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Should Not Have Said That
I’d always loved walking barefoot. Shoes were too confining. Still, I was kicking myself in the asphalt for not wearing them today.
Then you shouldn’t have annoyed Bobby.
“I didn’t know! How was I supposed to know?!”
Common sense?
`
A snarl tore up my throat, but I didn’t let it past my teeth. Marcus was many things, like a crook, a lunatic and a complete pain in my ass, but he wasn’t one thing: wrong, at least right now.
The road felt like liquid acid on my feet. Bobby was petty when it came to vengeance. I didn’t even have socks. Fact was I didn’t have pants either, but that was a separate story unrelated to Bobby and my current walk in the Arizona sunshine. Damn, was I catching a draft.
The road snaked for miles in either direction. I was heading back, away from where I’d been riding with Bobby and her crew of misfits when I’d done the unthinkable and landed myself in this predicament.
Us. Landed us in this predicament.
“Can it, Marcus. You certainly didn’t help matters. What, was a little bit of kung-fu too much to ask for?”
I was tired. And anyways, I like Bobby. Fighting her on her own tour bus would be rude.
“She kicked our ass!”
She kicked your butt. And don’t curse. You know Charlotte doesn’t like it.
“Well, Charlotte should have been there! Her and Lily could have handled things if you hadn’t insisted they have a spa day in freaking Tucson!”
Hey, they’ve worked hard these past couple weeks. And you got Lily’s arm broken when your fat mouth got us in trouble with Edgar from Accounting. They earned a day off from your rampant idiocy and I’m sorry for having faith that you could last more than three hours without a gimped mother and her little girl here to hold your hand.
“Now you listen here you–”
That’s when I stepped on the first rock. I bashed an elbow on the way down and got a brainful from Marcus when I mentioned it in the politest way one has after they’ve stepped on the carpet Lego from Hell. While I was down there, sizzling on the black tar road top like a slab of ham, I pryed the stone from the bottom of my instep and sat up so my two eggs could fry for a while. Bobby had a mean kickball leg too. The sun was no more than a quarter of the way up the sky, climbing like a fiery sloth on its way to work at the local diner. I was probably more than ten miles from the nearest gas station, and all the water was still on the tour bus going twenty miles the other way towards Tucson.
I sighed and got up, hobbling in the direction of the Pass’nGas. The man there was alright, at least by what I’d glimpsed of him out the window. How he’d react to seeing me, walking back from the busload of undergrads on their way to play in the Battle of the Bands at the Maudlin Arena in only my shirt, was less certain, but I’d wing that when the time came. How he’d have reacted had I told him back then that what the bus was full of was not guitars and basses and champagne but C4, twelve rocket launchers and a daschund with a Napoleonic complex that had taken a chunk from my rump on my way out of the bus would have likely gone a long way in explaining a few things, but sometimes professionalism prevented easy answers.
Charlotte was going to be livid when I didn’t show up with the Boom Crew.
“Well, this is just fantastic,” I growled, kicking at empty air with my bad foot and hitting a scrub brush for my trouble. I hopped along the road, picking thorns from beneath my toenails as Marcus chuckled.
Well, at least we can go out in style, right? Like cowboys in the Old West.
The countryside around here was beautiful. I couldn’t deny that. Flat and open, just desert and sand and rocks and lifelessness as far as the eye could see, from bushes that looked like the hand of Satan reaching out of the pit to grab you by the ankles to the distant plateau’s you could have housed a city on. It made you really appreciate shoes. And pants, especially when the wind kicked up for a breeze that was brisk on the roasting skin but not too gentle on one’s swollen delicates.
“We’re not dying. Not if I have anything to say about it.”
Cue the second rock; this one a four-sided dice that dug deep into the soul. This time, when I yanked it out, my hand was damp and red. I tore a bit of shirt off and wrapped it around my already swelling foot and kept limping, which is hard when you have a limp on both legs.
