Help a /lit/ friend with literary things

[Anonymous No.3691370]

So /lit/, my college is having a writing master class and LYDIA DAVIS will be coming for fiction. I'm freaking out about this chance but I'm anxious about what to submit for my writing sample. Will /lit/ read over what I intend to submit (~2,300 word short story) and make some critiques?

Here goes:

"First Rehearsal for the Peoples Temple, 1939"

The water tower stood high over them, blocking out the sun. When the wind blew the thing groaned in low, disturbed tones, the same notes of Jack’s grandfather moaning in the months before he died—a deepthroated voice, stately in its age but at the same time aching with decay. With muted respect, the wind whistled through empty tree branches before reaching the tower’s rusted metal. This time, more than any of the previous gusts, the structure’s groan was deeper, more forcefully warning of collapse. Even the wind seemed to agree, now increasing its momentum and adding pitched-up harmonics in complement to the tower’s bass.
“Maybe we shouldn’t play here,” Jack squeaked at last in the direction of the other two boys crouching over something in the grass.
“We’re not playing,” said Jimmy, looking up. “We found a dead bird. Come see.” He bent back down while Tom left to go find a stick. Around the crouching boy, the grass swayed in circles and swatted his bent legs, but his focus could not be moved. Behind him, clouds swallowed up the last scraps of blue sky in twisting advance while horizon trees bent forward with the shifting wind. Jimmy alone remained unmoved; not even a single strand of his shoe polish black hair strayed from his scalp. After a long while bent into this position, he looked up at Jack, staring with an expression that could not be recognized from such a distance, neither of them saying anything.

[Anonymous No.3691373]

>>3691370

Jack’s mind seized in its attempt to break the silence until it remembered the bird. “Is it gross?” he called over at last, standing on his tiptoes to see if he could catch a glimpse of it from a distance first.

“Come see,” said Tom as he reappeared wielding a stick. He stopped and gestured to Jack with it, pulling him in with invisible wires impossible to resist. Still, Jack stood anchored on trembling legs which Tom looked toward with a scowl. “It’s just a bird.”

Jack moved to them and crouched down to their level. The bird’s wings were spread in full span, every feather fanned out as if proud to betray the former posture of the organism at large when it still moved full of life. Now, a mere lump of oily feathers ground into the dirt, there was hardly any implication that this same thing once flew and ate and chirped in the mornings as Jack awoke; instead, it only seemed to wait scornfully until it was picked to bones by bacteria or carried away in the mouth of a neighborhood dog.

“It looks fresh. Prob’ly fell off the tower this morning,” said Jimmy, looking up to the metal structure now made more menacing by its involvement. The sun shined over its rust, glittering in the light like mud smeared on the back of an animal.

“Why would a bird fall?” asked Tom.

“Because he wanted to,” pronounced Jimmy. His eyes moved over Tom’s stick poking at the bird, exploring its corpse in a series of indents jabbed into its figure. “No,” he said at last, placing his hand over the body. “With your hand instead.”

Tom dropped the stick and leapt away. “Ah! Stop that!”

“Why? Are you afraid of it?”

“You’ll get sick!”

“I won’t die. It’s not even decomposed yet.”

“Decomposed?”

“Rotted. Like a mummy unwrapped.”

[Anonymous No.3691382]

>>3691373

“Oh.” Tom crouched back down and brought his hand close to the thing’s head, hovering his fingers in near contact to its protruding fuzz. He froze like that for a moment as if paralyzed from breaching some infectious aura. “We should bury it,” he said finally, withdrawing his hand.

“We’ll need to have a funeral,” Jimmy said solemnly, adding a nod. “Jack, run and get a shovel.”

“I can get cardboard too so we can make a gravestone.”

“Yeah! One shaped like a cross!” Tom piped in.

Jimmy shook his head purposefully. “No. Only people get gravestones. For animals it makes sacrilege.” Jack declined asking him to explain sacrilege and instead assumed it part of the vast morbid dictionary stored up in him and released in small doses in everything he did. “Jack, get the shovel,” he repeated, slower this time.
Jack nodded and ran around the legs of the tower and through the wide grasslot to the shed standing some distance behind his house. In a minute he was running back with the shovel, resting it on his shoulders crossways like he had seen in paintings of saints journeying across barren landscapes in holy struggle. His arms ached as he did this, but for the time being he appreciated his sacrifice.

“Here,” he said as he returned to the other two, removing the shovel from his shoulders and holding it out to them. Wordlessly, Jimmy snatched it and drove it into the ground, his hair flying out of gelled place at the impact. The blade penetrated halfway into the earth and Jimmy jumped on it with both feet until it sunk all the way in. The ground resisted with dull ripping sounds as he forced the handle downwards, spiderweb root networks clinging to the chunk of earth that the blade forced up. Finally, he wedged it loose and threw it aside, not even pausing before attacking the ground once more. He did this three or four more times as the others watched silently, hands in their pockets and heads bowed.

