Prologue (Second edit)

Jade wakes up.

I opened my eyes, panicked awake by an ear piercing crack. It was an unnerving sound, like metal on metal, and at an amplitude that reverberated through walls. Bolting upright, I found myself sitting in a mess of blankets. Gasping, struggling for air. Afraid. A distant rumble faded, and disappeared behind the pitter-patter of heavy rain splatter against the windows. Then, a flash of light, another crack, and a rumbling echo.

Lightning, I thought, still shaken.

“Mo-o-o-o-om!” I called out. The helpless and shrill cry of a girl who’d just turned five. Goosebumps erected on my neck and arms.  I was a frightened little girl, in the darkness of her bedroom, way past late. 

No reply came, and so, I called out again, “Mom?” in a short, pointed yelp.

In my barely woken state, the darkness surrounding me felt heavy and oppressive. The dead silence, deafening. 

I gestured into black air and a splash of green illumination responded, projecting in wireframes that lit the room with a faint splash of light. The wireframes congealed into a digital time display, which read two thirty five in the morning. I made a different gesture and the image faded away, with gradual yellow light overtaking the presence of the holo. I pivoted my head sidelong to the source of the light.

The yellow light seeped into the room from the crack under the door, beckoning me to inspect. Sliding the door enough to shoulder my wavy into the hallway, I peaked my head out and traced the light across the wall of the hallway

In need of Mom’s comforting voice -- actually, more in need of Dad -- I moved forward. Slinking close to the wall, I made my way out from the dark corners of the hall, sliding toward the luminance. I rounded the corner to an empty kitchen, its white tiles, eggshell walls, and stainless steel appliances made visible by the yellow glow of pot lamps in the ceiling.

Wind whistled, water trickled, and a cold draft stung for my attention to the far side of the room. Above the sink, the window had been left open, allowing the winter storm to rage through. Rain splatter spotted the floor, and the curtains danced with the wind in every direction.

“Mom?” I tried once more, shouting in the direction of the window.

Face your fears, I recalled the calm voice of my father. Swallowing down childish nerves, I tugged on my rain boots, pulled a jacket on over my nightgown, and climbed up onto the kitchen counter.

The countertop was slippery with the circulation of rain blowing in from the window. As I leaned out, the draft blew across the damp gown clinging to my knees. Peering over the edge, I looked down the fire escape, straining, but seeing nothing but a poorly lit alley.

Then a metallic clang, surging another round of panic to pound against my chest, rang from above. Turning my attention upward, I squinted against the rain at a shadow moving over the edge of the fire escape, and onto the roof.

“Face your fears,” the voice of my dad spoke clearly, as if out loud. I jolted with surprise, and looked back at the kitchen. No one there. Just my imagination. But, I thought I could smell him. That petrol smell he sometimes had, when coming back after a long absence.

Following the heed of the disembodied voice, I stepped out onto the fire escape, making my way up the cold steel-wrought ladder. White-knuckled, and fingertips numb, rain blurring my vision, I swallowed down the anxiety, and hoisted myself up the ladder. Face your fears, I reminded myself, climbing over the ledge and onto the roof.

Scanning the flat surface, I made out two silhouettes standing under the city’s oppressive twilight, at the far end of the roof. Plodding across the tarry grip of the roof, I moved at a sluggish pace, and made my way toward the far edge. 

The neon lights of gargantuan skyscrapers splashed down on the shadows as I approached. Rain bounced off of their heads and shoulders, silhouetting them at a distance in a chromatic glow. As I continued the approach, a made sense that one of the shadows wore a red raincoat, not unlike my mother’s. As I drew closer still, I traced my mother’s slender, feminine figure, with the coat’s waistband tight around her waist, her back facing me and crossed arms obscured by the angle. 

In front of the red-coated woman stood a larger form, with a long, saturated leather trench coat. I squinted, resolving my vision to be sure of who it was. Nerves pricked up along my spine, as I looked at the man in the leather coat, his face framed by drenched shoulder-length hair and the shadow of overgrown facial hair. My heart ached, as I recognized the man to be my long absent father.

Not knowing whether I wanted it to be him or not, I inched closer, and by degrees became more and more certain that it was him. I felt an anxiety, somewhere between anticipatory elation, and fear, at the prospect of it really being him. Slinking closer, the smell of petrol burned my nose and stung my eyes. My neck tightened. I was sure of it. It was Dad, here for a clandestine meeting with Mom.

