(If you'd like to read the story this feedback refers to, namely, "Fool's Goldfish", then please click on this link: This is a link to "Fool's Goldfish".
''Fool's Goldfish'' by Matt McHugh - WHAT
THE JUDGE(S) LIKED ABOUT YOUR SCRIPT - ......Even though there were so many
larger words in the opening paragraph I almost got lost (I'd suggest fewer
large words; there's just too many in that opening), I LOVED Malcolm's voice
and thought it was well-developed. I also like that the writer has given us a
very clear picture of Malcolm's personality right in the opening--and that he's
likable. Your "lovable geek" so to speak. Very nice work on this. I
also like the pithy dialogue.............Malcolm's infatuation with Sally
strikes a humorous tone and plays well within the storyline. Their search for
the missing goldfish is a sort of representation for their
dynamic..........................................................
WHAT THE JUDGES FEEL NEEDS WORK - ......I was
confused about what kind of fish was lost, because we were never told that he
was in a bowl and somehow made it into the koi pond? (By the way,
"koi" is the correct spelling). And I also didn't understand the pond
WAS a koi pond until the end, so I'd suggest that somewhere up front we get a
much more clear explanation of the fish was in a bowl, and now he's lost, and
why Malcolm would believe the fish made it from the bowl to the pond. I just
really didn't understand that. In addition, how old IS Malcolm? I'm assuming
he's a teenager, so I'd also establish this--when he's referencing his gran's
fish, I thought he was maybe 10, but using all of that upper-end language just
isn't likely for a 10-year-old (if he's a genius, then establish that). I'd
also suggest adding dialogue tags or stage business during the conversation
with Sally--the back and forth was difficult to follow.............The overall
storyline could use some more action/interesting events. While the main events
of them searching for the goldfish has a distinct thematic value, try adding
layers of complexity............................…........................
Hey, everyone, check out my most-recent failure! I wrote this for the 24-hour Short-Story contest from Writers Weekly.
First, the prompt: She was
standing on the porch of a sagging cabin with bright yellow leaves collecting
around her feet. As the cold wind billowed her skit, she shivered and wondered
if the owner of the purse really lived here. She knocked timidly and the door
quickly opened, revealing a tiny girl holding a hideous, bald doll…
Now,
the entry that lost if for me:
Home
The tiny girl held a hideous, bald figurine. It looked like a cancer-ridden Kewpie doll - something for very sick children. Not to inspire in them the will to live. Something to comfort them as they accepted the alternative.
The girl's arsenal of teeth was spotty - her mouth looked like the dental version of the porch on which she stood.
"Come in," I was certain I'd heard her command, as she turned and walked down the hall.
I looked around. All I saw were bare white birch trees, a carpet of bright yellow and orange leaves, and the wind intermixing the two. The path I'd arrived on seemed more faded by the moment.
As I crossed the threshold of the decaying cabin, I was immersed in feelings I'd last felt at six, frozen in bed in my darkened room, convinced any movement would guarantee my imminent demise at the hands of the murderous spirits whose presence I felt just beyond the mattress's edge.
Surprised to be the more scared of the two of us, I followed the girl around a corner, past a sliding glass door that revealed an enclosed porch, and into a kitchen that reeked of damp cigar smoke and rotting wood - strangely, because the room seemed neither damp nor rotting. It looked old and used, but sturdy and neat.
"This is him," the little girl said, pointing at the ground where she stood on the other side of the counter. Ice-cold fear shot up my back and down my arms as I approached her.
Lying there, eyes open, hand in mid-grasp, was a corpse. I almost screamed, but it would have been so incongruous with the girl's demeanor that I tamped it down into rapid breaths.
The man was skinny, before death. He wore no shirt - only overalls. He looked to be in his 40s, and maybe five days' dead, I thought, though I know not what experience I drew from.
His right hand reached toward me as if his last wish had been to grasp something in my direction. I tried to imagine what, and all I could picture was a mischievous hovering sphere - something like the snitch from Harry Potter - staying just out of the man's reach.
"I think we should go," I said, acknowledging the feeling that any of a hundred different things would jump out of the shadows, despite the fact it was a gray day of the type that fosters none - the kind in which everything seems to be illuminated by a diffuse, depressing fog of light.
"He said to stay," said the girl.
"When?" I heard myself ask, though I immediately felt that wasn't the line of questioning I wished to pursue.