Charlotte really was going to be furious. But, as a plus side, I wouldn’t be the only one she was mad at this time around. The Boom Crew had taken her contract, had taken money. Charlotte was very old fashioned when it came to how you acted when you took someone’s money, as well what you did to people who didn’t follow through on their promises. The thought of Bobby and her stupid daschund roasted on coals and thrown into oversized buns kept me going another mile or so.
I couldn’t help but wonder what they were doing. The thought of them in a spa was an admittedly fascinating one. What would the staff say when a women who looked like the mauled bear that ate Rocky, after you compressed it’s spine to make it travel-sized, and her little girl dressed in gray sweats and a white kabuki mask that she never took off for anyone or anything? Would they dunk them in mud, talking about how it was good for the skin as they took a belt-sander to the calluses on their hands? Would Lily put cucumber slices on her mask holes?
Or, the more likely outcome, would they do whatever they were told to do and damn the inconvenience, because whatever Charlotte decided was right. Always. You could have broken a superhero’s spine on her rightness, even if she told you something as crazy as “blow up the president’s limousine as it drives through Arizona to visit the children’s cancer hospital.”
Shut up. You don’t get to judge me. Somebody had to be the villain in the national narrative and there wasn’t exactly a line going out the gate for the job because the line consisted of me and Charlotte standing right behind me with her meat-mitten on my collar.
Still, I’d miss them. If it came to that, that is.
I suppose I can always hope for another body if we ever find Justine and wring that formula out of his scrawny neck. Maybe they can even pull you along if the buzzards don’t drink out your brain first.
“No,” I snarled. “I’m not dying here.”
I admire the spirit. I really do. But–
I stumbled around the third rock. “But nothing. I’m going to get home and I’m going to get you out of my brain if it kills me.”
Marcus fell silent at that. And he stayed silent for another couple miles which, for Marcus, was the equivalent of concreting the Hoover Dam shut. It gave me time to think. Think of home, or what was left of it after the firefight with President John and his assorted foot soldiers of Apple Pie and Baseball and Etc. were done trying to vent the world’s most wanted person and his two tiny runners-up.
I missed my garden. The patch of grass in the middle would have been perfect sleeping thickness this time of year. I suppose the ashes from the building would make good fertilizer for next year, but the garden had been mine. Or at least the grass had been mine. Everything else from the blueberries for the neighbors downstairs to the apple tree someone had given their grandmother two doors down had been mine only in that they made my grass a lot nicer to sleep on and breathe deeply. Of course, John had reimbursed all of them for the terrible loss from his own pocket. He’d even found them a new home, a lot closer to a police station in case another crook thought it’d be fun to set up shop in their place like some boogidy-boo from beyond the pale.
I’d been furious for a while. In fact, it was one of the few times Charlotte and Lily had ever left me alone for more than a couple minutes. That grass was what I’d gotten out of bed at dawn for and went back to bed at midnight for. I’d cared for it when it got a bad case of rust and bled for it when I almost lost it to a horrible infestation of razor grass a few years back. I worked hard because I had someone at home who needed me, even if they never said a word of thanks. Because when no one else was there for me, I always knew I could lay out on the grass and not be judged or told what needed to be done in triplicate or sent threatening emails from some nut-gobbling, unbathed, snaggled-dicked cock-up of a lost cause who was upset I’d shut down his account because calling someone that was not allowed anymore. And now it was gone. The one thing I’d fought for, through snow and rain and rust and dandelions was gone. And it was all my fault.
Hey.
“What?”
Are you crying?
“No,” I said, wiping at my eyes with a palm, which later turned out to be the one covered in a mixture of both partially dried blood and lots of sweat. That would be important later, but not now.
Do you want to?
“Shut up!”
I’m being serious.
“Sure you are.”
I won’t tell anyone. Promise.
“Look, we’ve still got most of the day to walk, so can you keep it canned a while longer? I was just getting used to it.”
Everybody’s lost a few things here and there. Nothing wrong with missing it.
