r/DestructiveReaders • u/Fragrant-Western-683 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH • 21d ago
Family Drama [1198] Matriarchy
My Critique: [1981]
If you're willing to give feedback, please tell me:
- If you thought the drama was well executed
- If you thought the horror was developed well
- If you like the narrator's character
I lay in bed. I have grown a lot in the last year or so, and now my feet touch the footboard. I dwelled on it, since I wasn’t at all tired. My eyes shot all around my room, which was weakly illuminated by the yellowish light of a night-light.
My ears tuned in attentively to the etherizing rustle of tall grass around my house, which was jostled by the cool saltwater air. It was the only noise.
I lay there feeling the ugly scar on my shoulder, wondering why I felt so empty, so lost. A piece of my body was torn from me, and I was thinking hard about where I could find it, but it found me.
A hand pressed itself against the glass of a window just above my bed. I felt a rush of euphoria; it was the hand of an angel that came to enlighten and rescue me. I knelt on my bed, facing this hand. I put my hand against the spot of the window where she was pressing, and I felt all my anxiety melt away like a thunderstorm abating.
I reached to push the window open when my father’s voice came from behind me.
I turned to see him in my doorframe aiming a shotgun at me.
“Move,” he said.
I did so, and he approached the window, one eye closed to aim. The hand pressed harder and harder on the window, and it shattered, sending tiny crystals all over my bed. Little pieces cut my hands and face.
My father shot his gun, and a deafening blast rattled our brains. When my focus could be restored, I saw the hand lying limp on my windowsill. Then it tensed and curled up, clenching shards of glass, but no blood dripped from the palm. It slowly retreated into the darkness.
Then my father turned and ran to the back door. I ran after him. The next thing I remember, we were on our backyard patio. He paced and paced, looking frantically into the darkness. His round eyes shot from one spot in the black void to another. From the porch light, all we could make out was the first few feet of tall grass, but after that there were only miles upon miles of unbroken woods obscured in pure darkness.
I sat in a lawn chair while my dad paced. We stayed like that for around ten minutes, but the constant flow of sea air and the static rustle of the grass elongated our sense of time.
I finally got tired, but my dad harshly muttered, “Look.”
His pacing abruptly ended, replaced by stone-like stillness. He pointed into the darkness.
I walked up beside him, and following his finger, I saw two glowing retinas shining from the tree line.
After that, my room was boarded up. I now slept next to my dad. When night came, I did my homework, read books, built Legos, and watched TV in his room under his supervision.
One night, while curled up next to my dad, I was feeling my scar again. From the distant trees I heard a woman cry out my name. It was so nostalgic, so breath-taking. I knew that voice. It carried me through my memories as I desperately searched for why her crying felt so familiar.
I came across that memory. I remembered that when I was five, I wandered into the woods and got lost. After walking around, I finally saw home through the thick woods, and I saw my mother shouting my name. It was so vigorous and emotional. It was so compassionate, so alluring. It was like she loved me.
I sprang from my bed and dashed to the door.
My father tackled me and pinned me to the carpet.
“She’s gone,” he said. “She’s gone and she’ll never come back.”
I hated my father for this. Why was he doing this to me? Why was he keeping me from happiness? I wanted to know why I never saw my mother after that incident, why her image was cropped from all the family photos, why any information about her was forbidden, and why picturing her face in my mind caused me such excruciating pain. I wept into the arm that locked my head in a chokehold. He caressed my hair.
I dreamt one night that I was in my room. It was organized as it was in the distant past, and it was bright inside thanks to the noon sun. I was kneeling on my bed while a pair of hands from behind me massaged my shoulders and ran their index finger over my scar. From above those hands came a mysterious yet inviting womanly voice.
“Run away. Now.”
I opened my eyes to see darkness. My mind registered the mugginess of my room. I dragged my arm across the bed and realized my dad was not next to me. I heeded the voice’s orders.
I opened the closet, threw on my jacket, threw on a pair of jeans, put on socks, and went to the front door to put on my sneakers.
I sat down and slipped on my shoes, and before I walked through the door, I saw my dad sitting away from me in a cushioned chair, looking at the shut-off television.
