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Man Molded Over
And then the dust like twilight settled on the room, stealing soft-laid sounds of waking men. A lonely stranger rose from sleep to meet it where it fell, and pushed away the covers, and stepped into the dark, again.
No one had knocked on Anderson’s door in nearly three months.
The sound seemed to create an imbalance of pressure in the room. It fluttered in the corners and came back to him a second time. Three strong raps on the door.
Anderson stood up from the mattress on the floor. The tiny apartment, one room containing a tiled kitchen and hardwood living area plus a bathroom, was almost totally dark thanks to the blackout curtains taped over the window. The illuminated clock on his wall indicated it was eight in the evening, just as it had for the last year or so.
The knocking came again. Anderson jumped and fell into a pile of dirty clothes at the foot of the mattress. There were two stacks on either corner, one dirty and one past redemption. He fell into the former. His feet ached as he picked himself up. Normally he would spend another hour or so in bed and get up slowly. He had slept for fifteen hours that day, and was feeling the lack of a sixteenth.
“Anderson?” came a voice from outside.
He whipped around to face the door. He knew the voice of his father anywhere. The whole filthy apartment stank of his breath. Every lingering piece of mold on the cutlery in the kitchen grew on account of his neglect. The very sun in the sky seemed to have forgotten him, never rising or setting within his little one-bedroom piece of shit.
Anderson fell back into bed and stared at the door. A vague shadow moved behind it, fracturing the slit of light coming in underneath. “Anderson?” his father said again.
The figure moved off. Anderson sighed, then jumped again as his phone rang. He rushed to throw it under his foul-smelling blankets, but it was too late. His father heard the ring and redoubled his efforts to knock down the door. “Wake up!” he heard him say. “Wake up!”
Anderson was about to throw open the door when he noticed in the slimy bathroom mirror that he was utterly naked. An embarrassed smile formed on his face, and he raced to the pile of clothes he had fallen into earlier.
After throwing on a t-shirt and jeans, he went back to the door. He eyed the vague shape of his father in the slit of light and felt naked again. Hopefully, he thought, this wasn’t about forgetting mom’s birthday last month.
Anderson’s father, a broad grey-haired man who dressed like a lumberjack, greeted him with a smile as he opened the door. “It’s so good to see you!” he said, embracing the boy with one arm and balancing half a dozen stuffed plastic shopping bags in the other. “Hope you don’t mind, I brought you some things. You weren’t asleep already, were you?”
His father barged in without asking and placed the bags on the floor next to the kitchen countertop. There was no space left to place it anywhere else. Anderson could feel his father’s eyes linger on the hundred or so empty styrofoam ramen cups molding together next to the sink, but made no mention of it. “There’s a little cake in one of those bags,” his father said. “Just in case you feel festive.”
“I didn’t miss anyone’s birthday, did I?”
“No, not at all. It was on sale at the grocery store. Happy birthday to you.”
Anderson relaxed into his usual slouch. “So, what are you doing here?”
His father looked for a chair to sit in, but there was only one folding chair in the corner, and it was already covered in ancient newspaper classifieds. He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall instead. “I pay for the place, don’t I? I have a right to see my son once or twice in a lifetime.”
Anderson could only wish his father kept a schedule so unobtrusive. “I was just playing some video games,” he lied, pointing to a spotless computer tower in the corner of the room, hooked up to a tube TV sitting on a rusty metal folding table. The whole device was powered off. His father wouldn’t know.
“I hope I didn’t interrupt.”
“No. Not at all.”
“Well, good! I was just in the neighborhood, and I got my shopping all done and thought you’d like some things.”
“Well, thanks dad.”
“You’re very welcome!” He paused, as if contemplating leaving the palace of rot forever. “Are you doing anything this evening?”
“I was just about to go to sleep, actually.”
“This early?”
“Yeah.” Anderson felt another lie bubbling up. It came naturally. “I have a job interview tomorrow.”
He felt himself enveloped in another massive hug. “My little man! Congratulations. What company?”
“Just a small-time thing in the city. It’s really nothing at all.”
His father took a step back and crossed his arms. “Anything to get you out and working. That’s great. You’re gonna be so happy once you get that first paycheck.”
“I know.”
“I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, dad.” Anderson eyed the opened door with unease. Had he left it open? The light was pouring in at a strange, uneven angle. “What time is it?”