I tried to think of what he’d lost, but couldn’t think of a thing, and I had no intention of asking him to find out. He’d never stop talking if I did that. I did have a guess what Charlotte and Lily had lost though. Charlotte looked like someone that had been put through a meat grinder and then had the meat grinder dropped on the remains, while Lily had the social charms of someone half her age and three times her insanity. I tried to think of them when they were normal, before Charlotte had become a killer and world crime boss and her daughter my bodyguard in training. My brain shut down before the world could go off-kilter and fall into the Stygian void of empty space.
“Yeah, I suppose so. I’m fine though.”
You sure? I think I feel some tears being repressed back in here.
“Go to hell,” I said. Wished I wasn’t smiling when I said it, but sometimes your body doesn’t listen to your thoughts.
I shuffled past my fourth rock and saw the buzzards flapping over me because clichés are clichés for a reason. I sighed, raised my shirt over my head in what I’d hoped was a ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ look but later turned out to be “crazy naked man with a lobotomy” look that got buckshot in my calf when the gentlemen at the gas station decided some risks weren’t worth taking. Live and learn, folks, live and learn. As I walked to my preordained peppering, I took another glance behind me to see if maybe Bobby would change her mind and forgive me and let me back on the bus, or at least give me my shoes.
I doubt it. You really let it slip this time.
“Like I said, it’s not my fault! All I asked was ‘When are you due?’ and she…
Then you shouldn’t have annoyed Bobby.
“I didn’t know! How was I supposed to know?!”
Common sense?
`
A snarl tore up my throat, but I didn’t let it past my teeth. Marcus was many things, like a crook, a lunatic and a complete pain in my ass, but he wasn’t one thing: wrong, at least right now.
The road felt like liquid acid on my feet. Bobby was petty when it came to vengeance. I didn’t even have socks. Fact was I didn’t have pants either, but that was a separate story unrelated to Bobby and my current walk in the Arizona sunshine. Damn, was I catching a draft.
The road snaked for miles in either direction. I was heading back, away from where I’d been riding with Bobby and her crew of misfits when I’d done the unthinkable and landed myself in this predicament.
Us. Landed us in this predicament.
“Can it, Marcus. You certainly didn’t help matters. What, was a little bit of kung-fu too much to ask for?”
I was tired. And anyways, I like Bobby. Fighting her on her own tour bus would be rude.
“She kicked our ass!”
She kicked your butt. And don’t curse. You know Charlotte doesn’t like it.
“Well, Charlotte should have been there! Her and Lily could have handled things if you hadn’t insisted they have a spa day in freaking Tucson!”
Hey, they’ve worked hard these past couple weeks. And you got Lily’s arm broken when your fat mouth got us in trouble with Edgar from Accounting. They earned a day off from your rampant idiocy and I’m sorry for having faith that you could last more than three hours without a gimped mother and her little girl here to hold your hand.
“Now you listen here you–”
That’s when I stepped on the first rock. I bashed an elbow on the way down and got a brainful from Marcus when I mentioned it in the politest way one has after they’ve stepped on the carpet Lego from Hell. While I was down there, sizzling on the black tar road top like a slab of ham, I pryed the stone from the bottom of my instep and sat up so my two eggs could fry for a while. Bobby had a mean kickball leg too. The sun was no more than a quarter of the way up the sky, climbing like a fiery sloth on its way to work at the local diner. I was probably more than ten miles from the nearest gas station, and all the water was still on the tour bus going twenty miles the other way towards Tucson.
I sighed and got up, hobbling in the direction of the Pass’nGas. The man there was alright, at least by what I’d glimpsed of him out the window. How he’d react to seeing me, walking back from the busload of undergrads on their way to play in the Battle of the Bands at the Maudlin Arena in only my shirt, was less certain, but I’d wing that when the time came. How he’d have reacted had I told him back then that what the bus was full of was not guitars and basses and champagne but C4, twelve rocket launchers and a daschund with a Napoleonic complex that had taken a chunk from my rump on my way out of the bus would have likely gone a long way in explaining a few things, but sometimes professionalism prevented easy answers.
Charlotte was going to be livid when I didn’t show up with the Boom Crew.
