The colossal wave loomed in the background; a cascading wall, floating on water, moving toward shore. Its own beast, it took time, gaining energy and force for its descent.
She squinted against the setting sun, which was casting orange across the deserted beach.
All had run. She didn’t. She knew it was inevitable. This was the first of many, so running would be a waste of precious time and she didn’t want to spend the last moments of her life sweaty. If this was the end, she wanted it to be here.
As the strong wind played in her hair, she lifted her arms and let her dress toss violently in the breeze. If she jumped, would she be carried away?
The wave was now closer, bigger.
Her carefully painted fingers gently pulled down her white sunglasses to cover her eyes from the blowing sand. A plastic kid’s shovel hit her leg.
She grabbed it, knelt down, and etched large rectangles into the sand. There were four, side by side. She tossed the shovel and crawled from space to space, writing in each box.
“Mom” — “Dad” — “J.P.”
She lay in the last one. The wave not far.
If no one was going to survive, she wanted to spend her last moments pretending as if everything were normal, with the ones she loved.
As she stared at the growing wave closing in, blocking out the dazzling sun, she wondered if she had decided too soon.
The thrashing water reminded her of her mother’s light blue dress, the last one she would ever see her wear. The wind carried her mother’s perfume and voice.
She could again hear her mother ask if she wanted to run with them, to a safe place. She didn’t have to stay here. It would be like a family vacation, only not coming back for a very long time.
She told her mother she didn’t want to go. She would continue to run the family business here, so when they did come back, there would be something to come back to.
Now there would be nothing.
The water played at her toes and the roaring of the wave wasn’t horrifying, but musical. An orchestra of low bass and tympani followed the beating rhythm of her heart, as if her acceptance of what was coming had granted her her own private, grand funeral, complete with fresh air, sun on her face, and dignity. There were no heavens above, only the scattering of stars and between them, vast emptiness. Somewhere up there was her family.
Off in the distance, seagulls squawked. They circled above and around the boardwalk she played on every day as a child, which was not that long ago. To her left she saw the colorful Ferris wheel, where she had her first kiss with her first love, who was probably running with the rest of them.
She buried her hands in the sand, the same soft, white sand she had built so many castles with. Never was there a more comfortable resting place.
Droplets fell on her face. Looking up, she observed they weren’t from rain, but from the looming wave, hovering momentarily, almost asking if she were ready.
Taking off her sunglasses she took a deep breath in, filling her lungs with her mother’s perfume.
She was ready.
Andy Leigh de Fonseca enjoys many things, but cannot afford most. Writing is inexpensive.
GD Star Rating
loading...
loading...
Did you like this story?
A new and interesting story is posted every day.
A new and interesting story is posted every day.
Subscribe to the RSS Feed! (what is rss)
Don’t miss another story! Subscribe to Every Day Fiction via RSS.- Share on Facebook
26 Responses to “SURVIVAL • by Andy Leigh de Fonseca”
Comments
« CIRCUS • by Jason Michelsen | Home | FLAME • by Andrew Waters »
January 29th, 2012 at 1:53 am
I’m sorry, but this is so clunky with jarring grammar etc. that it just fell apart for me – and then, after all that clunky build up, it did nothing with it (nothing happens; it’s just trying to push a mood, but the slapstick stopped that working).
Here are some examples:-
- “She squinted against the setting sun, which was casting orange across the deserted beach”. Casting orange what? Or is “orange” the noun, and if so why isn’t it “the orange”, “the oranges”, “an orange”, “oranges”, or whatever? (Not that that would make much sense, so it wouldn’t clear away the jarring.)
- “A plastic kid’s shovel hit her leg”. Why would a plastic kid have a shovel anyway? It certainly means something very different from “A kid’s plastic shovel hit her leg”.
- “She laid in the last one”. Laid what?
- “The wave not far”. This is from the “me Tarzan, you Jane” school. That school is perfectly good grammar – in Arabic (and even there, only for a positive, not for a negative).
It is quite possible that I missed something, but I had already been brought low by the relentless downpour of just these.
January 29th, 2012 at 3:28 am
I like the phrase “asking if she was ready”.
I was a bit thrown by the paragraph about the family asking if she wanted to go with them.
entertaining. thank you.
January 29th, 2012 at 3:48 am
The grammar distracted me, and I’m still waiting for the point so, sorry, but this one’s not doing it for me.
January 29th, 2012 at 4:19 am
This is a rather passive story, since the decision has already been made and we’re simply waiting for the end to arrive. That’s not a bad thing in itself, but the style made me feel like it was a series of facts being reported to me rather than a dynamic scene allowing me to be there, living and feeling it, with her. I didn’t get to know her well enough to make an emotional connection.
And as others have said, some unfortunate word choices and constructions didn’t do the piece any favours. That said, I really liked how the wave almost became a character in its own right, giving a nice sense of the impersonal, implacable power of nature.
January 29th, 2012 at 4:43 am
I liked it.
January 29th, 2012 at 6:25 am
Definitely in need of a further edit.
I enjoyed the intrigue as to whether the wave was a localised tsunami or an end-of-the-world catastrophe.
January 29th, 2012 at 6:32 am
I like the suspense. That hiatus where she wonders if she ‘decided too soon’. The pause as droplets fall-making it inevitable, yet waiting as if offering a reprieve and the peace of the personal funeral moment with its total acceptance. Nicely done.