But why here, on the roof? I wondered, drawing closer still to settle my curiosity, rather than succumb to fear. As I neared, just a few metres away from them, my father’s attention moved from Mom, to me. I froze under the force of his eyes. Overwhelmed by the intensity of his jade-green stare. 

The same striking eyes that Mom sometimes got lost in when she looked at me. Lost, and flustered. She would look at my eyes, seeing my father’s likeness. In those moments, I could feel her near crying, but she would brush it off. “Oh Jade,” she would say, while really thinking of him. Our shared impossible green eyes, whose hue was savoured in my name. Jade. My eyes would will my mother to the edge of tears. It made me feel awful, and guilty.

But that night, Dad was there, on the roof. Instead of the sadness Mom normally wore, I felt only suppressed anger while he was there in front of her cross-armed form.

“Please, take care of him,” Dad pleaded. “I’ll send more money, but I can’t take him with me.”

Realizing that he was holding something in both arms, I leaned sideways by a fraction. Green hair flopped in front of my eyes, and I brushed it away, trying to peek a look at the thing he held. Whatever was in his arms remained obscured by the form of my mother, standing close and in front of him. The most I could manage was the corner of a white towel, its frayed edge spilling over his forearm.

“A kaval boy?” Mom recoiled. “What happened to the parents?”

My father’s silence made me feel sad. Sensing in his weathered face, sorrow and regret, struggle and weakness. I wished then that I could see him instead as he was before he’d started disappearing from our lives. He looked off to the side, as if shamed by my mother’s question. And with his slight movement, the breast of his leather trench coat flapped open, revealing a glint of polished chrome sagging at his hip.

I swallowed nervously at the hand-sized thing with a barrel attached to his waist. It looked heavy, tugging his belt down by a fraction, and I imagined that its weight was a burden as much as the power it commanded. Amidst the smell of petrol, I thought then, that I tasted something acidic, and sulfurous.

There must have been an unspoken understanding between them, as Dad handed Mom the bundle. His shoulders loosened as if an oppressive gravity had been released with the transfer. He turned and trudged off in my direction. 

At his approach, I closed my eyes, too bashful to look at him. I listened to his steps splash closer, held my jaw tight and clenched my fists. The splashing stopped. I felt thick fingers run through my hair, calluses tugging as they brushed through. The hand moved to my shoulder and patted a couple of times. And then, the splashing steps resumed, trailing behind me until no longer audible.

My eyes remained closed, for a time I couldn’t place. Standing there, cold and wet, I shook not from the exposure, but the tension building up in my throat. The tension grew, until it spilled out in parsed sobs, like muted hiccups.

Not sure how much time passed, I remained in that state until Mom came by and whispered my name. “Jade?” 

I opened my eyes, to see her moist cheeks, holding up concerned brown eyes. “How long have you been here sweety?”

I shook my head, embarrassed at not knowing the answer to her question. “I faced my f-f-fears,” I struggled with a shiver to repeat my dad’s words. 

Mom crouched to my level, and I declined my chin to the bundle she was protecting. She took note, and unwrapped it partially, revealing a fuzzy little blue furred toddler, rotating his head, and looking at me with curious orange-flecked yellow eyes. “He’ll be staying with us for a little while,” she started, “until your father can sort things out.”

“Is it, kavalli?” I said shyly, biting my thumb. “It smells like a puppy.”

“Kavalli, yes he is, he’s a kavalli boy,” Mom giggled, and wiped the condensation off of my face with her free hand.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

Taken aback, Mom stalled by clearing her throat, and then answered. “Erik.”

“Erik is a human name,” I argued, with childlike certainty.

“Right. Well,” she trailed, hanging onto the word while she considered the dilemma. “How about Erk?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but my voice was overwhelmed by a sudden eruption of sound like metal on metal. There was a flash of light, a bang, and a rumble. I closed my eyes, fearful once more. Trying to repeat my dad’s words. But I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes.

I felt Mom shouting, but couldn’t make sense of it through the uproar. I wondered, lightning? The rumbling grew with a mechanical quality, not unlike a rocket engine. The tar tile beneath my foot shook as the rumbling grew louder. As it got closer. As it got hotter.

