Prologue

  

Prologue

 

Arnina dragged her feet along the broken sidewalk. She had just gotten out of school and hated the long walk home. “What a day,” she thought. “I thought I would die in science for sure!” But her spirits rose when she felt the warm sun on her. She took off her jacket loving the mid-October weather.

 

Her phone buzzed in her backpack, she stopped to look for it. Finding it under the load of text books, she saw that her best friend Ollie had texted her.

 

“Waz up?”  he said.

 

“NM…just walkin home” she responded.

 

“K tell me when u get home.” he said.

 

 

When she was about to respond her converse hit a hole in the sidewalk and her phone went flying. She picked herself off of the ground, to see not only her black skinny jeans ripped but her phone five feet away with a giant crack. “Oh crap!!!” she yelled, and pressed all the buttons to confirm that it was dead. “My mom is going to kill me…maybe if I say someone stole it, I don’t know!” she thought and shoved it back into her backpack.

 

She kept walking wishing she lived closer to her home. She planned on asking her mother about buying her a car again, but remembered her phone and decided against it. She knew that she would be grounded the second she told her parents about breaking her phone.

 

As she passed by the familiar houses she saw something out of the corner of her eye, and quickly turned. She scanned the streets and saw nothing and proceeded to walk.

 

        With each step she felt more panicked. Her pace increased as the seconds passed and she couldn’t shake the strange feeling. Now only a few blocks from her house she was sure that she was being followed. The now cold air burned her arms as she tried to run to safety.

 

But she was too late. Large arms grabbed her from behind. This made her mind go into a frenzy, and she couldn’t even think to struggle. A hand clamped itself over her mouth covering half of her face. The taste hit her first. It was all consuming and rotten. Then came the smell, it was a mixture of chemicals and an acidic stench. This combination seeped into her body and made her guts churn. But all thoughts ceased when she was pulled into an uncontrollable darkness. 

 

        When she woke up, her head was pounding. She didn’t know what was going on. She felt cold all around her and forced her sticky eyes open. When she opened them she wished that she hadn’t. She was surrounded by ice and darkness.

Author's Note

please tell me what you think!

Reviews

[James Watts]

Alana and the perfectionist took of most pretty much nailed it. Only thing they missed was the following: (“Oh crap!!!” Never use multiple exclamations or question marks outside of embedded items such as emails or letters etc. Same goes for using ?! together. It's one or the other but never both. As with the example above, use only one !)

[RosalieEmorosa]

Ive been looking for a great story. This seems interesting Im defiantly gonna keep readign :)

[Coyote Poetry]

A powerful lead into the story. I will read on.
Coyote

[Darruesh Eetraydes]

This is interesting. I can't wait to see why she got snatched

[Daydreamer54]

Wow this seems to gonna be a good story!

[The Perfectionist]

Alana was pretty thorough, but as harsh as she was, there was plenty she missed here. It scares me a little that there are this many mistakes in something that is only five paragraphs long.

Your sentence structure is a problem throughout. You use commas occasionally, but for the most part you could have a lot more compound sentences than you do. For example, the first two sentences could probably be joined together as "The air was surprisingly warm on this mid-October day as Arnina Martin walked home from her high school, only a mile away from her house."

There are a few spelling mistakes here and there. I have listed a couple below. My correction is in all caps.

"Enjoying the weather, she took OFF her jacket"
"Large arms GRABBED her from behind."

It's not often I get the chance to pick on someone for the story not making sense, so I'm going to jump on the opportunity now. First of all, a cracked screen does not equal a broken phone. I cracked the screen of my phone by closing a door on it and it still worked fine for the next year. Also, unless it was the world's heaviest phone, I don't think it could make a deafening thud - or any thud at all, really - landing on concrete.

I have a few more things I could complain about, so I will. I consider it a victory if my review is longer than the piece was, and this is heading that way. A lot of your writing is grammatically passable, but not readable. For example, the sentence:

"Landing with a deafening thud on the concrete, this brought alarm to Arnina."

The fragment at the end just doesn't make any sense. It feels tacked on and from a different perspective than the rest of the sentence. It would be perhaps better phrased as:

"It landed with a deafening thud on the concrete, bringing alarm to Arnina."

I still wouldn't phrase it that way, but you get the idea. Now that we're done with the first two paragraphs, let's move on.

"She felt oddly panicked"

What? Where did this come from? You try to explain it away in the next sentence, but that doesn't change that you dropped this out of nowhere, but act as if we should have seen it coming. At the very least, give the reader a break and include the word "suddenly" at the beginning. At least that gives the impression that it was, in fact, out of nowhere.

"The air now cold chilled her arms and she began to run"

I'm not sure whether this is an English failure or a grammatical one. Either way, this sentence stinks. Add commas around 'now cold' and it'll function though.

As another blanket statement, you fall into several amateur writing traps. You should never begin a sentence with 'But' (or 'And' for that matter) unless it's someone speaking, because generally you can make that a compound sentence. For the same reason, you should also try to avoid starting sentences with 'Then', but this one isn't so bad.

This is a very rough prologue all around, as you can see, and it's not helped by the fact that Arnina is not exactly a sympathetic character. All we know about her is that she likes Lady Gaga, she has a best friend named Ollie, she goes to high school, and she is heartbroken when her phone breaks. None of these qualities make me want to like her (in fact, the Lady Gaga thing makes me hope something really unpleasant happens to her in the next chapters).

I'll read on, but I don't have high hopes. This piece could have been twice this long, and you're writing something that might pass as a scary story - or at least a thriller - which needs pacing. So far, you have none of that.

[Rhonda]

amazing! this was great!

[Sarah Grace]

Well, it was a little choppy, and the story moved
really quickly, but if it's going to be short than I guess it's ok. But you really need to work on your flow; without the comma in the right place it just sounds wrong. I know it's sometimes harder to see run-ons and such in your own writing, though.

[Tina Kline]

Great first chapter. It got my interest for sure.

[Demetria.Ro$e.Hathaway]

Amazing Prologue
i enjoyed this :)
Your Friend Demi