[Anonymous No.3691383]

Less Faulkner more Hemingway.

[Anonymous No.3691384]

>>3691382
“Good,” Jimmy said at last, dropping the shovel and smoothing his hair back in place. The hole he had excavated was sizable, large enough to reach most of the way up Jack’s shin if he stood in it. Even from a distance he could sense the moisture lingering in it like at the entry of a dank cave, a whitish fungus frothing in its recesses. It gaped, a perverse sense of invitation emanating from its mouth.

Jimmy clapped his hands to his thighs. “Alright, I’ll be the minister of course, and Tom, you’re the funeral director. Jack will be the one who cries.”

“But I don’t want to,” whined Jack.

“You always cry,” said Tom.

“I’m not going to just for some bird.”

“Then pretend it’s your dog.”

Jack crossed his arms and didn’t respond.

Exhaling loudly, Jimmy looked up into the sky and
raised his arms out crossways to full span. The other two went silent and stood erect, not daring to display any imperfection. “Oh Lord,” Jimmy began, his brow creasing slightly, “everything dies. One day my mother will die and one day Jack’s dog will die, but today it was a bird. A bird who wanted to die and jumped from a tower.” He crouched down and picked up the corpse, cradling it in his hands as if to throw it upwards to release at the climax of a ceremony. Its head and beak pointed right at Jack, its closed-eye glare boring sickly into his stomach. “We know what it did was an unpardonable sin and it makes me sad that it can’t go to heaven. He’ll have to go under the earth and live in hell forever, like all the animals—even dogs.” Jimmy spat the last word and stared into Jack. Neither of them could look away. “But at least it was here for a while. It was with other birds in their world. It could fly.”

[Anonymous No.3691391]

>>3691384

He paused and titled his head to the side, crooking his view of the other two boys. His mouth moved formlessly, considering a smile. For a while they all stood this way, perched over the grave, ready for it and contemplating it as best they could the way they imagined adults did at all the funerals they attended. Despite the vaguely sick misgivings rising up in him, Jack was proud of himself in a way that he wanted to tell his mother of but couldn’t begin to find the words to frame this pride with. [ital]A bird died alone, but we buried him because it was the [small caps]RIGHT THING TO DO[/sc]. And it was all the more important because no one told them to do it…[/ital]

Something darkened in Jimmy’s face and his features seemed to take in everything around them in swift revelation. His head snapped toward Jack. “Cry,” he snarled.

Goosepimples pressed against the back of Jack’s shirt; his arms felt drained of blood, just hanging at his sides encased in ice and useless. “C’mon, Jack, cry,” whispered Tom encouragingly. He grabbed his shoulders, pretending to comfort him from invisible sobs, and finally, shaking himself free of non-thought and nauseous inaction, Jacks cradled his head in his hands and let forth the most dramatic cries he could. A small grin creased Jimmy’s lips as he nodded.

[Anonymous No.3691399]

>>3691391

“Death’s a crossing over. It’s easy. It’s natural and God wants us to do it because that’s why he created us. It’s what we’ll all do, sometime. So don’t cry!” he growled, voice groveling lower than even most adults could manage. The other two looked up from the grave expecting a demon’s face but Jimmy’s was there instead, bent toward them, snarling, his hands white-knuckled and clasping the bird. The tower groaned, a fugue, a harmony thundering over them, applauded by the wind. [ital]Someday that damned thing will fall,[/ital] Jack’s father grumbled often enough to have his words on constant loop in his son’s mind. [ital] It will fall and crash onto a house and burst open so rusty water will flood the streets and ruin everything. [/ital] A voice of prophecy, one the tower further agreed to with each groan.

Smoke began to rise a ways away—Sunday’s controlled burn. Its smell hit them, harsh and undeniable. All three turned toward the black column fleeing to the heavens from the flames below; Jimmy smirked with the knowledge that the cloud had arrived exactly on schedule, Jack was afraid. Unrelenting, the pillar thickened and pushed into the cloud-cover above, spreading out a black smear in the gray fluff. And smoke would continue to mix up through it, turning the sky to full black just before nightfall as even darker forces began to take over…

Saliva sputtered from Jack’s mouth as he coughed. Caught off guard, his body seized up in pain as it felt another shudder creep into his lungs. His face twisted into a tense frown, eyes tearing as they watched Jimmy gasp in pleasure and wheel back to the awaiting funeral. Forcefully, he cast the dead creature into the pit, kicking in the dirtpile after it. “Thy will be done,” he said with finality as a hazy cloud of dust rose from the grave.

