Hey! It looks like you're new here. You might want to check out the introduction.
Show rules for this event
Seven O'Clock Sharper
“Ma'am?” I wheeze drearily. My eyes are still crusty from waking. “Miss?”
The waitress behind the counter looks past me. Her eyes are lopsided—just like her nametag and half as greasy. A delivery truck's diesel engine rattles the windows as it chugs past the diner outsider. I watch as the lady twirls like a drunken ballerina—apron flailing—and lands with gymnastic grace at the patron stool furthest from me. She pours something black into a business ogre's cup, and the liquid grows blacker as the dreary morning lurches on by.
My eyes wander to the clock above the kitchen. Through thick steam, I see the big hand on seven and the small hand on twelve.
“Madame?” I try again. I consider wadding up a myriad of Central American languages and tossing them her way, but I'm certain they'd just fall short and become food for the cockroaches on the tile floor. Spoons clatter against saucers and the smell of bacon smegma molests my nostrils. “My egg muffin sandwich...?” I leave the sentence unfinished. Just like my career.
There's a flutter to her steps. Slippers clack-a-clack against linoleum. She flutters past me. Lilac and brimstone. My stomach grumbles.
“Can you fucking believe it?” mutters some grease monkey seated to my left. “He's picked a bastard named 'Jewstein' as his running mate. Jewstein.” Smiling teeth. Urine yellow. The newspaper crinkles in his paws like a used diaper. “Good luck passing that shit off as Protestant!”
I sniff.
“I hear the democrats' nominee raped a boy when he was at Harvard,” grumbles some uptown fop in a bowtie. He squirms atop the stool to my right. “Of course, the liberal media won't let that see the light of day.”
My fingernails need trimming. They dance a tango around the brown counter stains in front of me. I have thirty tax files stacked up from last night. The company can't afford to give me more hours to do my work, and yet they threaten to take my job due to all the backlog. The street behind us roars with garbage trucks, and I can feel the stones in my bladder bunching up.
My eyes scrape the ceiling. Halfway there, they find the clock. Through the haze, I see the big hand on the seven and the small hand on the twelve.
“Ma'am, I'm sorry if you're having a bad shift,” I mutter. I feel like rolling sideways. Paralyzed kittens don't live very long. My mind wanders to a bloody nose I suffered at my elementary school playground. “But if I don't get my breakfast and punch the clock on time, my boss will have my prostate—and not in the good way.”
I'm certain she heard me this time. The kitchen bell rings. Her hairbun rises and falls with the volcanic ash while her body undulates. Somewhere, I hear screeching, and she cartwheels across the diner to deliver a stack of pancakes to two dinosauric blue collar grungeheaps in overalls. My stomach sobs into itself, twisting like satin lingerie.
“It's the Illuminati, I tell you,” Fop says, wriggling his but deeper around the hard stool. “I read it in a book somewhere. They've got Manhattan's banking hierarchy by the scrotum.”
“Got a red phone to Israel in one of those offices,” sputters the orangutan. “Everyone of them, deep in their pocket. Along with the blood of all those Palestinian babies they run over every day.”
I sigh, bowing to the counter. I rub my temples, as if hoping to squeeze the voices out. Like pus. Despite my efforts, the screaming only intensifies.
“You know,” hums a musical voice. I see jagged teeth reflected in a salt-saker. Smiling. There are no eyes beneath his hat. “They say that Hell is something as simple as a Monday morning that never ends.”
Taxis wail against the tumult. The skyscrapers groan under the weight of bone and mucus. I look up to the clock. Beyond the fumes, it reads seven o'clock. I'm behind schedule.
“Ma'am? Please?” I reach for her. Flakes of skin flutter in the breeze. Hair and cigarette smoke and locusts. She streaks past the counter, claws scraping against bedrock. I start to snarl. “Okay, look...”
The waitress behind the counter looks past me. Her eyes are lopsided—just like her nametag and half as greasy. A delivery truck's diesel engine rattles the windows as it chugs past the diner outsider. I watch as the lady twirls like a drunken ballerina—apron flailing—and lands with gymnastic grace at the patron stool furthest from me. She pours something black into a business ogre's cup, and the liquid grows blacker as the dreary morning lurches on by.
My eyes wander to the clock above the kitchen. Through thick steam, I see the big hand on seven and the small hand on twelve.