“Just about eight.” He pointed to the broken clock on the wall. “That one’s right. You probably couldn’t see it, it’s so dark in here!”
Anderson laughed forcefully, to match his father’s enthusiasm. “Just trying to get some rest is all.”
“I know, I won’t take up too much of your time. You’ll need your rest.” He smiled broadly. “I was thinking, if you were feeling up to it, maybe we could grab a beer or two and celebrate! And catch up, of course. I miss you, Andy.”
Shame flooded the room and choked Anderson up. It was a dirty trick of his old man to use that name, and they both knew it. All of a sudden the room was so hot. He blinked frantically but the light coming in from the open front door ruined his night vision and left spots the longer he stared.
“I really need to get some sleep,” Anderson said.
“Of course! It was just a thought. I’ll come up to visit some other time. Maybe next week, or at the end of the month. You can buy me a beer and I’ll pay rent.” He laughed again, forcefully. He was going to pay rent anyway. He had been wordlessly and without complaint writing checks to the landlord for seven years.
The prospect of a visit poised over his head floated harder than fell a night out of the house. Anderson fumbled around behind his computer and fished out a roll of fifty dollar bills. “If you wanted to do tonight instead, I think I can make time,” he said, and peeled off two bills. “It’s only eight after all.”
His father beamed. “Can you really? That’d be so nice. I don’t want to get in your way, but I haven’t seen you in so long. There’s a bar down the street that looks nice.”
Anderson spent the next few minutes looking for his phone. He knew he would probably find it beneath his bedsheets, still playing the same looping gif of an anime woman grinding on a pillow, but he checked the computer desk and rifled through empty cans of ramen on the kitchen counter before “remembering” where he had placed it. Digging through the waste of months in front of his father, who watched him with a pleasant but vacant stare, gave Anderson an excuse to stay inside a moment longer. Anything to stay inside. Anything but out there. Anything, as long as he stayed inside forever and never
“Found it.” Anderson placed it in his pocket. The light of the screen came through his thin shorts. He made out a human silhouette with tall blonde hair set against a pink background, moving back and forth in rhythm to a song he couldn’t hear but looked grating and stiff He dug into his pocket and turned the screen off before his father noticed.
“Ready?” his father asked.
Anderson looked around, desperate for anything to keep him tethered to the apartment. He found nothing but garbage. “I guess so.”
His father smiled, put his hand on his shoulder. “After you,” he said, and led Anderson into the
Light, everywhere, flooding like darkness between stars and burning just as hot. The thick air of Indianapolis in summertime hit him with unrelenting force. Car horns and sirens and the rush of cars over the nearby highway, so distant inside his tiny apartment, now seemed unbearably loud. They were on the second-story balcony overlooking the apartment complex’s parking lot. Everywhere he looked, the setting sun cut through a haze barely clinging to the land west of there. The air felt saturated. How had the city not molded through already?
His eyes adjusted. He stretched his legs. His father waited patiently a few paces away. When Anderson felt ready to walk, the two made their way down the stairs to his father’s car.
They drove in silence, except for Anderson’s father, who talked at length about the rest of his family. An uncle had died a few months ago in a car crash, another had forgotten his wife’s birthday. A cousin lost a job, then found a new one. Anderson nodded in time to the sound of his father’s voice, completely lost in a series of silent panic attacks. The apartments outside his window flew by at such speed he could scarcely tell one from another. In the center of his vision surrounded by a ring of blackness, moss-covered brick faded to stone, faded to stucco, faded to faux wood siding, faded to empty lots, faded to flat farmland stretching all the way to the horizon.
The panic subsided enough for Anderson to ask, “Where are we going?”
“I know I said we’d go to the bars,” his father replied, “but I had a great idea to go to the art museum. Remember the lot behind the sculpture exhibit?”
A few fuzzy memories were all that remained of the place. The two of them had gone there a few times when Anderson was a child. They played catch and tumbled around in the grass. Just behind a line of short trees, the heads of a few horrific sculptures peeked their twisted heads up and watched them. The heads rendered themselves clear a photograph in Anderson’s mind.
“A little,” he said.
“I thought we’d go there and relax a minute. The bar’s too crowded. We wouldn’t be able to think, let alone talk.”
Anderson nodded, unsure if they had even passed the bar.