[Anonymous No.3691401]

>>3691399

Jack found himself running, his home only seeming to hover at the horizon without growing any closer. Two elliptical forms burned into his back, branding him with blue-eyed fury spit from the burning soul of God’s young reverend, Jimmy Jones. Words at once muttered under the breath and heavenwards cursed his retreat, invoking terrors of the highest order. Swirling fires would crash down on him, water turning to purplish blood in his cup, vast armies of animals in God’s most profane order would swarm and wreak havoc—all this would come upon the boy who fled.

Jack burst through the back door with fury’s inertia, exploding the barrier to his home with a shallow thunderclap rattling wood and rusty hinge. “Jesus Christ, Jack!” shrieked the boy’s mother, harpy-like, descending on him and cutting off his flight upstairs.

“Sorry sorry sorry,” he said stumblingly, more powerless with each repeat. “I’m just going—”

“Stop.” Her vocal hammer came down, impacting him with a near physical force. “You’re going upstairs to clean yourself up for dinner. Remember we’re eating at the Jones’s tonight.”

[Anonymous No.3691404]

>>3691401

The pull of Jimmy, still across the field, a tiny black dot before the fire, tore through the final sanctuaries Jack had assumed children his age could not penetrate. Jimmy had planned it all along—his ropes were everywhere through nature and death and food and fire. Probably it was his direction of the adults that had led to this meal, one evening long ago when today’s plans were still brimming in his brain, asking his mother, bending her toward him to hear his proposition that she was powerless to reject: “Sure James, I bet Jack’s family would love to eat with us that night.” Even from inside his house, Jack could feel the smile form on Jimmy’s lips.

“Mom…please.”

She took a step back from him, repulsed. “Well if you’re feeling sick you don’t have to go.”

And, like a spring bursting forth from the inert boulder of his brain, a headache arrived and with it a nausea sweeping closed the passage of his throat. A column of fire rose through the dark numbness of his spine. Gifts, multiplying, wracked him with glory that knew no boundaries. [ital]Yes, let them come![/ital] he rejoiced silently.

The harshness drained from his mother’s face. Reaching out for his hand and pulling it from his pocket, she seemed taken aback. “Jack, your hand’s white as snow!”

[Anonymous No.3691409]

>>3691404

He did not respond and did not thank her for the praise. With his last burst of strength, one not of the body but of victory’s joy, he ascended the stairs and dove into the darkness of his room. By the time the footsteps of his mother stalked up the stairs in complement to his, he was entombed in linens, shrouding all the flesh of his body. Overtop images strung up between reality and oblivion, jittering with fever, he thought he heard Jimmy arrive at his doorstep to hand back the shovel, a knowing smile imbued in his voice. “Where’s he hiding?” he heard from beneath layers of black, shading him from the other boy’s sight. Trembling with pride at his victory, Jack let himself lapse into the frenzy of stranger realms where tumbling dreams fueled hot by fever blocked out the light of the real.

Jack’s mother left him a cup of grape juice mixed with his medication for when he awoke, at Jimmy’s suggestion.


END

[Anonymous No.3691412]

>>3691383
i do prefer faulkner though. any specific suggestions about style? is there any section that is glaringly bad?

[Anonymous No.3691473]

one bump.

wouldn't anyone else be excited about meeting Lydia Davis?

[Anonymous No.3691492]

>>3691473
>Lydia Davis
just googled her looks like some stupid dyke, so, no.

[Anonymous No.3691523]

>>3691492
she's one of the most respected living short story writers, won a MacArthur grant, and is a well-reviewed French translator, so she's not a stupid dyke, no.

[Anonymous No.3691542]

>>3691473
That would be super fucking awesome and I too would be freaking out.

>>3691523
Also: she writes really fucking awesome short stories. To hell with her accolades.

[Anonymous No.3691546]

>>3691370
>Around the crouching boy, the grass swayed in circles
This is a historical inaccuracy. Grass was not discovered until 1951.

[Anonymous No.3691556]

It's quite a bit overwritten and very much on the nose. But it seems like it's basically good. Just try to turn some of the description down a notch and don't make the boys so well-spoken. That prayer is a little much for instance.

[Anonymous No.3691557]

>>3691542
oh i know, mentioning them is just a more objective way of saying she's good

[Anonymous No.3691561]

>>3691556
thanks for the input! the boys are supposed to be 8 years old, if that changes anything. I wanted Jimmy to be creepily well spoken but I think you're right that I should tone him down.

[Anonymous No.3691563]

>>3691557
Doesn't work if you don't really trust the organizational bodies in question. But this is off-topic.

[Anonymous No.3691592]

Are you female?
I think a boy would not say "We found a dead bird. Come see." He would just say "We found a dead bird."
That is, "up to you whether you want to come see it, FAGGOT."

[Anonymous No.3691600]

>>3691592
good advice. I changed it

[Anonymous No.3691609]

>>3691546
>Grass was not discovered until 1951.
wut

[Anonymous No.3691742]

one last bump