“Well, this is just fantastic,” I growled, kicking at empty air with my bad foot and hitting a scrub brush for my trouble. I hopped along the road, picking thorns from beneath my toenails as Marcus chuckled.
Well, at least we can go out in style, right? Like cowboys in the Old West.
The countryside around here was beautiful. I couldn’t deny that. Flat and open, just desert and sand and rocks and lifelessness as far as the eye could see, from bushes that looked like the hand of Satan reaching out of the pit to grab you by the ankles to the distant plateau’s you could have housed a city on. It made you really appreciate shoes. And pants, especially when the wind kicked up for a breeze that was brisk on the roasting skin but not too gentle on one’s swollen delicates.
“We’re not dying. Not if I have anything to say about it.”
Cue the second rock; this one a four-sided dice that dug deep into the soul. This time, when I yanked it out, my hand was damp and red. I tore a bit of shirt off and wrapped it around my already swelling foot and kept limping, which is hard when you have a limp on both legs.
Charlotte really was going to be furious. But, as a plus side, I wouldn’t be the only one she was mad at this time around. The Boom Crew had taken her contract, had taken money. Charlotte was very old fashioned when it came to how you acted when you took someone’s money, as well what you did to people who didn’t follow through on their promises. The thought of Bobby and her stupid daschund roasted on coals and thrown into oversized buns kept me going another mile or so.
I couldn’t help but wonder what they were doing. The thought of them in a spa was an admittedly fascinating one. What would the staff say when a women who looked like the mauled bear that ate Rocky, after you compressed it’s spine to make it travel-sized, and her little girl dressed in gray sweats and a white kabuki mask that she never took off for anyone or anything? Would they dunk them in mud, talking about how it was good for the skin as they took a belt-sander to the calluses on their hands? Would Lily put cucumber slices on her mask holes?
Or, the more likely outcome, would they do whatever they were told to do and damn the inconvenience, because whatever Charlotte decided was right. Always. You could have broken a superhero’s spine on her rightness, even if she told you something as crazy as “blow up the president’s limousine as it drives through Arizona to visit the children’s cancer hospital.”
Shut up. You don’t get to judge me. Somebody had to be the villain in the national narrative and there wasn’t exactly a line going out the gate for the job because the line consisted of me and Charlotte standing right behind me with her meat-mitten on my collar.
Still, I’d miss them. If it came to that, that is.
I suppose I can always hope for another body if we ever find Justine and wring that formula out of his scrawny neck. Maybe they can even pull you along if the buzzards don’t drink out your brain first.
“No,” I snarled. “I’m not dying here.”
I admire the spirit. I really do. But–
I stumbled around the third rock. “But nothing. I’m going to get home and I’m going to get you out of my brain if it kills me.”
Marcus fell silent at that. And he stayed silent for another couple miles which, for Marcus, was the equivalent of concreting the Hoover Dam shut. It gave me time to think. Think of home, or what was left of it after the firefight with President John and his assorted foot soldiers of Apple Pie and Baseball and Etc. were done trying to vent the world’s most wanted person and his two tiny runners-up.
I missed my garden. The patch of grass in the middle would have been perfect sleeping thickness this time of year. I suppose the ashes from the building would make good fertilizer for next year, but the garden had been mine. Or at least the grass had been mine. Everything else from the blueberries for the neighbors downstairs to the apple tree someone had given their grandmother two doors down had been mine only in that they made my grass a lot nicer to sleep on and breathe deeply. Of course, John had reimbursed all of them for the terrible loss from his own pocket. He’d even found them a new home, a lot closer to a police station in case another crook thought it’d be fun to set up shop in their place like some boogidy-boo from beyond the pale.
