Fleur Du Mal
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Hi! I'm here to present my views on your story, I hope at least some of this is helpful...
The story is good! Made quite an impression! I just had to come and tell you that since no one else has. Despite the butchery that'll shortly follow ('cause I can't help myself =P), never forget that my first impression was: this is good.
There's a way you have formulated your sentences that create a haunting mood. I can relate with the charcter very well, I can feel the eerie sorrow and a weight on my chest, as if I was pulled from the bed.
So, imo, your beginning is very powerful. Here comes the problem. Around the time you mention the photograph taped on the mirror, I guessed where this was going to. Not that it would be bad per se, but coupled with the very abrupt end your story has, it does gnaw away a lot of the potential you piece has.
You see, you describe is unspeakable sorrow that has striken Aaron down, shut down the light in his eyes, wakes him up in the middle of the night and then, when he wants 'this time to be different', just opening the drawer makes him fall asleep restfully?
Maybe I was waiting for a stronger reaction from him before he fell back on the bed? Maybe the clothes in the drawer would have still carried her scent? Maybe I expected an abrupt ending to say he still wasn't free. And felt he never would be?
Shortly, in my humble opinion, if you load a beginning of a story with such a powerful, tired and desparate emotion, so quick a change into 'blissful' seems illogical.
Would elaborating on what he goes through when he opens the cupboard seem like a reasonable idea to you? A paragraph or two on his internal dialogue and how it leads to the ending would give the reader so much more, imo.
Btw, I love the note about the clock: 'held a meaning behind it that he understood was respectful sadness '
Stylistically, your writing fits the story almost seamlessly, imo. There's one thing though that started to bother me: you employ the verbs 'to be' and 'to seem' so often that I started to wonder why won't you use other verbs to enhance the mood more? Because using 'to seem' puts a little mitigating effect to what you write and 'to be' has sometimes a sort of a listing quality to it. There was this, there was that, he was, his hair seemed (but wasn't?), the room was, and so on. I'm sorry if I make it sound like it were a huge problem, when it's not, but I just wanted to point that out in case you weren't doing this intentionally.
Eg. here:
quote:
The figure that appeared in that silvered glass seemed to be nothing like the man who stared back at it: tired bags sagged under eyes that had lost their gleam, a dull glance framed by ragged auburn hair that seemed to be a dark brown weed growing from his scalp.
Imo, you make the point that the image and the man seem different in the beginning of the sentence. Why do you need to repeat it? My suggestion for an edit would be to streamline the ending, eg:
'a dull glance framed by ragged auburn hair that grew like dark brown weed from his scalp.'
Now, I didn't do any serious typo-hunting, but this caught my eye:
quote:
Aaron felt the terrified sound come unbidden, a vestige of a still unknown dream that his body reacted to even after all this time.
Shouldn't that be 'terrifying'? Because now it means that the sound was scared, not scaring the man.
Anyways, I found your story an enjoyable piece, eventhough with a bit abrupt conclusion, and I hope you'll consider elaborating the ending.
(in short: write more! =P)
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