If this is the worse you can find to say about it then I’m happy :) See!
I am currently reworking it as I think there’s a lot of things wrong with it.
Short Story / Reconciliation (Analysis)
The letter said a meeting had been arranged for Ms Jane Murray at Her Majesty’s Prison Brightwell on the 22nd of February at 10 o’clock in the morning. Please respond by filling out the tear off slip and posting it in the prepaid envelope. It went on to say that Her Majesty’s Prison Service would appreciate a prompt response.
Dr. Hilary Thomas, the psychiatrist I’d been assigned to, came up with the idea. At first I was definite. No and, over my dead body.
Doctor Thomas persisted.
‘The meeting would help me reconcile my emotions. It would give me a chance to let the hate end and the healing begin; and if he could see the damage he had done then he would apologise.’
It sounded like a load of bollocks so I decided to ignore it. After a couple of months of gentle persuasion she slowly changed my mind and like a fool I signed the form that started the wheels turning. A couple of weeks later the letter confirming the details arrived.
Did they know they had arranged the meeting for the third anniversary of the attack? Had they done this deliberately? It was the sort of sick joke that inadequate people with weight issues in poorly fitting uniforms with permanent creases thought was hilarious.
At first I was stunned, I just wanted to screw the letter up, then I wanted to tear it into shreds and burn it.
I didn’t do any of these. I just sat gazing out of the window gripping the letter like it was the end of a rope. The dreams would come back; I just knew it.
I drank tea and shook like a leaf. Then, when it got dark and the shadows appeared, I got the bottle of cheap scotch out of the cupboard in the kitchen. I just wanted to keep the dreams at bay. I just wanted to make sure they wouldn’t come back. The dreams stayed away as long as there was scotch.
After a couple of slugs I started to think back to the night.
I’d been out at the gym, New Year’s resolution and all that. I’d just got back to my car and opened the door when I heard this voice behind me wanting to know what the time was. I turned round and saw this big smiling face, so I smiled back and looked at my watch. Just after eight thirty I told him. He said thank you and turned round. So did I. A second later I felt an arm tight round my throat while the other one stuck some tape over my mouth, pulling me back and off balance. It happened so quick I just didn’t know what to do, and by the time I tried to struggle he was already dragging me to the ditch by the car park. All I could see was our shadows locked together and all I could feel was his sweaty breath on my neck laced with… that stench. Then he hit me on the back of my head and I passed out.
But that was three years ago.
I can feel that breath again now, crawling through my hair, soaking into my clothes and every pore on my skin.
Without the scotch the dreams would come back, gouging their way into my head, distorting my mind and ripping great chunks from my sleep. Without the scotch I’d wake up, screaming.
Every night without fail I’d look at the clock, like it was some compulsion. Why would I want to know when I was waking up? I did though and it was always quarter past three. I’d take a sleeping pill and lie back down again; too tired to stay awake but too scared to go to sleep.
The next thing I knew it would be morning and the alarm would be going off. They wouldn’t go away now, not until after the visit to Brightwell. I ran of scotch.
The day of the meeting came round sooner than I had wanted it to. I managed to keep off the scotch until the night before the meeting; then I gave in. One last time I told myself, like I always did.
I’d ticked the box that asked me if I needed transport to Brightwell. I didn’t like the idea of trying to drive there by myself.
The doorbell rang at seven thirty. Christ! I’d barely woken up let alone got ready. I just hoped the house didn’t smell like a distillery. I pulled my dressing gown on and went to the door.
I wanted to see some ID. After shouting at them they stuck a pair of plastic badges through the letterbox. There was a photo and details on one side and the prison service logo in the centre at the top. On the back was a signature printed by a computer. I invited Joanna Davies and Dave Morsley in and showed them in to the living room. I made them a cup of tea and went and got ready.
At first I didn’t know what to wear then I settled on a pair of loose fitting androgynous jeans and a large sweater. I didn’t want to have any shape.
I looked in the mirror. Jeesus, what a mess.
I slapped something on to hide the cracks.
I pulled a pair of running shoes on, just in case.
“We ought to get going luv.” Dave shouted up the stairs.
“All right, I’m coming, I’ll just be a minute.” I shouted back. There was some desperation in my voice; I knew it but I just couldn’t stop it.
“I just need to do my teeth and I’ll be with you.”
“Right you are luv. I’ll get the engine going. Jo’ll see you to the car.” Dave added and I heard the door open and close.
I cleaned my teeth and joined Jo downstairs. We left the house and joined Dave in the car. I sat in the back right behind Dave so he couldn’t see me in the mirror, Jo sat in the front passenger seat, she tried smiling at me, but it wasn’t at all convincing. We set off, a little too intently for my liking.