I’d been furious for a while. In fact, it was one of the few times Charlotte and Lily had ever left me alone for more than a couple minutes. That grass was what I’d gotten out of bed at dawn for and went back to bed at midnight for. I’d cared for it when it got a bad case of rust and bled for it when I almost lost it to a horrible infestation of razor grass a few years back. I worked hard because I had someone at home who needed me, even if they never said a word of thanks. Because when no one else was there for me, I always knew I could lay out on the grass and not be judged or told what needed to be done in triplicate or sent threatening emails from some nut-gobbling, unbathed, snaggled-dicked cock-up of a lost cause who was upset I’d shut down his account because calling someone that was not allowed anymore. And now it was gone. The one thing I’d fought for, through snow and rain and rust and dandelions was gone. And it was all my fault.
Hey.
“What?”
Are you crying?
“No,” I said, wiping at my eyes with a palm, which later turned out to be the one covered in a mixture of both partially dried blood and lots of sweat. That would be important later, but not now.
Do you want to?
“Shut up!”
I’m being serious.
“Sure you are.”
I won’t tell anyone. Promise.
“Look, we’ve still got most of the day to walk, so can you keep it canned a while longer? I was just getting used to it.”
Everybody’s lost a few things here and there. Nothing wrong with missing it.
I tried to think of what he’d lost, but couldn’t think of a thing, and I had no intention of asking him to find out. He’d never stop talking if I did that. I did have a guess what Charlotte and Lily had lost though. Charlotte looked like someone that had been put through a meat grinder and then had the meat grinder dropped on the remains, while Lily had the social charms of someone half her age and three times her insanity. I tried to think of them when they were normal, before Charlotte had become a killer and world crime boss and her daughter my bodyguard in training. My brain shut down before the world could go off-kilter and fall into the Stygian void of empty space.
“Yeah, I suppose so. I’m fine though.”
You sure? I think I feel some tears being repressed back in here.
“Go to hell,” I said. Wished I wasn’t smiling when I said it, but sometimes your body doesn’t listen to your thoughts.
I shuffled past my fourth rock and saw the buzzards flapping over me because clichés are clichés for a reason. I sighed, raised my shirt over my head in what I’d hoped was a ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ look but later turned out to be “crazy naked man with a lobotomy” look that got buckshot in my calf when the gentlemen at the gas station decided some risks weren’t worth taking. Live and learn, folks, live and learn. As I walked to my preordained peppering, I took another glance behind me to see if maybe Bobby would change her mind and forgive me and let me back on the bus, or at least give me my shoes.
I doubt it. You really let it slip this time.
“Like I said, it’s not my fault! All I asked was ‘When are you due?’ and she…
I am very very confused.
So many names being dropped, and some of them are just voices in this guy's head? It's a mess trying to sort out all these past events being referenced, and these character relationships, all while trying to get to know this main character. Something about an assassination plot? Who, what? To be honest, I gave up halfway through on trying to be immersed. Stopped caring, turned my brain off.
I will give it credit, though, for describing this guy's current predicament pretty well. He's having a miserable time stumbling around in the desert, stepping on rocks and thorns, fried by the sun, and that's likely why he's so scatterbrained and agitated and can't tell his personal story in a straightforward manner. His past makes no sense to me, but I'm more interested in whatever he'll do next. Wish the ending was more about that, and less about the punchline.
So many names being dropped, and some of them are just voices in this guy's head? It's a mess trying to sort out all these past events being referenced, and these character relationships, all while trying to get to know this main character. Something about an assassination plot? Who, what? To be honest, I gave up halfway through on trying to be immersed. Stopped caring, turned my brain off.
I will give it credit, though, for describing this guy's current predicament pretty well. He's having a miserable time stumbling around in the desert, stepping on rocks and thorns, fried by the sun, and that's likely why he's so scatterbrained and agitated and can't tell his personal story in a straightforward manner. His past makes no sense to me, but I'm more interested in whatever he'll do next. Wish the ending was more about that, and less about the punchline.
Hmmm...
Not entirely sure what to make of this one, overall.
You've got lots of stuff in here. A half-dozen characters entwined in some madcap escapades in what I can only assume is some sort of strange alternate reality. Unfortunately, it's not cohesive enough for me to really grasp what you're aiming at overall.