They parked behind a rusty storage pod sitting in a vacant parking lot adjacent to the lot and picked their way through the tall grass, kicking up loads of tiny bugs all the way to a decomposing wooden picnic table in the middle of the lot. There they sprawled out on the splintered surface, settling in just in time to lose the sun behind the trees.
Anderson looked in the direction of the old sculpture garden, wondering if the old ones had been replaced or updated. The trees had grown, while his line of sight seemed to be about the same. If there were new ones, he couldn’t tell. He felt like the old ones were still looking at him with their twisted faces, but it seemed he would never know for sure. There was so much open space. It felt larger now than in his childhood.
From seemingly out of nowhere, Anderson’s father produced two cans of beer, ice still clinging to the aluminum sides. A little bit of fatherly magic left over from days long gone. They cracked them together and toasted the evening, but Anderson had no more than one shallow sip.
“So, what about you?” his father asked. “Anything of note happen since last time we spoke?”
“No, not really. Just working on finding a job.”
“Is this your first interview?”
“There were a few others,” he lied. “I did alright, but I couldn’t take them.”
“Atta boy. Find something you love and do it as best you can.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t always do that, you know. I spent the first few years of your life in a job I hated. I never got to see my family. Even when I did, it was only half seeing them. My one eye was always on my phone, waiting for a call.”
“You did what you thought was best,” Anderson insisted forcefully. Was that a lie? Anderson couldn’t tell his own intentions. He wondered if that would bother him later. It didn’t seem to be bothering him now. The bugs and the open air bothered him immensely, but not the flimsy lies he clung to for conversation’s sake.
“The best thing would have been to never take the job in the first place. You and your mother are so important. I can’t imagine not seeing either of you.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t been available.”
“Don’t be! You’ve got to be your own man.” Anderson’s father took a sip of his beer. “Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.” A legion of bugs sounded off all around them. Night was almost upon them. His father sprung a dirty trap. “Seeing any ladies?”
“Too many to count.”
“That’s my boy! Any good-looking ones?”
“Dozens.”
“But are they keepers?”
Anderson thought back to the silhouette in his pocket, moving back and forth. “Nah,” he said, and endured another silent panic attack. It was all he could do to keep his eyes trained on the stars, imagining them as bits of tile flooring showing through a growing curtain of black mold.
They sat in silence until the mold spread to the trees and turned the branches a similar shade of black. Anderson’s father stretched and tossed his empty can into the brush. Anderson followed suite.
As they made their way back through the buggy weeds, Anderson’s father said, “I just want you to know that I’m just so proud of you. You’re out there, doing your own thing in the big city. I know it must be a little embarrassing to get help on the rent from us, but I want to give you as much help as you need until you find what’s right for you.”
The thought made Anderson smile. With his father’s help, he felt like he really had found what was right for him. “Thanks, dad.”
They reached the car. Black shadows fell between them. The car’s headlights fell heavy on their faces. Behind them, their shadows danced in the field, over the grass, the weeds, the bugs. Shades of green and yellow and black reminded Anderson of his bathroom walls.
Anderson was just contemplating all the lying he had done today when his father patted him roughly on the back. “I’m glad I came out today.”
Anderson nodded. “I love you, dad.”
There was some familiar forcefulness in his father’s smile. “I love you too, Andy.”
No one had knocked on Anderson’s door in nearly three months.
The sound seemed to create an imbalance of pressure in the room. It fluttered in the corners and came back to him a second time. Three strong raps on the door.
Anderson stood up from the mattress on the floor. The tiny apartment, one room containing a tiled kitchen and hardwood living area plus a bathroom, was almost totally dark thanks to the blackout curtains taped over the window. The illuminated clock on his wall indicated it was eight in the evening, just as it had for the last year or so.
The knocking came again. Anderson jumped and fell into a pile of dirty clothes at the foot of the mattress. There were two stacks on either corner, one dirty and one past redemption. He fell into the former. His feet ached as he picked himself up. Normally he would spend another hour or so in bed and get up slowly. He had slept for fifteen hours that day, and was feeling the lack of a sixteenth.
“Anderson?” came a voice from outside.
He whipped around to face the door. He knew the voice of his father anywhere. The whole filthy apartment stank of his breath. Every lingering piece of mold on the cutlery in the kitchen grew on account of his neglect. The very sun in the sky seemed to have forgotten him, never rising or setting within his little one-bedroom piece of shit.