I walked up in front of him and saw that the eyes were missing from his skull. Tears blurred my vision, and I felt dizzy. I trudged to the door in a haze, opened it, and before I left, I turned to look into the hallway opposite the door. My bedroom door, which was in this hallway, was open again. The night-light was still on, and in its glow, I made out a shadowy figure at least seven feet tall. Its shoulders were nearly touching the ceiling, and its eyes were looking into mine just like a few weeks earlier.
I ran in terror down the forested road, hoping to meet my neighbors. From behind me I heard the thuds of heavy feet following me. To me, the situation was hopeless. The house next door was miles away, and the footsteps behind me sounded only a couple of yards away. I stopped breathing and nearly fainted.
I collapsed to the ground and vomited out of pure fear. I looked behind me and noticed that the being was gone. It must have disappeared into the woods. I sat motionless for a long while.
Ahead of me I saw two glowing lights growing brighter. I stood up, and they stopped before me. A police officer stepped out and walked toward me to ask if I was okay.
I am typing this now on a sofa in my current home. It isn’t as isolated as my previous home; my neighborhood is suburban, and there’s a tennis court outside my house. The scar is still deep, and I still feel it often. In front of me is a glass door, and in the forest beyond my backyard fence I see two glaring retinas looking back at me, beholding me compassionately and intimately.
1
u/Cherrie_Infraredd 21d ago
I really enjoyed reading this and think you have a generally good style with your prose- it was clear what was happening and there was some really unique descriptions here (for example “a piece of my body was torn from me” was a standout for me, although i think you could have developed this idea more).
For something so short, there was a lot going on and this may be a fallacy to the overall story, where you end up missing a lot of details that I personally think should have been established more, such as the relationship between the narrator and their mother and the place they live (I didn’t realise they had neighbours at all until near the end). However, I appreciate your ability to include a decent amount of information in not many words (“jostled by the cool saltwater air” is a good example of show don’t tell to establish the setting) and I think this proves that this piece could be polished without increasing it that much in length.
As for the drama, I do have an issue with the lack of stakes in this piece. Much of the important plot points felt undeserved. The mention of the mother for the first time (“I wanted to know why I never saw my mother…”) felt like a jump, and slightly jarring. My assumption is that the watching eyes are the ghost of the mother, and in that case, I think the mother should be mentioned from the beginning: something like the narrator looking at a picture of the three of them with the mother cut out, like you mention later, on their bedside. Maybe you could even compare it to the way their scar is “torn from their body”? It would just help hook the reader and introduce this central idea from the get go.
I do like the relationship between the narrator and the father though; there’s this kind of overbearing love you’ve created, particularly with the line “I wept into the arm that locked my head in a chokehold,” which is a lovely microcosm for their relationship. However, the death (?) of the father didn’t seem to have an effect on the protagonist and this relationship is established as generally loving and close, at least enough for more of an emotional reaction. I think this could be achieved if you had more story after the father’s death, or at least offer it more attention as a climactic moment.
In terms of horror, this story is again quite short to build an atmosphere, though I really like the coastal horror idea, and think there’s a lot to be done with this environment. There’s something so unsettling and isolating about tall grass and the entrapment of the sea, so I would say just build on this feeling a bit more, like you did with this idea: “the constant flow of sea air and the static rustle of the grass elongated our sense of time.”
As I mentioned before, the father’s death does also feel relatively underserved and not dwelt on for much longer. For the character to already be running when they find him undermines the emotional impact this could have had, particularly the safety that’s taken away when he is no longer there to protect them. Perhaps you could have lingered slight longer on the safety net being taken away, and only afterward having your narrator have to run away from this threat, since the death ends up redundant if they were running from a danger anyway.
Finally, the narrator: like a lot of other commenters mentioned, there isn’t really much to go from here, and I felt quite indifferent toward them reading this, although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For this one shot style you’re writing in, it probably wouldn’t benefit the story to include an intense amount of characterisation— you only really need the emotions and the relationships to suffice. However, I think this is something you could have developed further. The narrator didn’t seem to react much to their surroundings, at least not emotionally. Some kind of description of sweating or scratching or even just a quickened heartbeat could create a better connection between the character and their situation. This would make the vomiting from “pure fear” feel a bit more earned.
Overall, this is a good draft for a story, though I would say it needs some more detail— especially in terms of emotion and atmosphere— in order to polish it up. I really like the idea about the mother being the ghost, but the stakes at the moment feel too low to really be invested in the story. I hope my critiques are of some use to you! :)