As a beginning writer I feel a little sketchy about writing rules. Trying to figure them out and applying them to the stories I write is confusing. I'm often left with a feeling of.. 'uh did I do that right?'.
Here's an example. I wrote a short story that reaches it's crisis point and then doesn't immediately end (a more typical short story structure). Supposedly according to 'them' (those who shall not be named) readers will feel bored by the story going on too long if it reaches the climax and there is too much time for the denouement (final resolution or clarification of a dramatic or narrative plot). I'm kind of unclear on how much time that is. So here's a revision of a flash fiction piece I wrote awhile back and I'm still not sure about the ending. Feedback welcomed.
Also, I found this helpful to read about story arcs:
http://www.musik-therapie.at/PederHill/Structure&Plot.htm
That Which Lies Inside
By snott
I stared as the boys’ eyes twitched in perpetual motion, side to side, as he lay unresponsive. Beads of sweat rolled down his small heart-shaped face to the soft, thick black curls lying on his pillow. The seven year old had been climbing in trees, playing and laughing with friends at his birthday party when he fell, hitting his head. That was how the demon entered his body. Blood still slowly dripped from his ears.
His mothers’ tears fell on his sweat-covered chest as she mumbled desperate prayers.
I felt the doctor as he hovered over the boy. I heard the sound of air rushing into his lungs. I smelled the acidic tang of sweat and deodorant as it oozed out of his body. I could hear his fear in the stumbling pauses between words - the doctor could not challenge me. He was a confused, powerless servant. He could not stop me from feeding.
Unseen, I delicately ran my pointed, sulphuric tongue over the boys’ soul licking his life essence off of him. It was a gourmet rapture. Invisible to the humans, vaporous wisps of his life curled off the burn mark etched into his soul where I my tongue had touched him. I rolled his essence around my mouth, savoring the taste. The boys’ life energy was a delight – sweet, like the memories he had of fresh baked chocolate cookies.
Without warning the boys’ body began flailing in the bed - violently uncontrolled. The soft beeping of the monitors turned to shrill alarms. Splatters of blood smeared around his mouth as he bit on his tongue. The boys’ eyes rolled back in their sockets showing only white as I leaned over to put my weight on top of him, trying to hold him in place. After a desperate forever his body slumped vacantly. His eyes slid down and resumed their pendulum swing - side to side. The soft cadence of the monitors returned between one heartbeat and the next. His mothers’ prayers turned to sobs.
I looked at his chest over her shoulders. It moved up and down, a familiar counterpoint to the metronomic hideousness of his eyes.
There was nothing left to do but what needed to be done. I would make a hole into his skull to release pressure on his brain otherwise the pressure of the demon inside him would kill the boy. The evil spirits had to be let out - so said the Church scriptures. In a vaulted place in my heart I was unsure of the truth of the scriptures and I doubted what I had been taught.
I had been young, still in medical school when I had first found the Church. I had feared that I would not make it through medical school. Becoming a doctor had been the only thing that I had ever wanted in life but in medical school I was so frustrated and horrified by the stupid bureaucracy of medicine that ruled all while people. I was giving up hope that I could do anything, with my hands spending more time doing paperwork than touching patients. The Church had saved me, had taught me not to be afraid even in the face of horror – that there was evil in the world, ready to attack us. They had taught me of demons and the atrocities that they committed against humans, how they created pain and suffering in our bodies as they inhabited us. They had revealed the gods that could help us and taught me the how to give of sacrifices and prayers. I had stopped feeling weak and alone. I was given the strength and knowledge to help people for the Church, in the Church’s hospitals.
I looked at the boy; he had a faded stamp of a cartoon tiger on the back of a hand. My stomach ached, as I feared that my help would not be enough.
My eyes darted to the boys’ mother as she continued her prayers and I felt a wave of sadness for her break and tumble me. Her low voice was rough from crying. Her torso jerked back and forth as if she were unconsciously trying to push the demon out of her child. I watched her believe in the gods – entreat them, either out of anguish or true faith, I had no idea. I had no belief now after years of beliefs that had returned nothing. I had said my prayers, begged and pleaded with gods and yet some of my patients still died. Now I tried to have trust in my knowledge, the machines and pills I prescribed – the tools that I could control. The gods were a disappointing mystery.
I starred at the boys’ small, soft face and tried to see some way to help him. His heart rate was slowly increasing; a manifestation of the building evil in his skull or the swelling caused by the injury to his brain? Or were they were one and the same?
I unclenched my jaw and thought, “Get it over with.”
I yelled for aides to hold him as I prepared my tools – an iron blade to remove his hair, a stone borer to create the hole, water to bless the demon out and wash away the blood.
United, my helpers and I tied the boys’ arms and legs with leather straps to help keep him still. I motioned to them to hold him. His mother moaned and sobbed uncontrollably as she laid herself over his small body. Covered in bruises and splatters of blood he was a broken wish. Her grief and the beeping of the heart monitor provided the music of our ceremony.
Looking around the bed, reassured by my aides readiness, I started chanting my benedictions. The room became hot around us as I initiated the rite and I felt sweat merge with the ritual paint I had smeared on my forehead and cheeks. I began with the knife cutting away the soft, shiny black ringlets of his hair, then came the fall of blessed water running down his skull to be soaked up by the starched white sheets, last came the borer - sharpened bone that I twisted into his skull as I dripped oily black paint into the growing pool of bright red blood that formed around his head.
The doctors’ prayers rained on me, made invincible by the boys’ mother. Her belief in the gods was powerful, incontrovertible and I could not fight their power. The prayers ate into my being like water washing away dust. I screamed an empty screech of pain. I was disintegrating, impotent against the words. My hands clenched in the boys’ soul were eaten away by the contagion of blessings. I felt my power to hold onto the boy fade away and I drifted off of him, defeated. I drifted away as I hoped to find another human to latch onto, so that I could taste the flavor of life again.
I made the hole as big as my small finger would fit into. Blood sluggishly leaked out as I finished. During the whole procedure the only part of him that had moved were his eyes. I saw no sign of a demon.
‘Will he live?’ his terrified mother cried at me after we finished. In her eyes I saw a fire fueled by frantic belief, its’ judgment reached out to scorch me in my secret faithless heart.
‘I.. I don’t know. We have to wait.’ I motioned to the aides to clean up and clutched the boys’ chart to my robe-covered chest as I hurried out of the hospital room. His mothers’ eyes followed me as the beeps of the monitor echoed down the hall.
I had nothing to give his mother to assuage her fear. My belief in our medicine was too weak to tell her promises and too strong not to secretly hope.
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