Anderson fell back into bed and stared at the door. A vague shadow moved behind it, fracturing the slit of light coming in underneath. “Anderson?” his father said again.
The figure moved off. Anderson sighed, then jumped again as his phone rang. He rushed to throw it under his foul-smelling blankets, but it was too late. His father heard the ring and redoubled his efforts to knock down the door. “Wake up!” he heard him say. “Wake up!”
Anderson was about to throw open the door when he noticed in the slimy bathroom mirror that he was utterly naked. An embarrassed smile formed on his face, and he raced to the pile of clothes he had fallen into earlier.
After throwing on a t-shirt and jeans, he went back to the door. He eyed the vague shape of his father in the slit of light and felt naked again. Hopefully, he thought, this wasn’t about forgetting mom’s birthday last month.
Anderson’s father, a broad grey-haired man who dressed like a lumberjack, greeted him with a smile as he opened the door. “It’s so good to see you!” he said, embracing the boy with one arm and balancing half a dozen stuffed plastic shopping bags in the other. “Hope you don’t mind, I brought you some things. You weren’t asleep already, were you?”
His father barged in without asking and placed the bags on the floor next to the kitchen countertop. There was no space left to place it anywhere else. Anderson could feel his father’s eyes linger on the hundred or so empty styrofoam ramen cups molding together next to the sink, but made no mention of it. “There’s a little cake in one of those bags,” his father said. “Just in case you feel festive.”
“I didn’t miss anyone’s birthday, did I?”
“No, not at all. It was on sale at the grocery store. Happy birthday to you.”
Anderson relaxed into his usual slouch. “So, what are you doing here?”
His father looked for a chair to sit in, but there was only one folding chair in the corner, and it was already covered in ancient newspaper classifieds. He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall instead. “I pay for the place, don’t I? I have a right to see my son once or twice in a lifetime.”
Anderson could only wish his father kept a schedule so unobtrusive. “I was just playing some video games,” he lied, pointing to a spotless computer tower in the corner of the room, hooked up to a tube TV sitting on a rusty metal folding table. The whole device was powered off. His father wouldn’t know.
“I hope I didn’t interrupt.”
“No. Not at all.”
“Well, good! I was just in the neighborhood, and I got my shopping all done and thought you’d like some things.”
“Well, thanks dad.”
“You’re very welcome!” He paused, as if contemplating leaving the palace of rot forever. “Are you doing anything this evening?”
“I was just about to go to sleep, actually.”
“This early?”
“Yeah.” Anderson felt another lie bubbling up. It came naturally. “I have a job interview tomorrow.”
He felt himself enveloped in another massive hug. “My little man! Congratulations. What company?”
“Just a small-time thing in the city. It’s really nothing at all.”
His father took a step back and crossed his arms. “Anything to get you out and working. That’s great. You’re gonna be so happy once you get that first paycheck.”
“I know.”
“I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, dad.” Anderson eyed the opened door with unease. Had he left it open? The light was pouring in at a strange, uneven angle. “What time is it?”
“Just about eight.” He pointed to the broken clock on the wall. “That one’s right. You probably couldn’t see it, it’s so dark in here!”
Anderson laughed forcefully, to match his father’s enthusiasm. “Just trying to get some rest is all.”
“I know, I won’t take up too much of your time. You’ll need your rest.” He smiled broadly. “I was thinking, if you were feeling up to it, maybe we could grab a beer or two and celebrate! And catch up, of course. I miss you, Andy.”
Shame flooded the room and choked Anderson up. It was a dirty trick of his old man to use that name, and they both knew it. All of a sudden the room was so hot. He blinked frantically but the light coming in from the open front door ruined his night vision and left spots the longer he stared.
“I really need to get some sleep,” Anderson said.
“Of course! It was just a thought. I’ll come up to visit some other time. Maybe next week, or at the end of the month. You can buy me a beer and I’ll pay rent.” He laughed again, forcefully. He was going to pay rent anyway. He had been wordlessly and without complaint writing checks to the landlord for seven years.
The prospect of a visit poised over his head floated harder than fell a night out of the house. Anderson fumbled around behind his computer and fished out a roll of fifty dollar bills. “If you wanted to do tonight instead, I think I can make time,” he said, and peeled off two bills. “It’s only eight after all.”
His father beamed. “Can you really? That’d be so nice. I don’t want to get in your way, but I haven’t seen you in so long. There’s a bar down the street that looks nice.”