"Just before he passed," she said, her voice dropping with each syllable, until it was an echoing, sonorous bellow. She seemed to expand imperceptibly, like a marshmallow in a microwave. I couldn't focus on both her and her surroundings, so I wasn't sure if she was growing or my eyes were readjusting, until suddenly she towered over me, a six-foot-tall mass of black shadow and yellow eyes.
"He said to never leave."
Again - the terror I'd felt as a child, my bed a lone raft adrift atop a black sea of sadistic death. The same terror I'd known in dreams when I'd scream for help but no words would come. When I'd try to run but realize I was completely paralyzed.
Then I felt my feet take me away. I expected the creature would overpower me at once, but it remained, watching. I was exiting the kitchen, the beast, in my eyes, shrinking in size as it stood there.
I turned just in time to feel the pane of glass that was the sliding glass door ram my nose down what felt like my throat.
I awoke later facing a strange ceiling. As before, my body moved before my mind could paralyze it. I lifted my head before the fear inspired by that black mass fully returned, and I saw that the coast to the door was clear.
Half my mind wondered if the man was still behind the counter. I didn't sense the creature there, but neither could I make myself look. I put out my hand, got to my feet, and began walking toward the door. Immediately, I was running. Expecting anything. Expecting nothing. I was simply where I was. Totally and fully:
Running out the door. Avoiding the protruding knot in the fallen branch. Speeding by the procession of leafless trees, over and down the hill. I dared not look back, too afraid my luck would change. I thought of Sodom and Gomorrah and salt and Lot's wife - the sound of those words in my head as I ran. I ran until I was on asphalt again. Until I saw my car.
I got behind the wheel. I turned the ignition. And I drove.
I drove until I saw cars - modern, sensical cars. And people driving them. Real, live people. I drove until I saw traffic lights and restaurants and pedestrians. I drove past the exit for my house. I drove past the city limits. I drove until I was in front of my parents' house. I wanted to go inside, as I had ten thousand times before. I wanted to turn off the alarm and pet my dog and go up to my room and just lie there. But I couldn't. My parents weren't here anymore. My parents weren't anymore.
Round 2 of this competition. I'm somewhere between fifteenth place and last. (When you get down that low, you're basically all tied for last, so no one gets any points.)
My assignment, if I chose to accept it (I chose to):
Genre: Comedy
Location: A greenhouse
Object: A goldfish
Maximum number of words: 1,000 (mine's 993)
Maximum time allowed to write: 48 hours.
Fool's Goldfish
Sometimes I sit. Sometimes I think. Rarely do I do both simultaneously. This is more due to ability than preference. I can’t think if I have nothing to distract me. This is to say, if I sit down and concentrate on something, my mind manufactures its won distractions. Conversely, if I struggle to follow the traces of the tail of an idea, dodging obstacular thoughts and detour-inducing envisionments, the detritus of half-conceived ruminations, aborted foetal thoughts, abandoned ponderances, and discarded musings, the challenge of following that contemplation trail to the end is often enough motivation to reveal some real revelation.
Right now, I’m sitting.
That’s why I’m making little (OK, no) progress on the mystery – the mystery of the missing fish. Where does a fish go? My grandma says that all fish go to heaven – she’s a Pescaterian – but, I mean, I can’t even find a body. Where does a fish go? It has to be somewhere in the pond – doesn’t it?
Well, if I don’t find him before grandma gets back, she’ll send me to heaven. Or wherever God sends negligent fish homiciders.
But I’m not even sure he’s dead. But what else could it be? Harry jumped in his Geo Supermarine and took off for Marseilles?
I stand up and take what must be my tenth lap around the greenhouse. Three-quarters of the way through, I see Sally come by again. And, as usual, I’m struck by the feeling that I have no idea what enables her gluteus maximus to carry itself with such a regal bearing. I’ve heard women’s bodies described as defying gravity, but Sally’s also defies anatomy and structural engineering. What reproduction pressures could have selected for her rump to possess such divine deportment?
As usual, I thank and curse God for his rear-end work on this particular model.
Strolling along in the transfenestral light of the afternoon sun, I already feel dangerously somnolent. Catching sight of Sally makes me light-headed.
“Sally,” I venture.
“Hey, Malcolm,” she says, awaiting more. Or not.
I smile until she turns away.
“Do you…?”
“Yes?” she turns back. The sun filters through her nectarine-red hair and makes her eyes glow like liquid oxygen, the tittular freckles dusted on her smooth, pale face like candy crystals on God’s favorite red-velvet cupcake.
