If at first you don't succeed, try something else.

[wordwhacker]

So, I'm still working on "Splintered Soul". Honest. I have it open in the background, right now.

In the meantime, however, I was smacked upside the head with an idea for dvandva's challenge. It's a short drabble, but I think it turned out okay^*.


Wet Sand


They tell me it was hot that day, that the sun had beaten down on my shoulders so hard that I was red for weeks. I'd been swimming earlier, they say, but Nan was watching me now, helping me dig in deep with my plastic toys, her silky hands shaking with every shovel full of wet sand that found its way clumsily into my bucket. They say I loved making castles, that I jabbered on about towers and moats while meticulously tending my slumping masterpieces.

I don't remember the castles; I remember the wet sand and how it felt between my toes, how it stuck between my fingers and crawled up my shorts as I toiled away. They would periodically pick me up and dust me off, they say, muttering all the while about how hard it was to keep their children clean. They hadn't that day. I clawed into the sand with my bare hands, the coolness of it grinding against my skin.

I was sent home with Nan that night; she wrapped me in a blanket, a pouch of warmth and softness and sand buckled in tightly in the back seat. She carried me inside, letting me sleep next to her on her bed, still enveloped in my cocoon and her arms. She couldn't bathe me, she says. She couldn't bring herself to.

They tell me my brother drowned that day, and all I can remember is the feeling of wet sand.



Comments, criticism, questions and rabid weasels are welcome and encouraged.


* "Okay" meaning "I don't quite want to jab out my eyes as penance for having written this piece of shlock."

Comments

*sob sob*

[dvandva.livejournal.com]

Part Two: The narrative.

Thankfully, this part will be a lot shorter. Like I said above, I like the transition from hard adjectives to softer tones as the piece progresses. It really conveys the vividness of the day in the mind of the narrator, and the progression toward more hazy memories as fatigue starts to kick in.

Digression: muttering all the while about how hard it was to keep their children clean,

I understand the sentence-hate you have with this one. It needs to be said, but that's perhaps not the most effective way to do it. Maybe you could try, "On other days, they had periodically picked me up to dust me off, muttering all the while about how hard it was to keep their children clean. They didn't that day."

End Digression.

The time and the place is set perfectly, your word choices give the feel of a dreamlike vividness, as seen in: "[...]had beaten down on my shoulders so hard that I was red for weeks." It's made plain right away that this is a memory, both through the imagery and the omnipotent present tense of the narrative style, and that at least some time has passed for the degree of visible emotional detachment, vis a vis, "They tell me my brother drowned that day," to set in.

You detach nicely from the first-person narrative as the third paragraph starts, and the transition from remembered events to described ones flows seamlessly. In fact, it stays smooth and even in tone through the entire piece, with very little to break up the flow. This is what a drabble is supposed to be. I like.

I also like the inclusion of details that the child wouldn't necessarily have understood at the time, but would have remembered regardless, like "Nan's" hands shaking. Like you had said, she drives the narrator home, so her hands are presumably stable to some degree. The gesture while building the castle is indicative of some emotional distress that the narrator wouldn't have understood at the time, but which comes across clearly to the reader.

And, of course, the strength of the imagery really sets the reader up for the eventual revelation in the fourth paragraph...Well, that's not the exact word, but since we're both drawing a blank here, well, you know what I mean. Grr.

Moving on to characterization. I know it's a little bit odd to mention it with a piece like this, but I feel compelled to mention it, since these characters have such vivid "voices".

The narrator is very gender-ambiguous, which is a very key point, I think, in making him or her such a readily available cypher for the reader to "jump into" and empathize with. I also like his reaction to his brother's death; it seems very human to fixate on a strong sense-memory, like the wet sand, and to almost-equate the sensation with the lack of emotion at the time. That is this piece, in a nutshell.

I like the emphasis on the stability of this family, as evidenced by the number of "they said"s. Obviously, these people are relatively stable if they're able to talk about such a traumatic event to such a degree, (sunburn on shoulders, sand castles, driving a young child home and putting them to bed) with such clarity, even after time has passed. It's a nice counterpoint to the overdrawn "grief" that a lot of people try to convey. This family is obviously upset, to the point that the other child is left alone while the brother is drowning/immediately after his death (end of second paragraph), but leaving such important events to be conveyed through subtle gestures gives the piece a poignancy that it would be lacking if you pushed the point across to the reader, as do the little events, like Nan's tenderness toward the narrator.

1258 words. This, children, is what we call "excessive." You wanted detail, you got detail.

I'm gonna go cry now. But in a poignant, understated sort of way, because you kick all kinds of ass. Have I mentioned that I liked this a lot yet?

He's a GIRL?!

[cassaclyzm.livejournal.com]

I bow down to your awesomeness. Your C&C is divine. Rawkage.

"Your kind can't satisfy my thirst."

[dvandva.livejournal.com]

Consider it repayment. For a little something like, well...Nine comments of Doom.