Dave was chatty, too flaming chatty. He kept on about how he was nothing more than a taxi driver for the prison service and how he wanted to go work on the trawlers with his mate Mick. I wished he was already there. Then I wondered if he had ever attacked a woman.
No. Dave was probably unhappily married to a wife that was just as fat as he was. They probably hadn’t had sex in years. Well, not together anyway.
We arrived early.
Dave turned off the main road and into the empty car park. He drove up to the chain link gates topped with razor wire and stopped by the guardhouse. Harry, the guard, and Jo and Dave greeted each other, and Harry checked Jo and Dave’s ID then opened the gate. Dave drove through the gate and parked the car in a space marked ‘Reserved for visitors’. They led me to a thick, heavy door that let us inside the prison. It felt like being swallowed up by a huge concrete animal.
We went through lots of doors, they seemed endless and they all had to be unlocked and opened and shut and locked before we could move on to the next one.
I was eventually shown into a room to with a table and two chairs and another door. The room was tiled to institutional standards. The tiles in these places always went higher than the eye expected. It made anyone not in on the joke feel shorter than they actually were, smaller than the institution; or was it to make the institution look bigger.
I wasn’t in a mood to think about it, I just didn’t want to be here, wherever here was.
I looked up. The room that was taller than it was square. It was a room filled with an emptiness, sterile and devoid of feeling. It smelled of nothing as if it hadn’t been used for years, but cleaned every day just in case. Primeval whoops and shouts from the inmates leaked into the room and stabbed me in the ears. The voices were intimidating, even though they were behind bars, and grilles and countless locked doors and solid walls.
The stone and metal may hold back the flesh but the oppression and the violence implied in the sounds roamed freely. My palms started to sweat.
I waited.
Neat footsteps came clip, clopping down the corridor and stopped outside the door. There was a jangling of keys, some polite chat, and a little laughter.
The right key was found and inserted into the lock. The door opened and in came Dr. Hilary Thomas. She smiled and offered me a plastic cup with a drink in it.
“Hi Jane, tea no sugar right?”
I nodded, took the cup and tried to smile. Dr. Thomas sat down at the other end of the table and opened a folder. She read from a sheet of paper and took a sip from her cup. A few seconds later she put them down, looked at me, then smiled and relaxed a little. Did I look that stressed?
“I know you must be feeling nervous,” she said, “so I’ll just run through what’s going to happen.”
She started to talk but the words just bounced off me like balls of cotton wool. All I could think about was having to face him again, to smell his stench again.
“Jane? Jane?”
I looked up.
“Are you alright?”
I nodded and smiled a wobbly smile.
“Are there any questions you want to ask?”
What a stupid thing to say. Of course there were questions I wanted to ask. I wanted to know why he had picked me. Why he had chosen me that night three years ago. I wanted to know whether he knew he had completely destroyed my life. Was that what he wanted to achieve?
The problem was that I didn’t want to have to ask them. I wanted them to be answered without me actually having to speak the words.
Dr. Thomas looked at her watch. She tried to do it so I wouldn’t notice.
“Look. Jane. We don’t have to do this. It’s not too late to stop it if you’d rather.”
I shook my head. I wanted to do it. It was a case of finding the courage to do it.
I remember as a small girl at the swimming baths. I’d creep up to the end of the diving board and I’d try my best to jump off, but all I could see was the hard tiled bottom of the pool and it made me frightened. I’d have to walk back along the board, conceding a humiliating defeat. This was the same thing but the board was much higher and the water was very shallow. What a crap analogy Jane, get a grip for crying out loud.
I picked up the cup, missed my mouth and spilled tea all over the desk.
“Shit! Sorry.” I said.
Dr. Thomas fished some tissues from her bag and mopped up the mess.
“It doesn’t matter Jane. Don’t upset yourself by it.”
There was nowhere to put the tissues, no waste bin, not even a window ledge. She left them in a pile on the table.
I picked the cup up again and drank the remains of the tea. I put the cup down carefully, trying my best not to shake. Dr Thomas looked at me, a picture of sincerity.
“Are you sure you want to go through with this Jane? I can still cancel if you’d rather.”
Oh, if only she knew just how tempting it was to be on the other side of the door, but what would that achieve? I’d still have the dreams and the waking up at quarter past three, in a screaming sweat.
“No. I need to do this. I have to do this. Let’s get it over and done with.”
Jane leaned across the table and held my hand for a couple of seconds.
“Ready?” She said. I nodded.
She went to the other door and knocked on it.
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Mikkosgirl reviewed Version 1 -
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I like the way you begin, but there isn’t as strong of a visual image of the letter and your protagonists response to it. It sounds like you’re introducing an invitiation to tea, almost. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but I really was confused in the beginning. I like how you make the scotch almost a security blanket, keeping the pain and fear from permeating the very beign of your individual, and it even adds a little foreshadowing to the situation.
