This is really good. In terms of construction, definitely the best I've read thus far, obviously written by someone experienced. Lot of small, understated descriptive details here in a competition where description is usually thrown out the window. The ending I think may be a base breaker for the competition at large, but I think it works, and for a second, it got me. I pulled back after a second, but reading the last few lines gave me a short pang in my heart, which is a lot to accomplish for a mini.

The dad comes across as just a little too self-deprecating, not in its severity, but just in the frequency that attention is called to it. He also comes across as paradoxically very self-aware yet supposedly quite dumb (a factor I think is also a bit overdone, like a well-done steak). I think also, there is a bit too much mentioning of Jessica in the story that it dampens the conclusion. I'd prefer it to be a bit more subtle, which in fairness, it already kind of is.

I had a teacher named Mrs. Gee. She gave me a copy of Guards, Guards! by Terry Pratchett. She was a sweetheart.

Cool title. Story feels like a lot of missed potential, though.

this guy has probably got twice my vocabulary and he isn’t even in middle school yet

he doesn't seem to show it. except the word "universe", which dad somehow doesn't know.

And just like that, I’m thinking about my Jessica again. Her voice, her hair, her smell. Her laugh and her cooking, and her son.

Only detail I know about her is chocolate cake. The rest is still vague. I don't know her enough to empathize.

since Jason claims the teacher didn't bring up this topic of parallel universes, it only makes sense if he got it from his superhero comics. It's half of the title, after all, therefore it's gotta be more than a throwaway detail. yet when describing the concept to his dad, he gives such a generic description. there's no hint that he's thinking about some story that influenced him.

the problem here is that the boy's idea doesn't get turned into any interesting conclusions.

Something different could have happened to them a long time ago, and that makes them change who they are.

people could turn out different, but there's no suggestion what in the past could've produced a different result (i.e. smarter dad). and since the focus here is on the mother, I was wondering if there's something implied about a mistake someone made in the past, something that could've been changed to save her in another universe. but uh, there's nothing. just, "feel bad because she's gone"

the only focus I can find is the mud caked (pun intended?) on his fingers. pretty imagery which doesn't tell me anything.

So I read this one early, because I saw >>Cassius posting that it was good. And that's not incorrect, the construction's good, the details are good, it's very nice and evocative. I left it hanging for a couple of days, though, because the specifics of Cassius' commentary didn't make sense to me, and I was sneakily hoping some other people would post and clear it up. Alas I am still confused, and need to get to writing comments, so here we are.

I'm not sure I understand what's going on here. What I get from it is that Jessica, the narrator's wife and Jason's mother, died sometime in the past few years, and father and son are still having a melancholy time dealing with it and wishing she was with them again. And that's all I get from it. If there's a twist to the ending, I'm not seeing it. I looked for suggestions that there might be some unusual relationships going on, maybe Jessica is the narrator's daughter instead of his wife or something, but couldn't find anything to go on in that direction. Cassius mentioned in Discord that the end "recontextualizes" the prior content, but I don't really see that either.

In fact my primary criticism of the story is that it doesn't recontextualize anything, and stays stuck in the same groove of sadness it establishes early on without introducing anything new. Jason making his own lunch already suggests mom's out of the picture, and this line absolutely confirms it:

“Dark chocolate, like mom used to make,” he said.

And then we just stay there for another 400ish words, end scene. So... if there's more going on here, I don't get it. Maybe I'm missing something big? It's very possible, post and let me know if so!

Continuing on with my present interpretation for now... well, it's a hard call. This style of country music lyrics litfic is certainly popular in some circles, but happens to run counter to my personal tastes, so I'm quite conscious that I might not be giving it the leniency I would unconsciously extend to other styles and genres. (Perhaps this is what Cassius was referring to?)

The piece does seem to achieve its goals. They aren't goals I particularly like, but it's hard for me to say they're objectively poor, except in the sense that even for this genre I'd like to see a little more of a narrative arc. Characters facing a conflict and taking some action, y'know? I don't see any action here, and I'd like to see some, even in a litfic mini.

Good emotional evocation, meh on narrative and story, where does that go in terms of voting ranks... I'm not sure. Mid, probably around average or a little lower, since I value narrative arc very highly in mini rounds. Subject to change if I did miss something going on here though. Thanks for writing - it's certainly a piece that provokes some thought!

I hurt my arm, so I'm recording reviews instead of typing them.

Listen at this link.

Sorry if I sound a bit harsh on this one:

I can’t explain it, but when you’re a dad, sometimes you just know when something’s wrong with your kid.

Sounds cheesy and generic. Like something you quoted verbatim from books instead of something you experienced. If it's seat-of-the-pants, then it doesn't come across as it should.

Hmmpf. He remembers his wife because of her cooking? Come on! That's a bit of pigeonholing, no?