I opened my eyes, and I was in a brightly lit room. With blurred figures in white, rushing all around me. I blinked the sleep out of my eyes, but they remained blurred. I blinked again, and was then aware of an odour like bleach. I looked around at the blurred forms.

“Where am I?” I tugged at the sleeve of one of the blurred figures, who turned for a moment to look at me, before stepping off again. “I was, I was on the roof.” 

I sat up, and rubbed my eyes. On opening them again, I could see that the people sharing the room with me wore white coats, and unpatterned shirts and pants. One, a man, moved his lips and pointed a light at my eyes, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

My breathing quickened. Confused, I looked around, flailing my arms haphazardly. Something itched at my hand, I scratched, and feeling something unusually plastic, I looked down and gasped. There was a square of clear tape over a tube coming out of my hand. It didn’t hurt, but being distressed I yanked it, and blood trickled out from the centre of a square of pale skin.

One of the coated people, a woman, scurried to my side, attempting to comfort me by rubbing my shoulder. Her lips flapped, but I heard nothing.

Twisting my head either way, I saw that I was in a curtained off section. I then looked down, and around me, and realized I was laid out on a cold bed, covered with a thin layer of sheets. 

I finally realized where I was.

A hospital.

Reviews

[JayG]

• It's not always easy remembering the details from your childhood, and I was pretty young when it happened.

You need to look at this piece, not as the author, who knows the backstory before reading the first word, but as a reader who knows only what the words suggest to them, based on what has gone before and what the words suggest to them, based on their background and experience, not your intent.

In this line, you’re putting effect before cause. Someone unknown, who lives in an unknown time and place, is, for unknown reasons, referring to the night when something unknown happens. That’s not a mystery, it’s missing context. Were the clarification to come quickly, it might work, but at the end we still don’t know where we are or what’s going on.

You say “pretty young,” which is indeterminate, and could mean anything from five to twenty-five.

• Five, to be precise.

So why weren’t you precise in line one, and simply say “five,” there? Replace “pretty young” with “five” and you cut one word, there, and can drop this line to save four more. That’s five words cut from twenty-two, or nearly 30%, with no change in meaning or flow.

Why trim? Because every unnecessary word you can remove speeds the reading speed and adds impact to the story. And in this case, the entire first paragraph tells the reader nothing they have context for. Basically, it’s someone saying, “This part of the story is really important, and an unknown number of years later it still is.

Clearly, we’re not on the scene as the story takes place. Instead, the unseen narrator is reporting events from the comfort of their desk chair. Yes, you use first person pronouns, but is there really any difference between a narrator who isn’t on the scene reporting events in a voice whose emotion we can’t hear, and the same narrator pretending to have once been the protagonist, reporting events in a voice whose emotion we can’t hear? Neither of them are on the scene, and there’s no immediacy to the story because it’s a report.

As E. L. Doctorow observed, “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader, not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” In this, you're talking about things, not making the reader experience them. But the experience is what the reader comes for.

As we read this, we have no idea of where we are, whose skin we wear, or what’s going on. Instead, the narrator is providing sentence after sentence filled with generalities about things for which we have no context. So instead of the protagonist being our avatar, she’s the subject of YOUR exposition. Evocative and vivid prose is great in support of story. But where’s the story?

Why, as a reader, do I care if it was raining? Why do I care about air density? Why do I care how often the father came around, or what time it is? That's irrelevant to what's HAPPENING. Why do I care 99% of what’s talked about when I have no context to make it meaningful?

You’re going for poetic language and evocative descriptions. I get that/ But you provide a total of 798 words, or three full standard manuscript pages. And what happens that has meaning to the story? Someone named Jade, who could be male or female for most of the chapter, who lives in an unknown place with his/her mother, is present when his/her father drops off an unknown being that appears not to be human because it has fur (which appears to be common because the child reacts only to the eye color).

Three pages of an external narrator talking about the situation in general, flowery terms, and I don’t learn what’s going on, where we are, or anything meaningful. Three pages of prose to say:
- - - -
It was raining when my father unexpectedly stopped by the apartment to drop off baby Erk. I wasn’t certain of what to expect, but with a five year old’s curiosity I pulled back the blanking wrapping him to find myself looking into a pair of orange flecked yellow eyes set in a head of fuzzy navy blue fur.
- - - -
Fifty-eight words instead of 798. Surely you can jazz that up and make it interesting without a word salad filling three pages.