Anderson spent the next few minutes looking for his phone. He knew he would probably find it beneath his bedsheets, still playing the same looping gif of an anime woman grinding on a pillow, but he checked the computer desk and rifled through empty cans of ramen on the kitchen counter before “remembering” where he had placed it. Digging through the waste of months in front of his father, who watched him with a pleasant but vacant stare, gave Anderson an excuse to stay inside a moment longer. Anything to stay inside. Anything but out there. Anything, as long as he stayed inside forever and never
“Found it.” Anderson placed it in his pocket. The light of the screen came through his thin shorts. He made out a human silhouette with tall blonde hair set against a pink background, moving back and forth in rhythm to a song he couldn’t hear but looked grating and stiff He dug into his pocket and turned the screen off before his father noticed.
“Ready?” his father asked.
Anderson looked around, desperate for anything to keep him tethered to the apartment. He found nothing but garbage. “I guess so.”
His father smiled, put his hand on his shoulder. “After you,” he said, and led Anderson into the
Light, everywhere, flooding like darkness between stars and burning just as hot. The thick air of Indianapolis in summertime hit him with unrelenting force. Car horns and sirens and the rush of cars over the nearby highway, so distant inside his tiny apartment, now seemed unbearably loud. They were on the second-story balcony overlooking the apartment complex’s parking lot. Everywhere he looked, the setting sun cut through a haze barely clinging to the land west of there. The air felt saturated. How had the city not molded through already?
His eyes adjusted. He stretched his legs. His father waited patiently a few paces away. When Anderson felt ready to walk, the two made their way down the stairs to his father’s car.
They drove in silence, except for Anderson’s father, who talked at length about the rest of his family. An uncle had died a few months ago in a car crash, another had forgotten his wife’s birthday. A cousin lost a job, then found a new one. Anderson nodded in time to the sound of his father’s voice, completely lost in a series of silent panic attacks. The apartments outside his window flew by at such speed he could scarcely tell one from another. In the center of his vision surrounded by a ring of blackness, moss-covered brick faded to stone, faded to stucco, faded to faux wood siding, faded to empty lots, faded to flat farmland stretching all the way to the horizon.
The panic subsided enough for Anderson to ask, “Where are we going?”
“I know I said we’d go to the bars,” his father replied, “but I had a great idea to go to the art museum. Remember the lot behind the sculpture exhibit?”
A few fuzzy memories were all that remained of the place. The two of them had gone there a few times when Anderson was a child. They played catch and tumbled around in the grass. Just behind a line of short trees, the heads of a few horrific sculptures peeked their twisted heads up and watched them. The heads rendered themselves clear a photograph in Anderson’s mind.
“A little,” he said.
“I thought we’d go there and relax a minute. The bar’s too crowded. We wouldn’t be able to think, let alone talk.”
Anderson nodded, unsure if they had even passed the bar.
They parked behind a rusty storage pod sitting in a vacant parking lot adjacent to the lot and picked their way through the tall grass, kicking up loads of tiny bugs all the way to a decomposing wooden picnic table in the middle of the lot. There they sprawled out on the splintered surface, settling in just in time to lose the sun behind the trees.
Anderson looked in the direction of the old sculpture garden, wondering if the old ones had been replaced or updated. The trees had grown, while his line of sight seemed to be about the same. If there were new ones, he couldn’t tell. He felt like the old ones were still looking at him with their twisted faces, but it seemed he would never know for sure. There was so much open space. It felt larger now than in his childhood.
From seemingly out of nowhere, Anderson’s father produced two cans of beer, ice still clinging to the aluminum sides. A little bit of fatherly magic left over from days long gone. They cracked them together and toasted the evening, but Anderson had no more than one shallow sip.
“So, what about you?” his father asked. “Anything of note happen since last time we spoke?”
“No, not really. Just working on finding a job.”
“Is this your first interview?”
“There were a few others,” he lied. “I did alright, but I couldn’t take them.”
“Atta boy. Find something you love and do it as best you can.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t always do that, you know. I spent the first few years of your life in a job I hated. I never got to see my family. Even when I did, it was only half seeing them. My one eye was always on my phone, waiting for a call.”
