Eyes Only
Eyes Only
She sat in her garden and screamed.
It echoed.
She screamed again.
She dug her nails into her palms and burrowed her feet into the soil, pushing up little uneven mounds of dirt.
She pushed off from the rock upon which she was sat and ran across the garden until she hit the privet hedge on the opposing side.
She sank down to the earth in a rustling of leaves and a snapping of twigs, the whispering of beetles in her ears.
She yelled.
It echoed.
Ally McLullich yelled out questions and answers and accusations.
Ally looked down at her hands and saw the marks the nails had left.
She inspected the soles of her feet and saw the scratches the stones had put there.
She curled up on her green patch of grass, shadow cast across her figure in the evening light by the twigs criss-crossing above her, and winced as she felt the pain of the wound a sharp branch had torn down her flank.
She shut her eyes and tucked her limbs into herself, using the breeze as her blanket.
Ally McLullich sobbed, but nobody heard it.
Sarah Cuming
31 Dec 2008 16:02
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Tags: Creative Writing Prose
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George Ttoouli
This is VERY weird – much more surprising than I expected of the opening line.
Often I recoil at the mere mention of characters, screaming, howling in anguish, in any way shape form, but you’ve kept that aspect very sparse and pushed this somewhere strange.
The character’s name is magical to my eye/ear, which rescues quite a bit of this. The extremely visual nature of the central section is very striking.
I’d say you need to work on two particular lines: the “She curled up…” – verbs like ‘cast’ shadoes, ‘criss-crossing’ twigs (or lattices, or webs…) and the ‘sharp’ with the ‘wince’ and the ‘pain’ all add up to a sentence not working hard enough to construct Ally’s unique point of view.
Also the last line: you could go far better than that. A quick edit would be to simply chop it and end on ‘blanket’ but a bit more work might come up with something that doesn’t ‘solve’ the piece, but does elevate it. Look for the ‘yugen’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aesthetics
08 Jan 2009, 16:13
Sarah Cuming
Thank you for the comments; I’ll work on them.
Thanks especially for the selection of those two particular lines, because at the time I wrote it I wasn’t completely sure that it worked or why, but now I think I’ve got a slightly better idea why it doesn’t fit properly. I think part of the problem in that section was that I tried to apply an idea to Ally that wasn’t quite applicable to the character I had been considering in the first or last sections, I manipulated it in a way that twisted the story in her head, and as a result it didn’t give the right effect for the concept which was steering the rest of the piece.
I agree that the last line is weak, but I didn’t want it to end on “blanket”, because that didn’t fit with the final image frame in my head, so thank you for the “yugen” term – never heard it before and it sounds helpful. I’ll consider the concept and hopefully will be able to come up with a more satisfying piece as a result.
Glad you liked the name :) I nicked them from family members. I’ve always found Scottish names to be quite musical.
08 Jan 2009, 18:01
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