I mean the characters here are very stereotypical. Dad is a dumb construction worker. Son is a boy wonder. Mum was a good cook. Not precisely subtle in the characters' choice.

So yeah, this has a sort of sappy appeal because of dead mother and caboodle, but to me it comes across as a collection of stock cliches.

>>Haze
>>Not_A_Hat
>>Monokeras


All right you chumps, now you've gone and done it. I'm gonna have to write a second opinion. A lot of people have been inevitably comparing this to the story "The Burden She Bore", which makes sense because the both use the same basic framework, but I think this story does the same shtick but better in two big ways:

1. It is not direct, preachy, or proselytizing. Whoever wrote this gets what it is like to be a father, but also remembers what it is like to be a child. The interactions between the two lead characters are genuine interactions without the need of an artifice or a cloyingly sweet interaction to sell that. The moment where the son remarks, "Let's not stretch things" to banter with his father is a more legitimate father-son interaction than I've seen in a mountain of write-off stories.

2. The details (by that I don't just mean description, I mean actions that communicate character) here are frankly better. >>Haze mentions not getting the point of a small (yet important!) detail of the mud. I am being straight-faced with no pretentious hyperbole here when I say the mud is a very important metaphor, while somehow also doing double duty as being a character-establishing detail. What the mud on the hand communicates immediately about the father is that he is a rustic, homey sort of man who is a bit messy and easy-going all without a single line of expository information . On the other hand, the mud is also representative of the situation itself.

3. It's a story about a father which I am a sucker for.

Here I am going to sound like a jackass. The mud is symbolic of the dead mother, or rather, the father's grief of losing her. It's something that's caked to the father, a detail that is uncomfortably and passively lingering underneath the surface. It's something that's brushed off in small amounts, not all at once.

That's dealing with grief. You don't grieve all at once and get over it. It sticks to you, and you cast a little bit off of it from you little by little. At the end, the father lets a little more of that grieve out while simultaneously casting out more mud. His hands still aren't clean, but there's less mud.

I disagree with >>Ranmilia that there is no narrative arc. There is one. It is very small-scale, but it is definitely present. As I've mentioned, both characters are dealing with grief, but they are contextualizing it differently. The son ultimately wants to vocalize his feelings about his lost mother, but as kids (and adults) can be with discussing emotions, the topic is difficult to broach directly. So the boy uses the topic of parallel universes that he's presumably read in the comic book as a vehicle to discuss it. If you want me to directly state what the arc is, it's very much that there is an undercurrent of a problem (i.e. the presumably dead mother) that both characters are still dealing with, but neither of which can vocalize, and they have a small moment where they assuage a little bit of that grief together.

And what is nice about this is that it doesn't resolve things completely, and it doesn't overindulge the moment. The kid doesn't say something completely on the nose like, "I wish I was in the universe mom was still here" or something overtly direct because that wouldn't make sense with how things were established. He's still struggling to deal with that emotion, so he mentions a tertiary detail he fondly remembers about her, the chocolate cake. The mom is still (assumed) dead, and that still sucks. But things are getting better. They are dealing with that emotion. They together as father and son are moving forward.

There's an essay to be written here about the significance of this opening up in the context of the story particularly because of the traditionally masculine father and decidedly feminine mother that is established, and the general stereotype that men have difficulty with emotional communication with other men, especially their fathers but I'm not really going to get into all that business other than to mention that it drives up the significance of the interaction.

>>Monokeras

See above spoiler paragraph about why we have the gruff and tumble father with the more soft-spoken and intellectual boy.It's not sad because the mother is dead. The story is sad because two people miss her.

Also you smell like excess cologne.

>>Ranmilia

So what does this re-contextualize? The emotionality of the characters. When Jason first mentions the chocolate cake, there are two interesting factors at work:

1. There's no indication to his inflection. He's basically stating a fact. He makes the remark as if nothing is bothering him. Jason continues this trend right up until the line about his wanting his mother's chocolate cake again.

2. The dad checks in, wondering if Jason is feeling moody about his mother, but he doesn't know how to talk about it either. Jason continues for more lines to act as if nothing is amiss. Dad has made a lot of allusions to his wife being dead, but he never seems to dwell on his grief, and he himself is struggling to communicate. That is, until Jason makes his comment about wanting the cake.

What is "revealed" is that both these characters are still very much affected by the death of the mother, but they just struggle to talk about it openly, only letting it slip through in these little moments.

Who cares about the mom? This story isn't about her, you guys. If it were, it'd be titled: "My Dead Mom: an Adventure in Alternative Realities." It's a father and son story.

Oh. I still had this one in queue. Uh... don't actually have a lot to offer here. Just a solidly executed, sweet little slice of life.