There's a sort of rolling reveal going on here, and the sheer oddness of what's being revealed is interesting in and of itself. However, the oddness works against you to some extent, because the way things are presented, I needed re-orient myself several times as new information changed what I thought I was seeing. Things like the MC lacking pants, Bobby being a girl (I know it can be a girl's name, but I wasn't expecting it) Marcus being something besides an imaginary friend, every time I needed to re-adjust what I thought I was seeing, it broke immersion a little.
Still, the oddness was worth something? I did like the sheer weirdness of what you've got here, even if I don't really think you're using it much at all. I mean, for all the crazy characters and situations you hint at, as far as I can tell, at it's core this story is about someone missing their... lawn. Which, alright, you can probably sell me on if you try hard enough. However, it mostly got two or three paragraphs in the middle, where it gets a simple enough treatment without a lot of conflict or drama. Meanwhile, the rest of the story goes into tangents and reveals on weirdness that doesn't really affect the main narrative very strongly.
More than that, I don't even feel like I got the whole picture. I mean, I have some idea who these characters are. Some. But not nearly enough to understand what they're doing or why, overall? That's a bit annoying to me. I don't think you need to answer every question the reader has, but connecting the weirdness of the setting to the emotional arc of the narrative would help a lot, I think, and that means giving us more of an idea of how he ended up missing his grass; not why he's limping by the road, but why he was even on that bus in the first place, maybe?
Not entirely sure what to make of this one, overall.
You've got lots of stuff in here. A half-dozen characters entwined in some madcap escapades in what I can only assume is some sort of strange alternate reality. Unfortunately, it's not cohesive enough for me to really grasp what you're aiming at overall.
There's a sort of rolling reveal going on here, and the sheer oddness of what's being revealed is interesting in and of itself. However, the oddness works against you to some extent, because the way things are presented, I needed re-orient myself several times as new information changed what I thought I was seeing. Things like the MC lacking pants, Bobby being a girl (I know it can be a girl's name, but I wasn't expecting it) Marcus being something besides an imaginary friend, every time I needed to re-adjust what I thought I was seeing, it broke immersion a little.
Still, the oddness was worth something? I did like the sheer weirdness of what you've got here, even if I don't really think you're using it much at all. I mean, for all the crazy characters and situations you hint at, as far as I can tell, at it's core this story is about someone missing their... lawn. Which, alright, you can probably sell me on if you try hard enough. However, it mostly got two or three paragraphs in the middle, where it gets a simple enough treatment without a lot of conflict or drama. Meanwhile, the rest of the story goes into tangents and reveals on weirdness that doesn't really affect the main narrative very strongly.
More than that, I don't even feel like I got the whole picture. I mean, I have some idea who these characters are. Some. But not nearly enough to understand what they're doing or why, overall? That's a bit annoying to me. I don't think you need to answer every question the reader has, but connecting the weirdness of the setting to the emotional arc of the narrative would help a lot, I think, and that means giving us more of an idea of how he ended up missing his grass; not why he's limping by the road, but why he was even on that bus in the first place, maybe?
This is another one in the "needs more pieces" bin. Apparently tonight is the night for the Writeoff to hurt my brain as I try to piece everything together.
It's pretty clear from the beginning that Marcus is ... well, non-physical and sharing the narrator's brain, however you want to label that (imaginary voices, multiple personalities, the Clippy of their brainware implants, etc). The big problem with framing the scene as the narrator alone talking with a head-voice is that there is an extra special burden to establish who is inside their head and who is NOT inside their head. It took me far too long to figure out that Bobby physically existed -- my default assumption given your introduction was that Bobby was like Marcus, and took over the narrator's brain to make them walk out into the desert or something (or drove them out, locked the car, and buried the keys in a sand dune).
[1] It also didn't help that she's got a boy's name, because when I hit her pronouns, it took me extra time to try to sort out whether there were other unnamed individuals also being talked about ... that wouldn't have been a problem in isolation, but when I'm already so confused, it's one more thing on the pile.
