By T. Davis
He finds me first. I shift away from the hatch and he hunches down beside me. Bits of dirt fall from the low ceiling with every footstep above. It’s cold and damp. “They won’t find the door,” he whispers.
The dirt has settled when he says, “Should we go check?”
“Maybe we should wait,” I say.
“If we’re going to go, it has to be now.”
The General waits at the top of the stairs. “Good work, Lieutenant.”
The General’s men grab him. He is silent. “It’s all there,” says the General. My stomach turns, the envelope heavy in my hands.
I don’t understand what is happening in your story. I do like how you’ve created a “feeling” in your second and third sentence. The story does not work for me. Sorry.
The way I see it, the protagonist and his friend are members of the resistance in a country that is under authoritarian rule. They are hiding from the General underground, waiting for the soldiers to leave. However, our protagonist was actually working for the General all along and ended up betraying his friend from the resistance. The story nicely shows the protagonist having second thoughts (“Maybe we should wait”) and feeling some remorse after the betrayal (” My stomach turns, the envelope heavy in my hands.”).
I’m with Joy on this – the confusion of characters and their relationship to each other is not in the least made clear here. There are half a dozen reasons why the mc should want to wait or have their stomach turn, not least in being afraid of discovery and terrified when it happens, especially with a top secret delivery envelope in hand – if that’s what it is.
Main problem – failure to identify characters. There is no indication of a supposed mole being a lieutenant – that character just appears.
Perry, we will have to agree to disagree on this. It is pretty clear to me from “It’s all there” that there is money in the envelope and that the main character’s stomach turns because he betrayed his friend. There was indication in the story that the main characters was trying to prevent his friend from leaving, and the ending clarifies why — because he knew the General’s men would be there, waiting. Also, the lieutenant *is* the main character; that’s how the General addresses him, which further clarifies the main character’s role as a mole.
LOL – yeah – disagree if you want, but I’m the reader. You, as writer, know the whole of the story from its inception. Readers don’t, which is why we have to tell them. It is a common fault of us all that we sometimes forget to put half the story down in assumption of what we regard as obvious … because we wrote it. “Reader” does not mean mind-reader. Be aware of that. And hey – I do it myself at times – it’s easy to slip into the story when writing it and forget the reader isn’t in there with you.
You seem to think I am the writer of this piece, but I assure you I am not. I’m just a reader, like you. To me, the narrative is pretty clear, but I admit I did have to read it through 2-3 times to get what was going on. It hinges on certain details (what I wrote above) probably more than most flash, but overall I thought it was good.
Ah yes, – mea culpa, SP, but an understandable assumption, since it is up to the writer to respond to feedback, not another reader in a fit of presumption.