers. Backwards. Then, she starts writing "karass" before I ask: "Why are you carving it in backwards?"

She heaves as she continues jabbing the dulling blade into the chipping bark of the tree. "In Japan, they read from bottom to top, from left to right," she says before handing me the knife. "I'm tired, do you want to finish?"

I take it from her scrawny hand. Even the handle feels like it just came out of the oven. "'Karass', right?"

"Yeah," she continued heaving as she plants her bony ass on the ground. "That's right."

"Not quite," I say before easing the knife into her shoulder from beside her neck. I know it's painful. In the Elizabethan days of Britain, people would pay the executioners to sharpen their axes, or else they would hack through vertebrae for hours before lopping off a chunk of ugly faces, brains and eyeball jelly. I smirk whenever I recall how dull this knife has become. Her head tilts back, and I know she's in agony as she's doing the best she can to yelp with punctured lungs. She finally asks why.

I just have to respond.

"In the Feudal days of Japan, whenever it came time to execute a prisoner, they would exile them to an inescapable place with their executor, and they would continue to live their lives never knowing the the gleam of an unsheathed sword would appear from nowhere and apply their death sentence."

With this sort of power, you get self-righteous. "I know what you did. I know why you're here, sweetheart. Why you're running. Before you become some mutant version of John Dillinger beta, your job was to get rid of people. When you asked me if I had any family, you didn't ask what happened to them. Almost like you remembered. Like you knew why every time you touched me, I felt like I was being covered in gasoline and targeted with a well-flicked lit matchstick. You burned down their house. My house. You killed them all."

She starts gulping blood. I'd imaging drowning in your own blood is not a delightful way to go. At least for her, anyway. For me, this is almost too much fun.

"I read Vonnegut too," I continue. "This has nothing to do with your 'karass.' Your 'karass' is a contact book written in blood and bound in leathery, dead flesh. You and I are in something different. We're a 'duprass.' Do you know what that is?"

She coughs blood. I'll take that as a no. Nevermind the fact that I want her to hear the words that are coming out of my mouth like I felt every one of her touches on my anatomy.

"I'll refresh your memory," I say, leaving the knife in. As I start explaining it, I find my hands flailing about like a scientist going on about the inter-workings of his newest creation, ecstatic to share it with someone he knows will understand. "A 'dupress' is the exact opposite of a 'karass'. It's not several people entwined by fate, it's two. It's me and you, and not even the biggest catastrophe will break our union. No matter of flesh removed from bone or pints of blood lost."

The knife doesn't come out easy as she slumps to the ground. I see her squirm as she tries to face me, but I know I've severed the tendon in her neck that she needed to search my soul before she loses hers. I refuse to give her that edification. I refuse to let her understand how I could be such a cruel person, so strangely delighting in the satisfaction of expelling something I've needed to rid the world of for years and years.

After awhile, her diaphragm stops pulsing. I sit in a natural basin of tree trunks, staring at her dead body as scarce traffic barrels through the desolate highway and the sun makes it's last descent towards earth. At least for her, anyway.

Maybe for mine too, I think as I finish carving my version into the tree. Our initials. "Duprass."
The word keeps echoing through my brain as the brown and gray chips of wood fly over my shoulder. Members of a duprass always die within a week of each other. I finish the task and return to my place of solitude within the cold and rough embrace of the mold-covered trunks. It's not but a few hours before I finish an unopened pack of cigarettes until I pick up my phone and dial in my voicemail.

"It's done."

I stare at the blood-covered knife and my reflection becomes opaque, but I realize the bloody visage staring back at me. I've found out that my fata morgana was just that, an illusion drawing me somewhere. As I pull the knife in, I grin. Dull blades hurt just as much as I imagined they would.

This is extremely well-written, and a great read.

If you want constructive criticism, the one thing I can think of is that I'd have liked to have seen the back story developed a little more - it was intriguing.

Aside from that, though, great job. You write very well andshow a sense of humor, which totally pwns most of the darkity-dark crap around here. I really enjoyed reading this.

This is a very polished story. My only "nitpick" is a grammar issue:

It's = it is, contracted

Its = the possessive form

Thanks for a great story! I liked it a lot. Good luck with that contest. You should think about submitting to magazines, in which case you've just given away First Electronic/Web Rights by posting it here. Alas.

You keep the reader in the dream flow which is not easy when writing in the first person, and I love the evolution of romance to violence, the opposite of how I write. Well done!

Wow, thanks for the warm reception.

And I always get the correct form of "It's" and "Its" wrong, I used to refer to the wikipedia article on it whenever I wrote and it just never sank in.

As far as the back-story goes, all my stories end up dragging on whenever I turn them in, so I like to do a lot of ambiguous cutting and chopping. The way it works is that a picture is posted and the entries write something about it, so I'm trying to focus more on the actual scene than the characters.

Thanks again, guys.

It's and its are easy: "It's" is only for "it is" and nothing else. If you can't break the word into "it is," throw the apostrophe out.

Nice creepy little story too. I have a suggestion: I found your character's description of "easing" the knife into Jessie a bit undramatic. Maybe "forced" or "shoved," or "pushed" if you want a word that wouldn't ordinarily be used. Or break out the thesaurus. To me it seems like if he's easing the knife into Jessie's shoulder, Jessie is just sitting there happily taking it.