January 29th, 2012 at 6:38 am
I must agree with Mr. Freeman. Too many unanswered questions.
January 29th, 2012 at 7:32 am
Despite the errors in grammar, I enjoyed it. Interesting to read someone’s idea of facing inevitable death.
January 29th, 2012 at 9:25 am
the first paragraph was exceptional: “floating on water, moving toward shore.” i think i’ll carry that image whenever i go to the beach.
i could have used more back story with less mystery to it nonetheless your story created a mood of impending doom that i got caught up in.
January 29th, 2012 at 11:14 am
This story didn’t do it for me at all. For once, I agree completely with #1, P.M. Lawrence.
January 29th, 2012 at 11:36 am
Typo “laid” corrected to “lay”.
January 29th, 2012 at 11:53 am
I feel the story made perfect since. It was meant to go through her emotions, so that the audience can feel what she is feeling also getting the mental picture of what she is seeing. It ended on a perfect note. If it was to go anywhere else such as the disaster itself, it would take away the whole meaning of the story. The story is not to describe the disaster. That’s a whole different chapter. We’re being focused on a woman who’s through running and is ready to accept her fate. It’s brilliant!
January 29th, 2012 at 12:43 pm
Hey Andy!
There are no rules that say you have to fill the reader in on every detail. The lack of background details is what I liked most about this story. And sometimes, the best stories dismiss the need for a finite beginning or end. It’s a moment.. and our lives are merely made of that, a bunch of moments.
—
There are some things that could be slightly altered like, “She laid in the last one.”
Try something along the lines of, “She laid down in the remaining sand-drawn rectangle.”
—
Her random, pleasant memories of life near the ferris wheel and remembering her love is nice to think that’s what we all could be thinking about right before death.
I feel strongly that you should end it with, “…filling her lungs with her mother’s perfume.”
Great stuff, girlfriend.
) Keep on writing!
January 29th, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Good story; I can almost feel the water coming at me! Very good descriptions of her feelings at that moment, how she is thinking of her family and mother. But she’s almost too calm, waiting for death. Makes me anxious for her, as I’d want it over with much faster; just waiting for the wave to drop down heavily!
January 29th, 2012 at 3:01 pm
The ache of this story has settled into my bones. Very well done. Thank you.
January 29th, 2012 at 3:13 pm
An enjoyable story. Thank you
January 29th, 2012 at 4:41 pm
I really enjoyed it. The language used was for effect, and I liked the effect.
January 30th, 2012 at 2:59 am
The language used was intended for effect, and I might have liked the effect if it had worked. Only, on me, it came over as slapstick or just clumsy. Just to use the first example I gave, “casting orange” suggested that the sun was throwing oranges – slapstick. Since the stumbling blocks kept on coming on, the piece never managed to pull itself together.
January 30th, 2012 at 5:15 am
Being fatalistic myself and a true fan of tragedy, I could have enjoyed this story a great deal more if it had gone through a merciless third-party edit. The plastic kid’s shovel almost stopped me; I’m glad it didn’t because this story has a lot to offer underneath some strange grammatical gymnastics.
I’m glad someone corrected the “laid” and “lay” issue before I got there, that definitely would have stopped me in mid-read.
January 30th, 2012 at 11:27 am
I won’t beat a dead horse over the language issues that have been sufficiently pointed out by the previous posters.
Absolutely, some additional editing would have helped, and I have to agree that overall there were many more questions raised than answered, but I did really like the ending “are you ready?” pause. That was a very captivating image.
January 30th, 2012 at 2:19 pm
@ PM Lawrence, I think that even a simpleton could discern that “casting orange” is a reference to the effect the sun has on the beach. Why you would think she is talking about a fruit I will never understand. While it may be technically an error, as long as you can follow the dots in understanding what she meant, it isn’t as problematic as you would make it seem.
January 30th, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Sigh.
Ivy, you are completely missing my point. I am no simpleton, and I did not for one moment make the mistake of thinking that the sun was throwing oranges. No, it was something far worse than that.
Do you know how, say, dirty jokes work, i.e. produce their effect, as opposed to just using bad language to someone? Instead of the idea coming in from outside, as it were, it makes the hearer create the idea inside. This gets past mental buffering – a censor – and bursts out, tickling the sense of humour.
Here, the author was trying to produce one kind of effect inside people’s heads, by the use of language. But the effect I – and clearly some others – received was of a feeble joke. This has nothing to do with whether or not I understood what was really meant, any more than explaining a joke can make someone laugh. So the language failed in what it was attempting just there, and the piece never came round because it kept tripping over like that every so often. All this is very important because this piece is about emotional effects in readers, not about something actually happening (compare and contrast the telling of the story of a tidal wave actually arriving in Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer – and see a recent xkcd cartoon if you want to claim that that wasn’t really a tidal wave but a tsunami).
Sometimes, even a master stylist can fail that way, as happens at one point in Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson because the English language has changed since he wrote it: he writes “plastic lips”, which meant something else then.
February 2nd, 2012 at 8:08 am
Self-indulgent overdescriptive nonsense. Next.
February 2nd, 2012 at 6:22 pm
A powerful moment. Great descriptions made me feel like I was there. Nice work, Andy.
February 2nd, 2012 at 9:02 pm
I like this story. It remind me of something I wrote years ago, but not as well because I was just learning English. I think you have great grasp of English language. Grammar will improve as you continue to learn the language, it did for me!