I can’t help but think that, even though a million of those freckles on my tongue would never fill me up, one would be all I’d ever need.
“Malcolm?” she asks again. Now she’s right in front of me. You got to watch these pretty ones. They have powers.
“I can’t find my gran’s fish.”
“Have you checked the pond?”
I just stare at her.
“He’s not in the pond,” she asks?
I shake my head.
“Well, then where could he be?” she asks, catching up.
I shrug.
“Well, what do we do?” she asks.
I like that, though I have no answer.
“What could have happened?” she asks. “A cat came in and stole him?”
“Maybe. But what cat? And how’d it get in? And how’d it get out?”
“I don’t know. What else is there? It emigrated to the Atlantic?”
“OK, what would you do if you were a fish?” I ask.
“Nothing. That’s why I’m stumped.”
“What would you like to do?”
“I don’t know – maybe go visit another pond? I might get lonely here all by myself.”
“But how would you leave? On your bicycle?”
“Oh my gosh – Gloria Steinam was right!”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
“So…?”
“Well, there’s that tube, right there,” she says, pointing to a tube that’s right there.
“But that’s for incoming water,” I say. “You think it swam up against the current to freedom in the water tower? It’s a goldfish, not a salmon.”
“Have you ever noticed that, when they start swimming against the current, salmon seem in a rush to die?”
“Like someone who’d write The Satanic Verses?”
“Aww, come on – you give Khomeini too much credit.”
“You give Muslims too little – look at what they did on 9/11. On 26/11.”
“Those guys were about as Muslim as the crusaders were Catholic.”
“Yeah, OK, but I give murderous sycophants appropriate credit.”
“Well, you shouldn’t – the dude who planned to kill Rusdie blew himself up hanging out in his hotel room.”
“Well, maybe he was repenting.”
“I guess we’ll never know.”
“Anyway, this fish needs to get found. The pump was down last night. Do you want to pursue the out-of-greenhouse theory or not?”
“Where’s this tube come from?”
“The coy pond in the garden.”
“Oh, God,” I say.
“Allah,” she offers.
“Brahman,” I counter, and we lose interest as we exit the greenhouse, and run to the coy pond.
She stands over the pond, shaking her head.
“He wouldn’t last a minute in here,” she says.
“I’m dead. He’s dead, and now I’m dead.”
“Wait – what’s that?” she says.
She reaches for a leaf that covers half of the tube that sends water into the greenhouse pond. Behind it is a miniature version of the behemoth fish boredly floating around above it.
“Grab him!” she says.
“I need a net! Protect him!” I say as I run away.
“They’re coming to me! They think I’m going to feed him!”
“Distract them!” I say as I run into the greenhouse.
I’m back with the net and I see her on the other side of the pond, tossing pieces of crushed leaf onto the water, surrounded by progressively less-interested coy.
I sweep the net down near Harry, flicking my wrist to pull some water back toward it, and then scoop.
Up comes the net, and in it is a tiny, shining fish.
I go back inside, putting Harry safely in a glass of water.
“Don’t drink that,” I say, my hand on the counter.
She smiles and exhales relief. Then, she collapses into my chest.
Hey, kids - even gotten back an English paper in which you were told you incorrectly identified a symbol? Thought the pickle jar in Ethan Frome was just a pickle jar? Missed four of the twenty Christ-images in whichever Victorian novel you've just read? Didn't realize Alice was bi-curious when she went down that rabbit hole? Ha. I envy your naivete...
Well, now's your chance to talk to determine the symbolism for yourself! You've probably read "A Literary Life" in your AP English classes. Now, avail yourself of the opportunity to actually determine what symbolizes what! In the comments section for this post, please tell me what you'd like something "A Literary Life" to symbolize.
For example:
1.) I think Moishele should represent Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
2.) North Samarsheffieldchestershire = Babylon
3.) The adverb "spontaneously" in the phrase "one of the books spontaneously shook" is used to symbolize the uneasy balance between the modern Western woman's quest for self-determination and her primordial need to play the role of birth-mother-goddess-queen.
The best answers for each word will be chosen as the official representation of that word in this story. All other answers will be wrong. It will be indisputable!
Knock yourselves out!
(Also, anyone who finds run-on sentences in A Literary Life gets an honorable mention here. Please alert me to them in one of the "comments" sections.)
