Very nice:

The opening confused me a bit once I got to the tape recorder. Is she listening to one of her own live recordings? If so, it'd be simple enough to tell me that right in the first line by making it something like, "The audience had hardly made a sound, she remembered."

Also, I found myself starting to skip the narrative parts about halfway through so I could get straight to Octavia's actual spoken lines. Maybe find ways to get some of that information into her monologue? Another way to help that would be to make more use of the physical environment. You do some of that now, but a few more bits of her looking at or even touching objects that have meaning to her in the house would be welcome.

The big thing, though, is that I never get to know what the note says. The idea of Vinyl communicating with Octavia is so key to the story that withholding the actual piece of communication from me makes the ending less impactful, if I might descend into jargon for a moment. :)

Mike

As >>Baal Bunny said, not showing what was written on the note was a bad decision. Especially since Vinyl is mute. Vinyl can't express herself as much as Octavia, so it is impossible to infer what she wrote onto the note (which is what I assumed I was suppose to do).

For most of the story, it was a one-sided conversation, and that was fine until Vinyl wouldn't talk to Octavia. It was pretty jarring, not knowing what set Vinyl off. Again, since Vinyl can't express herself as much as Octavia, I saw that Vinyl was angry, but I didn't know why. Also, Vinyl's anger seemed to be unwarranted simply because Octavia wouldn't express how much she loved her (it seemed like 'never speak to me again' anger due to Vinyl not even bothering to look in Octavia's direction). Honestly, I could see Vinyl harassing Octavia by poking at her (just to annoy her) and not love on her, so she could get the point across better.

Despite the two flaws I pointed out, I think it is a good story. I can't wait to see how you will finish this.

Rating: What's written on the note?

Interesting that you turned Octavia into a low-key pervert. Really subverted my expectations there.

Something I liked:

Seriously though, this is fine. Maybe more than fine, I'm not sure. At first I was worried there would be a very obvious reversal of roles with how we associate these characters with certain personality traits, but their relationship ended up being a lot harder to pin down than I expected, for better or worse. I'm gonna disagree with Mike and say I was more interested in the prose than Octavia's monologue, which itself is not badly written by any means. It's just that there's a certain sense of mystery with what happens around the monologue that I find more compelling. There is certain information here that we're either not given right away or just not told about, which I find eye-catching, if not necessarily gold.

Something I didn't like:

Going back to the monologue, I do feel like it can be considerably more fleshed out. I'm trying to map out what Octavia is saying in my head, and what she says sounds kind of scatterbrained. To a degree this makes sense, given how she's feeling and how she'll try saying anything to Vinyl, but I feel like the semi-randomness of the monologue messes with the already-weird structure of the whole piece. You could convert some of the prose and make it part of the monologue, or you could refine the prose around the monologue and make it an overall smoother reading experience, or maybe both? And of course it'd be nice to get more physical descriptions of Vinyl, since she doesn't talk. I don't need to know what the note says, though.

Verdict: Kind of enigmatic, but also kind of fascinating. I don't mind not knowing what Vinyl wrote tbh.