This is well put-together, and I can't really fault anything specific. So I'll try to be harsh. :derpytongue2:

The story isn't as interesting to me as most of the others I've read. I think if you want to do something simple, you need to do more than write it beautifully (which you did): you need to provide something striking that forces me to connect with the characters and feel things for them emotionally. That's hard to do in a minific, and I'm not quite there. The protagonist here is interesting and colorful, but it's hard to step into his shoes, and the child doesn't have much personality. I'm left with a story that seems realistic, but leaves me feeling very little.

>>Cassius

The son ultimately wants to vocalize his feelings about his lost mother, but as kids (and adults) can be with discussing emotions, the topic is difficult to broach directly.

Except that we learn about the mother being dead from the son's second line of dialogue broaching it directly. The idea of them finally circling around to a painful topic is undercut by the fact that it just gets laid out, clear and obvious, with that early cake line.

(And if you want to argue that one of the strengths of the story is the way it explores the norms of masculine emotional repressions, you can't simultaneously argue that Jason's first line has no emotional nuance. Pivoting from "my day was good" to "like mom used to make" says volumes, in man-speak. Blandly mentioning a painful subject out of the blue is the hypermasculine equivalent of huddling on the floor, weeping and hyperventilating.)

So, yeah, I'm with >>Ranmilia. This sets out some compelling premises and then feels like for over half its length it's just stomping back over and over the same ground. The bit about private school? We were told in the first paragraph how smart Jason is. The dad not knowing the word "universe" (except that he immediately proceeds to define it; and he casually throws the word "theoretical" into his next line, so I am really not buying that he's that dumb)? Again, the first paragraph makes a point of how much smarter Jason is. The climactic moment in which we learn the shocking twist of Jason missing his mom? Uh, yeah, I picked that up from the first cake reference.

The interpretation that Dad is in a denial that's only cleared away by the final cake line, too, is undercut by the foreshadowing:

“I don’t know,” he says. “I was just thinking… maybe if I could go to parallel universes, I’d go to one where I could have mom’s chocolate cake again.”

And just like that, I’m thinking about my Jessica again.

Yet this is his narration a little over halfway through:

The school’s a bit of a drive from home. It’s private, and I’m damn proud that Jason’s been doing great there. Costs a buck, but nothing that I can’t give up. Jessica wouldn’t have wanted him at a public school. She was always picky like that.

(In fact, that's the line where we learn dead-mom's name.)

I will acknowledge that the story does deepen the father/son relationship in the back half — notably, the "Let's not stretch things" joke. And while the mud was introduced in the front half, it's only at the end that it's really reinforced sufficiently to support the metaphorical link. So the second half of the story does have some value; it's not fair to say that it reads exactly the same if you look only at the minific which ends with “Dark chocolate, like mom used to make." But it does still seriously stall out after the first cake line. It revisits a lot of its earlier themes, which is definitely not the same as recontextualizing (that requires new context, and I don't see any even with the specific argument of Cassius' comment) — and it feels to me like what modest deepening of the premise we get still isn't enough to pull its weight.

I do agree with earlier reviewers that the prose itself is largely solid (though bits like the universe vocabulary fault and the warhammer-subtle telling of "sometimes you just know when something’s wrong with your kid" really broke me out of my reading). The joke, the mud analogy, the undercurrents of emotions in body language and narrative focus: there's definitely skill on display here. But the foreshadowing problem is so ubiquitous that the story isn't pulling me along to where it wants its emotions to be. I'm left with a number of great moments inside a half-collapsed structure, which are going to require some editing to re-assemble.

I do want to briefly also mention the genre thing Ranmilia brought up. It's entirely possible that this is meant to be in the Literary Fiction genre, whose conventions run counter to pretty much every other traditional genre in that litfic is supposed to lack coherent meaning [*]. If so, this may well be a litfic masterwork which I (and most authors here) are unequipped to critique. If so, all I can offer is that I am a mass-market reader (and this is a mass-market crowd), and it's going to be difficult to get coherent appreciation and/or critique out of readers whose default genre assumption is that this is in one of the 90% of genres that try to make a point. I'm scoring this accordingly — because without the context of the artist's statement of their goals for the piece, all I can do is evaluate it based on how effective it is at making me react (and the quality of its prose/construction), and good art whose goal is to be meaningless will by definition not have any larger themes to which I can react.

On that metric, largely pretty prose with some significant stumbles + lack of meaning = near the bottom of my finals slate. Thank you for writing, regardless.

Tier: Needs Work

[*] This sounds on its face like an insult, but from everything I've read, that is what literary analysts say distinguishes the genre.

Man I am never going to get past being the sole bulwark of this entry, am I guys?

>>horizon

Except that we learn about the mother being dead from the son's second line of dialogue broaching it directly. The idea of them finally circling around to a painful topic is undercut by the fact that it just gets laid out, clear and obvious, with that early cake line.

This isn't really incapable with what I was saying. Join me below, and I'll explain further.