The personality of your character shines in the scene in the car, which made me start to pay more attention. The entire feeling of the almost apathy for the gentleman driving and his weight made the character seem even more real. The setting inside the prison was realistic, and very easy to conjure up in the mind. I feel this sense of anger towards the doctor. Is that what you are trying to get across?
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littlegreenpills reviewed Version 1 -
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Fantastic premise, and it is clear you have real insight into the emotional turmoil Jane is going through. That feeling of blank numbness that traumatised people is shown starkly and clearly here. You’ve got some pretty good lines here as well; I especially liked “It was the sort of sick joke that inadequate people with weight issues in poorly fitting uniforms with permanent creases thought was hilarious.”
That said, I think it needs a fair bit of work before it is publishable. What I felt I missed, when I reached the end, was a real understanding of the process that led to Jane agreeing to meet her attacker in the first place. The psychiatrist persuaded her, of course – but how? In fact, I would really like to know how Jane found the sessions with Hillary. She’s obviously pretty cynical about everything, but hearing Jane’s inner responses to some specific examples of Hillary’s psychologist guff would really help with effectively portraying just how damaged she is. It’s pretty clear she has a massive problem with trusting or liking anyone – she’s suspicious of the driver, she IDs everyone who comes to her home – but what would really drive it home is if she directs the same cynical anger towards someone who is clearly trying to help, understand and heal her.
JaCarloHairston reviewed Version 1 -
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I followed your story but just have a few tehnical suggestions.
1) On page 2 I was confused by the interaction between the guy asking for the time and the narrator.
2)the use of the word androgynous seems pointless on page 3 before describing the jeans.
3) The doctor does alot of movement before anything is said on page 6
sorry to knitpick
matty_j reviewed Version 1 -
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very well done!
your descriptiveness really put me in the story. great job.
i really felt the protagonist’s tension throughout the piece as well. it seemed to build as she got closer to her attacker…
the only problem i had with the story was the ending. it may be your way of letting the reader decide for themself what happened, and i can respect that. it’s YOUR story.
but if felt, for lack of a better word, “cheated” out of closure or even revenge for the protagonist. again, it’s your story, but i wanted somethig a little more final…
overall, great job. you definitely wrote a good piece. keep it up!!!
SwordMistress reviewed Version 1 -
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Great beginning! It really pulls the reader in. This was well-written and you had me up until the end. It’s just a personal preference, but I hate to be left hanging. I really wanted to know how the confrontation went. The story could be much more powerful if you included it.
“meeting came round” around
“I ran of scotch.” I ran “out” of scotch.
Howard_Bushart reviewed Version 1 -
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This is an intriguing piece with a very interesting premise. It’s revealing that we see Jayne in all her quirkiness—obsessing on weight, shape, dress and how she judges others and herself by a different standard in a post-assault world. That, I believe, is the most effective part of the story. Her fear is tangible and that’s good. But it does need a heavy-handed edit in places.
For instance, you have a tendency to overdescribe action. The passage of the detectives showing the badges was very descriptive but unnecessary. All I needed to know was they showed me their badges and I let them in. The same with the going upstairs and getting ready and showing the ids at the prison gate. A couple of sentences would suffice.
I find it hard to do the numerical rating part. You are onto something and you do have talent. You don’t need an agent to place short fiction and most agents want no part of it anyway.
imara219 reviewed Version 1 -
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I felt like you did a good job creating your world and character. I could feel her emotions very well. It would be nice to have a glimpse of her world before the attack, i.e. did she have a boyfriend, what kind of job did she have, what does she do now. only because her destruction would feel more complete to me as a reader. Besides that I liked your descriptions and you seem to be affected by your character. There are some grammatical errors you might want to fix before you show this to an agent.
Wytchcat reviewed Version 1 -
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Thanks for requesting this review.
Watch puncuation. ”...for Ms. Jane Murray ath Her Majesty’s Prison, Brightwell, on…” for example.
Use quotes to make comments or explatives stand out …”NO” or “Over my dead body!”
When you do use quotes… write the dialoge as spoken. ... Doctor Thomas persisted “The meeting would help YOU reconcile…”
“All I could see WERE our shadows…”
Overall a well written start. I would recommend either giving more detail and “creepiness” I guess, to Jane’s dreams or the attack itself. As it is… while it truly is a terrifying experience, it doesn’t read as one over all. (something to thank, or not, the current entertainment industry for).
This will be especially important if you want to leave this with the ending you have… sort of a “slice of life” piece. In that same vein you can give a bit more descriptive narrative about the how the scotch dulls everything etc.
It’s a good base though, that can either be brushed up as is, or added to for completion.
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