“Madame?” I try again. I consider wadding up a myriad of Central American languages and tossing them her way, but I'm certain they'd just fall short and become food for the cockroaches on the tile floor. Spoons clatter against saucers and the smell of bacon smegma molests my nostrils. “My egg muffin sandwich...?” I leave the sentence unfinished. Just like my career.
There's a flutter to her steps. Slippers clack-a-clack against linoleum. She flutters past me. Lilac and brimstone. My stomach grumbles.
“Can you fucking believe it?” mutters some grease monkey seated to my left. “He's picked a bastard named 'Jewstein' as his running mate. Jewstein.” Smiling teeth. Urine yellow. The newspaper crinkles in his paws like a used diaper. “Good luck passing that shit off as Protestant!”
I sniff.
“I hear the democrats' nominee raped a boy when he was at Harvard,” grumbles some uptown fop in a bowtie. He squirms atop the stool to my right. “Of course, the liberal media won't let that see the light of day.”
My fingernails need trimming. They dance a tango around the brown counter stains in front of me. I have thirty tax files stacked up from last night. The company can't afford to give me more hours to do my work, and yet they threaten to take my job due to all the backlog. The street behind us roars with garbage trucks, and I can feel the stones in my bladder bunching up.
My eyes scrape the ceiling. Halfway there, they find the clock. Through the haze, I see the big hand on the seven and the small hand on the twelve.
“Ma'am, I'm sorry if you're having a bad shift,” I mutter. I feel like rolling sideways. Paralyzed kittens don't live very long. My mind wanders to a bloody nose I suffered at my elementary school playground. “But if I don't get my breakfast and punch the clock on time, my boss will have my prostate—and not in the good way.”
I'm certain she heard me this time. The kitchen bell rings. Her hairbun rises and falls with the volcanic ash while her body undulates. Somewhere, I hear screeching, and she cartwheels across the diner to deliver a stack of pancakes to two dinosauric blue collar grungeheaps in overalls. My stomach sobs into itself, twisting like satin lingerie.
“It's the Illuminati, I tell you,” Fop says, wriggling his but deeper around the hard stool. “I read it in a book somewhere. They've got Manhattan's banking hierarchy by the scrotum.”
“Got a red phone to Israel in one of those offices,” sputters the orangutan. “Everyone of them, deep in their pocket. Along with the blood of all those Palestinian babies they run over every day.”
I sigh, bowing to the counter. I rub my temples, as if hoping to squeeze the voices out. Like pus. Despite my efforts, the screaming only intensifies.
“You know,” hums a musical voice. I see jagged teeth reflected in a salt-saker. Smiling. There are no eyes beneath his hat. “They say that Hell is something as simple as a Monday morning that never ends.”
Taxis wail against the tumult. The skyscrapers groan under the weight of bone and mucus. I look up to the clock. Beyond the fumes, it reads seven o'clock. I'm behind schedule.
“Ma'am? Please?” I reach for her. Flakes of skin flutter in the breeze. Hair and cigarette smoke and locusts. She streaks past the counter, claws scraping against bedrock. I start to snarl. “Okay, look...”
Setting and concept was really clever: nice and evocative, and successfully hinting at something greater existing beyond the scene itself. I'm not convinced that the narrative itself went anywhere strongly enough for me, though that might be just personal tastes and preferences. I certainly appreciated the descriptive elements, particularly in the first paragraph.
Really nicely written, even if it isn't exactly my cup of coffee. Thanks very much for sharing.
Really nicely written, even if it isn't exactly my cup of coffee. Thanks very much for sharing.
The story had some colorful imagery, I liked that. Plus, the notion of being trapped for eternity in a busy Monday morning is indeed terrifying.
I feel that the disjointed succession of events and the random snippets of dialogue help to drive that sensation of blearinness, annoyance and mild insanity proper of Hell/morning diners.
Parte of me wants more, while another is just glad I don't have work tomorrow. Nicely done.
I feel that the disjointed succession of events and the random snippets of dialogue help to drive that sensation of blearinness, annoyance and mild insanity proper of Hell/morning diners.
Parte of me wants more, while another is just glad I don't have work tomorrow. Nicely done.
This is currently atop my slate. I like the symbolism and the shambolic picture where people reverse to their animal counterparts. This reminds me of some Enki Bilal's strips, especially in Froid Équateur. I wish you'd gone further and regressed the decor and the dialogues too.
The plot itself is meagre, but it's all about being atmospheric, and I think this fic succeeded perfectly within that scope. At least in my POV.
