By Bobby Warner
The street was nice, with clean sidewalks, cozy houses, abundant trees and shrubbery, and dim lights where families watched TV.
It was like the street where he grew up. Only his parents were not like others: after lights out, they insisted he do things to them with his mouth and hands. Waiting for whispered voices, he would watch the streetlamps flicker from his bedroom window.
Parking beneath the umbrage of a leafy oak, he moved swiftly through the shadows, placing small packets at the foundations of each house.
Driving away, he pressed the remote and waited for the street to erupt.
A dark one from Mr. Warner – I like it 🙂
The molestation part could use a bit of subtlety, no need to smash the reader in the face. I could understand him destroying his childhood home, but without any precedent, destroying other houses not even in his old neighborhood didn’t make sense to me.
My two major difficulties with this are:
No transition from the Waiting line to the Parking line.
No development of his deteriorating mental state.
The fist para doesn’t have much meaning to the story except for atmosphere. I think the word count there could better be used to develop my two difficulties with the story.
Seems like that is the point, that people who are deranged for whatever reason don’t act in ways that make sense to ‘sane’ people. Well done, Bobby.
Thanks to all who posted comments. I appreciate your feedback. A thousand thanks!
I think the story is perfect as it is. Victims of abuse jump from one thought to the next; it’s a survival skill. It may not make sense to a “sane” person. The narrator does a great job. It slso shows how it makes sense to the character to blow up a street “like his.”