1/12/26 - Appol PhD - Smear part 1, 4838 words (LGD)

[Appol PhD they/he]

Additional content warning for discussions of suicide. 

 

Hi everyone,

 

I have a bit of an unorthodox submission here. This is a long short story where I'm sending the first half, and my recommendation is to hold off reading until next week when I submit the second half to read the entire 9k word short story at once. But in case it works better to read and critique smaller chunks weekly the first half of the story is attached.

 

Thanks!

[Silk she/her]

Splitting my responses up just so the post isn't a mile long.

“I have enough experience watching my father fail…” Like the sentiment—good characterization here—but stumbled on the sentence structure.

P2 “things have gotten better for us…” I was willing to go along for the ride on the first page, now I’m bought in. It does feel like there should be a bit more of a build to this reveal, perhaps, since we took some time to get here.

All this description of the social stuff is very believably horrific.

P3 “...and I knew better than to argue with her.” Hmm, now that’s interesting.

P4 “Rather than a supernatural pull to the ocean…” I was just thinking that I wasn’t sure yet what shape the story was going to take, but now I think I know.

P5 “It was the happiest I’ve ever seen her.” That hurts. Well done on that one.

P6 “The first time I saw that blood smear…” was briefly confused here, until I realized we were talking about a different person.

Ah, I was curious about this before, but thought perhaps it was more metaphorical. Here the reference to newborns looking like teenagers makes me wonder why the narrator would mourn a childhood he hasn’t actually lost, since this seems to be the normal course of things.

P9 “boys prefer pragmatic gifts over romantic ones” lol

“...a big enough kitchen to not worry…”

p11 “she hits it off with M right away.” Thought we’d already established this at their first meeting.

So the narrator and D shack up and run off to the ocean together, right? … Right? (Presumably after the shoe drops and we finally learn the horrible abusive thing K’s doing that the narrator has been keeping from us the whole time…)

No overall comments as I’m going right to part 2