“You did what you thought was best,” Anderson insisted forcefully. Was that a lie? Anderson couldn’t tell his own intentions. He wondered if that would bother him later. It didn’t seem to be bothering him now. The bugs and the open air bothered him immensely, but not the flimsy lies he clung to for conversation’s sake.
“The best thing would have been to never take the job in the first place. You and your mother are so important. I can’t imagine not seeing either of you.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t been available.”
“Don’t be! You’ve got to be your own man.” Anderson’s father took a sip of his beer. “Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do.” A legion of bugs sounded off all around them. Night was almost upon them. His father sprung a dirty trap. “Seeing any ladies?”
“Too many to count.”
“That’s my boy! Any good-looking ones?”
“Dozens.”
“But are they keepers?”
Anderson thought back to the silhouette in his pocket, moving back and forth. “Nah,” he said, and endured another silent panic attack. It was all he could do to keep his eyes trained on the stars, imagining them as bits of tile flooring showing through a growing curtain of black mold.
They sat in silence until the mold spread to the trees and turned the branches a similar shade of black. Anderson’s father stretched and tossed his empty can into the brush. Anderson followed suite.
As they made their way back through the buggy weeds, Anderson’s father said, “I just want you to know that I’m just so proud of you. You’re out there, doing your own thing in the big city. I know it must be a little embarrassing to get help on the rent from us, but I want to give you as much help as you need until you find what’s right for you.”
The thought made Anderson smile. With his father’s help, he felt like he really had found what was right for him. “Thanks, dad.”
They reached the car. Black shadows fell between them. The car’s headlights fell heavy on their faces. Behind them, their shadows danced in the field, over the grass, the weeds, the bugs. Shades of green and yellow and black reminded Anderson of his bathroom walls.
Anderson was just contemplating all the lying he had done today when his father patted him roughly on the back. “I’m glad I came out today.”
Anderson nodded. “I love you, dad.”
There was some familiar forcefulness in his father’s smile. “I love you too, Andy.”
Pics
This story somewhat continues the trend of both The Dawn and Captive of Industry. I fail to really care for the boy, which seems to be a modern counterpart to Dawn’s hero. Guy is a layabout, lives in a ‘sty and own his survival only to his father's liberalness. More than that, he’s a liar, and that doesn’t make him very sympathetic to the reader. More like a loser.
Most of all, I don’t see any storyline here. Father steps in, they get out, they find out that they feel fondness for each other, and, well, the end, folks. There doesn’t seem to be any evolution. It’s all about description. But that lack of plot or conflict unfortunately means that we don’t have any real reason to care for the characters. It’s like someone showing us a picture of a father and his son, hand in hand, smiling. It’s a cute picture, but if we don’t know the persons, we have no reason to care beyond the fleeting moment we discover it.
If you wanted to say to us “even losers love their parents”, then yeah, you succeeded. But it’s not a very memorable message. And I’m even not convinced that’s what you wanted to convey here.
I'd say the prose is certainly up to snuff, and thank you for teaching me the word “countertop”, but outside this side benefit, I emerged from the story with a “so what?” feeling.
Most of all, I don’t see any storyline here. Father steps in, they get out, they find out that they feel fondness for each other, and, well, the end, folks. There doesn’t seem to be any evolution. It’s all about description. But that lack of plot or conflict unfortunately means that we don’t have any real reason to care for the characters. It’s like someone showing us a picture of a father and his son, hand in hand, smiling. It’s a cute picture, but if we don’t know the persons, we have no reason to care beyond the fleeting moment we discover it.
If you wanted to say to us “even losers love their parents”, then yeah, you succeeded. But it’s not a very memorable message. And I’m even not convinced that’s what you wanted to convey here.
I'd say the prose is certainly up to snuff, and thank you for teaching me the word “countertop”, but outside this side benefit, I emerged from the story with a “so what?” feeling.
Honestly, I did like it. I felt like the tension was genuine and certainly unlike anything else I've read so far. I have to dock points for it being rather one-trick, and also ending without even a further hint as to what we're meant to take away. Most of all, I just want to know how Anderson got like that, because it's obviously way, way beyond simple otaku-ism.
It made up a theme and stuck to it, which is more than I can say for many other stories. I only wish the author had put some more effort into critically proofreading his stuff, because a kind of talented carelessness shows itself in some of the punctuation and grammatical constructions.