The interpretation that Dad is in a denial that's only cleared away by the final cake line, too, is undercut by the foreshadowing:

Perhaps I didn't adequately explain what I find to be significant about this interaction because this was not what I was intending to say. What I mean to convey is this: the earlier acknowledgement of the mother's death / disappearance are fact. They are recitations void of emotion. When the kid remarks, "Cake like mom used to make", the author doesn't add some sort of adverb or description to indicate that he is feeling emotion with that delivery. It's an off-the-cuff comment. Same with the father talking about his wife not wanting to have the kid in school. These are facts. It's not so much that Dad and son are in denial or skirting around the topic itself (the kid's remark I think is more an indirect lede into talking about it than anything), no, it is that they are putting up a front. Emotionally skirting, if you will.

foreshading

twist

These things don't exist in the story as far as my read goes.

>>horizon
I've long since concluded that anypony who writes on "literary analysis", with the notable exception of Bad Horse, is completely out of their bucking mind.

I haven't left a longform text comment on this, but I'd like to say that I really do appreciate the attempt by the author to introduce more litfic into the Writeoff. When it comes to original fiction, I really don't like most genre works—and while this isn't my favorite story in the competition, its tone, concept, and plot totally gel with me. Thanks for writing.

>>horizon

It's entirely possible that this is meant to be in the Literary Fiction genre, whose conventions run counter to pretty much every other traditional genre in that litfic is supposed to lack coherent meaning

I've never heard this before, and unless I'm misunderstanding you, I'm gonna say outright that it's false.

While I could tell where this story was going after a little while, I thought it was fairly effective in getting there. Having a kid being depressed over his mother's death and wanting to find a parallel universe where she's still around isn't the most original idea, but I thought the story handled it with a surprising amount of grace. I also enjoyed the father as a character; he really emulated that working-class ruffian that used to be more prominent. The fact the author made him that clear of a character in such a short story is pretty impressive.

The only thing that bugs me is that the kid seems a bit too old mentally for his own good. Just because he's really smart doesn't mean he's suddenly a Pungeon Master ("Let's not take it too far.") and can be more competent than his father. Even prodigies are immature and childish; they just have a bit more education than the average child. Other than that, I actually enjoyed this story.

8/10, give me that dark chocolate cake

>>Dubs_Rewatcher
I linked a source representative of what I've read about modern literary fiction (in which Bad Horse provides multiple quote citations). Granted, BH is a serious hater of postmodernism and pomo-adjacent. Would be happy to read disagreeing views and definitions.

Congrats to our winners!

Just got back from work. Also, I realized a couple of days ago that ever since I started working full-time last year, I have submitted zero short story entries.

...That's just depressing. I think I'm going to do my best to get into the next FIM one.

Anyways, retrospective.

Pickup Trucks and Comic Books

Most controversial? Dang, I'm pretty surprised, though in hindsight I guess it makes sense, with the whole love-it-or-hate-it thing going on in the comments. Shout out to >>Cassius who pretty much nailed exactly what I was going for, but I know for a fact that I could have done a much better job. Still, really happy someone liked the story enough to so stubbornly defend it. :P

Okay, time to get real; this story's a little about my own dad. (My mom is fine, btw, before anyone asks). Ages and ages ago, I mentioned that my parents aren't native speakers. My dad (who's one of the biggest extroverts I know) sometimes has trouble expressing himself in English, especially on abstract or emotional topics. And I kinda wanted to capture that sense of this wordless barrier that can exist between two people, even when they understand what the other one is thinking.

There are a lot of ways I could have made this clearer, starting with our narrator's characterization. I'll be honest, I was pretty disappointed that no one figured out that the narrator was supposed to be a pretty smart guy who only thinks he's dumb. While I was writing, I honestly thought I did a good job showing that, but I must have been way off my mark. As for the self-deprecating humor, I thought it would give the story a more spoken feel, but everyone who mentioned it didn't like it, so I guess I over-did it.

RE: the ending, this is where I'm really fucking disappointed in myself. Because it's the exact same mistake I keep making, with these endings that feel like vague, unsatisfying twists. See: pretty much every minific I've ever written, and a lot of my short stories too. I don't know; I thought I took care of it this time, but I obviously didn't. It's very frustrating and it makes me feel like I'm not improving as a writer, but I'm very determined to kill this Bachiavellian-shitty-ending curse.

Thanks for the reviews, everyone; they were all an absolute pleasure to read. I hope to see you guys next time.

>>Bachiavellian
I legit thought your ending was spot-on.
/shrug.

>>Not_A_Hat
Shhh, stops saying nice things while I'm trying to feel bad about myself.

But really, I'm glad you did! It might just be a perception thing where I'm noticing some kinds of critique more than others, but sometimes I legit think that 50% of all the critique I get from the Writeoffs deals with my damn endings.