Okay, so Marcus is concerned about Charlotte overhearing, that makes her another head-voice --
-- okay, so Charlotte isn't a head-voice. I think. Or is there some sort of mental holodeck where head-voices can "go places"? Even assuming that Charlotte exists, is Lily real or a head-voice of Charlotte's?
... okay, so Lily's presumably real, assuming Edgar is real too. (Or maybe these voices are radio chatter of people locked in an office somewhere? At this point I'm beginning to question my own existence.)
ASDFJKL;ASDFKL;J;AKF;SLDJ;BBQ IF THEY'RE REAL THEN WHY IS MARCUS THE HEADVOICE IMPLYING THAT THEY CAN BE "HERE" CODDLING THE NARRATOR
Seriously, I cannot overstate the impact of Marcus being the second character introduced without any context as to why he and the narrator share brains, or how common that is. It's like starting out a story by showing us that some people are secretly lizard-people in human skins, and then introducing a huge cast of apparently human characters without ever mentioning lizard-people again.
Once the story settles down and stops introducing characters, it gets less confusing, if no less bizarre. I mean, I guess after everything we've learned, the idea of professional assassin-bombers kung-fu fighting with the president's bodyguards is just sort of whatevs. I'm not sure if it's the sleight of hand of the early story making me desperate for something concrete to latch onto, or whether I'm taking it in stride because this just doesn't reach the high-water mark of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, or what, but that's an amusing sort of over-the-top insanity and I really wish it and all of the head-voice stuff had switched places to get everything properly framed first.
And then there's a bunch of character development stuff, and an abrupt ending which is more or less a punch line calling back to the opening bookend. So my experience of the story was a long time struggling to figure things out, some whimsical insanity once I did, and an anticlimax/lack of resolution. Color me frustrated.
So, #1:
This desperately needs to fix the framing stuff I mentioned, but if it had established everything properly, this would certainly have had my interest. It seems to be running mostly off of Rule of Cool, and while the headvoice thing ended up backfiring, I definitely admire the effort there -- providing context in medias res rather than resorting to lengthy exposition dumps. That's a big strength of this story, and I don't want to discourage it -- but the danger of in medias res is that the reader is trying to figure it out as they go along, and if you get them building up images in their head which you later kick out from underneath them, they feel a little betrayed by their engagement. (Take heart; I made much the same mistake in Harmony Needs Heroes, which was my first-ever Writeoff non-finalist after several years competing, so this is certainly not a novice problem.)
#2:
Totally separate from that, I can't say the ending landed for me. You're asking for a lot of reader engagement, introducing a really dynamic cast of characters and drawing us in with a tight and gripping storytelling technique, and then this sort of becomes a shaggy dog story. It's hard not to feel disappointed because the writing promised so much more. This could certainly be the basis for a more ambitious story.
Tier: Flawed but Fun
(... by which I mean: I didn't actually have fun reading this, but the potential is all there, and modulo the failed experiment of the headvoice, I think this would have drawn me in. The command of narrative is certainly evident here, it just made some choices that didn't pay off.)
It's pretty clear from the beginning that Marcus is ... well, non-physical and sharing the narrator's brain, however you want to label that (imaginary voices, multiple personalities, the Clippy of their brainware implants, etc). The big problem with framing the scene as the narrator alone talking with a head-voice is that there is an extra special burden to establish who is inside their head and who is NOT inside their head. It took me far too long to figure out that Bobby physically existed -- my default assumption given your introduction was that Bobby was like Marcus, and took over the narrator's brain to make them walk out into the desert or something (or drove them out, locked the car, and buried the keys in a sand dune).
[1] It also didn't help that she's got a boy's name, because when I hit her pronouns, it took me extra time to try to sort out whether there were other unnamed individuals also being talked about ... that wouldn't have been a problem in isolation, but when I'm already so confused, it's one more thing on the pile.
She kicked your butt. And don’t curse. You know Charlotte doesn’t like it.
Okay, so Marcus is concerned about Charlotte overhearing, that makes her another head-voice --
“Well, Charlotte should have been there! Her and Lily could have handled things if you hadn’t insisted they have a spa day in freaking Tucson!”