>>Monokeras
This story isn't at all framed like a traditional story, and this much was at least immediate to me from the start. The protagonist is indeed a lying layabout, and the father is too soft with his kid to the point of delusion. This description of the two is done thoroughly enough that I did legitimately care about them. There is intentionally very little in the way of an evolving plot, and it's not like there's going to be a gold-trimmed moral or resolution by the end of the story. It works well enough as a portrait of two interesting characters in a static moment of their life.
It made up a theme and stuck to it, which is more than I can say for many other stories. I only wish the author had put some more effort into critically proofreading his stuff, because a kind of talented carelessness shows itself in some of the punctuation and grammatical constructions.
>>Monokeras
This story isn't at all framed like a traditional story, and this much was at least immediate to me from the start. The protagonist is indeed a lying layabout, and the father is too soft with his kid to the point of delusion. This description of the two is done thoroughly enough that I did legitimately care about them. There is intentionally very little in the way of an evolving plot, and it's not like there's going to be a gold-trimmed moral or resolution by the end of the story. It works well enough as a portrait of two interesting characters in a static moment of their life.
>>Paracompact
I can easily see where you come from, but the characters feel too generic to me. We lack any sort of background that would give them depth. Instead we have pretty much nothing to gnaw on. Some crumbs. And then it’s over. I need more, because I’m unable to relate this text as it is. It needs way more flesh to grab me.
I can easily see where you come from, but the characters feel too generic to me. We lack any sort of background that would give them depth. Instead we have pretty much nothing to gnaw on. Some crumbs. And then it’s over. I need more, because I’m unable to relate this text as it is. It needs way more flesh to grab me.
I agree with both >>Paracompact and >>Monokeras.
Yes, it's not your typical story, and what the feeling it wants to convey comes across very well. There are people who live like this, and that's depressing, and this story made me feel exactly that. I can respect a story that has a goal in mind and achieves it. But is it all that enjoyable?
I'm reminded of a 4chan greentext story, which is not a reference I thought I'd ever use when reviewing a story, but it's out there though and I'm sticking with it.
But this greentext reminds me of Mono's comment, because the story told there, whether or not it's real, has stuff that this story doesn't. In the greentext, this particular loser is making actual sacrifices (his evenings) just to make his father proud, where in this story the character is just trying to get his father off his case. They're both lying to their fathers, but the intent is different.
I like reading about characters, and if the characters themselves are not good people, then I'll settle for liking their relationships with each other instead. I feel there's an 8-ft thick concrete wall between Anderson and his father here, so when Anderson himself is a lying layabout, and he's not even really trying to consolidate the relationship at all, it's hard to get invested in his plight. I'm only depressed because, like I said, people live like this. And that sucks. But the next step is to make me feel actually sorry for them.
One other thing: I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt for the two times a paragraph ends without the final sentence being concluded. It could be that you just wanted to interrupt the narration instead of throwing in a "suddenly,". But if that's the case, I recommend putting in a "—" in there so that everyone is clear that we're being interrupted by something, and that you haven't forgotten to finish your sentences.
Thank you for writing!
Yes, it's not your typical story, and what the feeling it wants to convey comes across very well. There are people who live like this, and that's depressing, and this story made me feel exactly that. I can respect a story that has a goal in mind and achieves it. But is it all that enjoyable?
I'm reminded of a 4chan greentext story, which is not a reference I thought I'd ever use when reviewing a story, but it's out there though and I'm sticking with it.
But this greentext reminds me of Mono's comment, because the story told there, whether or not it's real, has stuff that this story doesn't. In the greentext, this particular loser is making actual sacrifices (his evenings) just to make his father proud, where in this story the character is just trying to get his father off his case. They're both lying to their fathers, but the intent is different.
I like reading about characters, and if the characters themselves are not good people, then I'll settle for liking their relationships with each other instead. I feel there's an 8-ft thick concrete wall between Anderson and his father here, so when Anderson himself is a lying layabout, and he's not even really trying to consolidate the relationship at all, it's hard to get invested in his plight. I'm only depressed because, like I said, people live like this. And that sucks. But the next step is to make me feel actually sorry for them.
One other thing: I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt for the two times a paragraph ends without the final sentence being concluded. It could be that you just wanted to interrupt the narration instead of throwing in a "suddenly,". But if that's the case, I recommend putting in a "—" in there so that everyone is clear that we're being interrupted by something, and that you haven't forgotten to finish your sentences.
Thank you for writing!