I understand what you're saying, but I want to focus more on the monolog the narrator gives Jessie rather than the actual act of Jessie being killed. I don't really want her death to be dramatic, I just want her character resolved.

Okay, sometimes the author picks a word just for the specific effect it has on the passages around it, and I can understand that. :)

Makes sense. I did wonder if it was intentional, and given the quality of the story overall I guess it's obvious in retrospect that it was. But I couldn't see any other shortcomings, and I hate to leave a literature thread without somehow dumping on the work displayed. (It's not entirely about me being an asshole, I promise!)

Then thank you for the inadvertent compliment. :P

Well I'm new, but here's my two cents:

This story is all over the place. It reads like a bunch of connected thoughts but it's not fluid like stream of consciousness writing. Kinda the literary equivalent of an episode of family guy; I'm trying to follow the story but I keep getting distracted by the tangents.

I'd say to improve it you need to trim the fat off. We don't need a story about Elizabethan times to know that a dull knife hurts. Your bit about Japanese executions is interesting but in the end it just distracts from the real reason she's being killed. The narrator doesn't have to tell us "I just had to respond" we'll understand that when the narrator responds.

Anyway I like where this is going it just needs some editing.

I loved this. It reminds me a bit of Will Christopher Baer's writing, which is a huge compliment coming from me, seeing as he's my favorite author. Check him out.

I agree with Apathy's_Child. I wish I'd have known a little bit more about the background of the story. It interested me to pieces.

Eh, I like to connect statements and phrases when I write. Jessie dulled the knife writing "karass" and their initials into the bark of the tree, so I wanted to use that in hindsight to add to the irony of Jessie being executed.

As far as the Japanese execution goes, it's actually fairly pertinent to the story. It's the narrator using it as a historical anecdote to announce his role, which is pretty much all of his monologue towards the end. I hint throughout the beginning that their relationship is pretty much rooted in S&M, so it's only natural that he'd want to make the sting hurt that much more. All of the imagery used that evokes fire hints at the fact that Jessie murdered people via arson later on, and I strongly feel that without those excessive pieces of information, the characters themselves would've been boring and without any personal reference point.

This is very good!!! Unless this is a oneshot, I would continue the story!
as mentioned watch the grammar, but other than that great job.

This is fantastic! I truly appreciate all the vengeful and morbid thought donated to the tale. What a marvelous exploration of humanity at its best and worst - and the fortunate shall always seek this kind of understanding. The fearful shall retreat, and consequently they shall remain in their darkness. Thank you.

This tale really captures my imagination ... and fairly tickles my soul ... so here is why you ease a blade into the subject of your wrath: The moment of intrusion is startling, and the eyes shall betray the dread of the betrayed. The further pressure of the hand upon the blade shall validate the intent, and with the final and slow crawl of any such steel into the flesh of a victim, the ghastly and satisfying sight of disbelief upon the face of the victim shall imbue the perpetrator with a sense of satisfaction ... the final release of breath of the dying shall then be echoed with an equal release from the bearer of the blade. The delight shall be met with rest ... and death.

I really like this tale. It is truth.

See I thought that as well, and I almost went back and edited my post before I realized that these forums don't let you do that after five minutes. However (and I may simply be misunderstanding here) The point of the Japanese executioner living with the condemned (as far as I understand it) was that the person about to be executed knew that their end was coming but never knew when it was going to come, and thus the anticipation of the death made that death worse. In your story it doesn't seem that the victim knows that they are dating their executioner and thus the parable makes no sense. There's no point in making a person live with their executioner if the victim is unaware of it.

If you're really married to the use of the 'Japanese' stuff as a parable, and you're going with the S&M theme; maybe you could make the sudden betrayal less of a surprise for the victim? (it can still be a surprise for the reader). I think someone involved in an S&M relationship with someone they know is going to eventually kill them is much more dramatic than someone who's simply betrayed by their lover.

Anyway, it's your story and you know what it needs better than me. I'm primarily a playwright so I'm very minimalist in my approach.

This was one of those personal writing preferences things, and once he told me why he used that particular word to convey his point, I told him I understood what he meant. He writes with more imagery than I do, which is fine for his style, but wouldn't work for mine.

I hope you're not confusing me with the actual author. My flowery dissertation notwithstanding - this isn't my story.

I'm not; I was replying to you because you replied to me.

Ah ... cool ...

Good story. I felt the suspense right from the beginning.

The victim not knowing is the point. She's very aware of the fact that she's done horrible things in the past, and shows reluctance to tell the main character. I'd imagine someone about to be executed would be well aware of their crimes, just like Jessie was. Sure, she has no idea death is coming, but I find the back-story extremely compatible regardless.

As far as the feelings of betrayal goes, I still think it works in context. The main character rarely ever shows any real sort of compassion or feeling for Jessie, and the language plays it off more like a business trip than it does a relationship. Sure, they sleep together, but no one ever said people who sleep together actually like each other. Jessie however has an extreme illusion about their relationship if you read back over it. She's the one smoozing on about how they're entwined by fate, and the main character essentially just nods his head through the entire thing. It'd only be natural that when she realizes otherwise, she'd be surprised.

Thanks for your input, just think we have creative differences.

ZombieG, the story was excellent and well told. I'm waiting for more posts ...

Uh? I'll write something again soon?