-- okay, so Charlotte isn't a head-voice. I think. Or is there some sort of mental holodeck where head-voices can "go places"? Even assuming that Charlotte exists, is Lily real or a head-voice of Charlotte's?
Hey, they’ve worked hard these past couple weeks. And you got Lily’s arm broken when your fat mouth got us in trouble with Edgar from Accounting.
... okay, so Lily's presumably real, assuming Edgar is real too. (Or maybe these voices are radio chatter of people locked in an office somewhere? At this point I'm beginning to question my own existence.)
They earned a day off from your rampant idiocy and I’m sorry for having faith that you could last more than three hours without a gimped mother and her little girl here to hold your hand.
ASDFJKL;ASDFKL;J;AKF;SLDJ;BBQ IF THEY'RE REAL THEN WHY IS MARCUS THE HEADVOICE IMPLYING THAT THEY CAN BE "HERE" CODDLING THE NARRATOR
Seriously, I cannot overstate the impact of Marcus being the second character introduced without any context as to why he and the narrator share brains, or how common that is. It's like starting out a story by showing us that some people are secretly lizard-people in human skins, and then introducing a huge cast of apparently human characters without ever mentioning lizard-people again.
Once the story settles down and stops introducing characters, it gets less confusing, if no less bizarre. I mean, I guess after everything we've learned, the idea of professional assassin-bombers kung-fu fighting with the president's bodyguards is just sort of whatevs. I'm not sure if it's the sleight of hand of the early story making me desperate for something concrete to latch onto, or whether I'm taking it in stride because this just doesn't reach the high-water mark of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, or what, but that's an amusing sort of over-the-top insanity and I really wish it and all of the head-voice stuff had switched places to get everything properly framed first.
And then there's a bunch of character development stuff, and an abrupt ending which is more or less a punch line calling back to the opening bookend. So my experience of the story was a long time struggling to figure things out, some whimsical insanity once I did, and an anticlimax/lack of resolution. Color me frustrated.
So, #1:
This desperately needs to fix the framing stuff I mentioned, but if it had established everything properly, this would certainly have had my interest. It seems to be running mostly off of Rule of Cool, and while the headvoice thing ended up backfiring, I definitely admire the effort there -- providing context in medias res rather than resorting to lengthy exposition dumps. That's a big strength of this story, and I don't want to discourage it -- but the danger of in medias res is that the reader is trying to figure it out as they go along, and if you get them building up images in their head which you later kick out from underneath them, they feel a little betrayed by their engagement. (Take heart; I made much the same mistake in Harmony Needs Heroes, which was my first-ever Writeoff non-finalist after several years competing, so this is certainly not a novice problem.)
#2:
Totally separate from that, I can't say the ending landed for me. You're asking for a lot of reader engagement, introducing a really dynamic cast of characters and drawing us in with a tight and gripping storytelling technique, and then this sort of becomes a shaggy dog story. It's hard not to feel disappointed because the writing promised so much more. This could certainly be the basis for a more ambitious story.
Tier: Flawed but Fun
(... by which I mean: I didn't actually have fun reading this, but the potential is all there, and modulo the failed experiment of the headvoice, I think this would have drawn me in. The command of narrative is certainly evident here, it just made some choices that didn't pay off.)
Can only really echo what's already been said. Lots of names, a confusing situation, not enough context and it quicky disengages me as a reader. Theres nothing to latch on to that makes me care about the charecters or what happens.
Even weird realities should be grounded in something relatable.
The desert is well described, and there are certainly some very colorful metaphors bandied about.
Even weird realities should be grounded in something relatable.
The desert is well described, and there are certainly some very colorful metaphors bandied about.
I'm likewise fairly confused. There's some nice turns of phrase in here, but also quite a bit of apparently deliberate obfuscation, or 'noddle incident' references that don't apparently add anything to the story. They feel like they're inserted purely to make us feel like there's more depth to this story than there really is.
I like the reveal at the end, but getting there was rough.
I like the reveal at the end, but getting there was rough.