But that aside, why would a five year old, on seeing that his mother was holding a baby, automatically assume that it’s to be a brother? Five year olds don’t think that way.

You write well, and your imagery is vivid. That’s great. But you need to get your narrator off the stage and working in service of the needs of the protagonist, not talking in generalities. The goal isn’t to impress the reader with language, it’s to make them view the scene through persona of the protagonist. The reader doesn’t want to know what happens, they want to be made to live the scene in real-time.

After all the razzmatazz on this page, the reader expects the scene to continue Instead, the next chapter begins an unknown time later, in an unknown location, as this same invisible narrator reports things the reader should be made to live.

The short version—and I really wish there was an easier way to break such news—is that you’re trying to use the presentation methodology of verbal storytelling in a medium that reproduces neither sound nor vision. You’re transcribing your performance. But in a live performance, how you tell a story counts as much as what’s said. Take away the emotion in the performer’s voice; remove the changes in facial expression; drop the gestures used for visual punctuation; eliminate body-language, and what’s left? A report by a dispassionate voice that contains only the emotion dictated by punctuation.

Have the computer read this aloud (always a useful editing tool) to hear how different what a reader gets is from what you intended them to get.

You don’t hear the problem when you read because, unlike the reader, you can hear the nexessary emotion in the voice of the narrator—your voice.

Bottom line: During our school days, those years of writing reports and essays made us pretty good at writing reports. But all professions are learned IN ADDITION to our schooldays skills, and ours is a profession. So we literally leave our schooldays exactly as qualified to write fiction as to remove an appendix. Luckily for our friends, we know we need more training in medicine before picking up a scalpel.

The solution? Simple. Add the tools of the profession to the nonfiction skills you already own and you’re good to go. Unfortunately, simple and easy aren’t interchangeable words, but that’s true for the skills of any profession. All craft takes time and practice to perfect. Still, you’ll love the difference when the protagonist becomes your co writer, and, the fun of living the story as the protagonist as you write, rather than simply talking about the story.

The local library system’s fiction writing section can be a huge resource. My recommendation, though, is to pick up a personal copy of the best book on fiction-writing technique I’ve found to date: Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It's the book that got me my first contract. And if I can do it anyone can.

As I often suggest, you might dig around in the writing articles in my blog, which are meant to give an overview of the differences between fiction and nonfiction techniques.

But whatever you decide to do, hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

[Wathanya.5KY3]

Well, well, well. What have we got here? A prologue! I like how it provides a bit of backstory to Virgil's ghost-like existence as well as the start of Jade's and Erk's siblinghood.

I only have so long before the horrible symptoms of menstrual pain of a two-week-late period come back, so this is going to be even shorter than my short reviews.

I can see what you're doing with the first paragraph, but the second paragraph is more intriguing and relevant to me. But then again, I've read the story. Maybe get a pair of fresh eyes on it?

It's interesting how Jade noticed Erk's eyes and not his blue fur. I mean, I'm also someone who likes eyes, but it feels off to see Jade -- who, at the time, had never been exposed to the Kavals -- to not mention Erk's fur at all. Personally, I'd say something like, " 'Whoa!' I said, looking at his orange-tinted yellow eyes which were accentuated by his young blue fur."

On a side note, using different words to describe colors is something you can do to enhance the reading experience. For example, I like using sapphire instead of blue, amber instead of orange and/or yellow, and ruby instead of red. Yes, I love gemstones.

[JT Godin]

I think you're right about the first and second paragraphs. First I can do away with, second feels like a stronger start.

Mentioning his fur was something I considered, which in hindsight I should probably do, considering how out of the ordinary it is. I'm sure you notice after reading so much of Erk's POV with green eyed people that this is a glimpse of Jade feeling the same thing with Erk's eyes, so that's kind of where my mind was when I thought to leave mentioning the fur out. Bringing it up in a way like you suggested is easily workable though.

[Wathanya.5KY3]

Yes, I’ve noticed that Erk thinks green eyes are very foreign and triggering. That is the reason I thought adding the blue fur a side note adjacent rather than noticing that and only that fits the story and is appropriate.