Yeah, Hell might be an endless repetition of clichés spoken out by beastly demons. As Garfield once stated: I hate Mondays.
The plot itself is meagre, but it's all about being atmospheric, and I think this fic succeeded perfectly within that scope. At least in my POV.
Yeah, Hell might be an endless repetition of clichés spoken out by beastly demons. As Garfield once stated: I hate Mondays.
There are currently three stories with only 3 reviews. I've already reviewed Rain, but I'm going to review the other two before prelims end. Can someone else give Rain its fourth review?
Let's talk about that first sentence. This feels kind of nitpicky, but if there's any line worth picking nits about, it's your first sentence. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and you want to come out as strong as you possibly can.
Those four words establish two things: that we're in first-person present tense, inside the narrator's head; and that the narrator is delivering their line in such a manner as to cause sadness. "Drearily" is a strange adverb to apply to yourself in first person: it basically means in a manner provoking sadness, so you are describing not your own emotion, but the effect it is having on others. It's even stranger in present tense, when the narrator is not able to tell the tale in hindsight, and doesn't know how the audience is going to react. On top of that, we're already getting a whole constellation of impressions from "wheeze", none of which imply sadness to me, and the combination comes across oddly.
Fortunately, the language in this picks up quickly:
That's a particularly lovely turn of phrase, among others throughout. And the repetition of checking the clock is powerful.
As >>Monokeras says, the strength here is the atmosphere, and it works just fine without a story arc. But while I do like the reveal, it doesn't feel to me like this delivers it gracefully; the speaker of the third paragraph from the end comes out of nowhere, and there's not really any reason in context why he would deliver that information to the narrator. It's purely an audience reveal, camouflaged somewhat by the fragmentary nature of the text. That's probably my biggest hesitation here: for all that this is showy and subtle in the way it uses its descriptions, the core of the story just sort of sledgehammers in. Regardless, on the strength of the prose this is nudging up against the lower end of my Top Contenders.
Tier: Solid
Let's talk about that first sentence. This feels kind of nitpicky, but if there's any line worth picking nits about, it's your first sentence. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and you want to come out as strong as you possibly can.
“Ma'am?” I wheeze drearily.
Those four words establish two things: that we're in first-person present tense, inside the narrator's head; and that the narrator is delivering their line in such a manner as to cause sadness. "Drearily" is a strange adverb to apply to yourself in first person: it basically means in a manner provoking sadness, so you are describing not your own emotion, but the effect it is having on others. It's even stranger in present tense, when the narrator is not able to tell the tale in hindsight, and doesn't know how the audience is going to react. On top of that, we're already getting a whole constellation of impressions from "wheeze", none of which imply sadness to me, and the combination comes across oddly.
Fortunately, the language in this picks up quickly:
Her eyes are lopsided—just like her nametag and half as greasy.
That's a particularly lovely turn of phrase, among others throughout. And the repetition of checking the clock is powerful.
As >>Monokeras says, the strength here is the atmosphere, and it works just fine without a story arc. But while I do like the reveal, it doesn't feel to me like this delivers it gracefully; the speaker of the third paragraph from the end comes out of nowhere, and there's not really any reason in context why he would deliver that information to the narrator. It's purely an audience reveal, camouflaged somewhat by the fragmentary nature of the text. That's probably my biggest hesitation here: for all that this is showy and subtle in the way it uses its descriptions, the core of the story just sort of sledgehammers in. Regardless, on the strength of the prose this is nudging up against the lower end of my Top Contenders.
Tier: Solid
...huh. I guess this is like Orbiting Kettle's "Just Another Shift"? With this one, though, I did cue properly on it actually being hell. That being said, I'd have liked that reveal to have a little more foreshadowing. As it is, the only thing I picked up on was the clock not moving... and even that can be dismissed, since the hubbub described could, conceivably, fit into the three or four minutes most analogue clocks could be described as 'pointing at the twelve'.
You certainly do a good job of setting a tone here. It's just so very disjointed, I guess. That it works as well as it does, even with that, is a mark for it, I think.
You certainly do a good job of setting a tone here. It's just so very disjointed, I guess. That it works as well as it does, even with that, is a mark for it, I think.
Spoons clatter against saucers and the smell of bacon smegma molests my nostrils.
I refuse to believe I share a website with someone who wrote a sentence that good. Fuck off.
I love every part of this except the ending. Them actually being in Hell (or whatever it was) feels like a real cop out, considering how good of a slice of life piece you had going.
