I enjoyed the first half of the story a lot but got confused once it switched to Dr. Ruth Silverstein's perspective. The two possible scenarios I see are as follows:
1. The two halves of the story occur at different times and Rich has a drastic change in personality.
2. The two halves of the story occur at the same time and are just showing the different perspectives.
If you were going for the first one, it isn't very clear. You don't really give a time frame or a reason behind the sudden personality switch beyond that Rich is crazy. If you were going for the second one, however, there are zero similarities between the two perspectives. If #2 was your goal, I think you would be better served to write the same (or at least decently similar) conversation on the outside with the individual character's inner thoughts revealing how differently things are being interpreted. I really felt as if you were setting that up well in the first half of the story because Rich was clearly misinterpreting innocuous words and gestures from Dr. Ruth.
Usually I have a problem with a conversation that doesn't have any speaker attributions, however it was easy to understand who was saying what in the second half.
As if a movie director had suddenly changed a character's personality, without telling the other actors.
I loved this simile, I thought it perfectly captured the feeling of suddenness and confusion that Rich would have.
believing his life with the other person was 'real', when, ZAP!, the other's words or actions would rip through his guts like the kick of a mule!
I don't think "ZAP" fits well here, especially since that's not the sound a mule kick would make.
It also might be better to not have both character's name's start with R.
I really like your work, T. D. Roberts. Just the segment you chose to write about this story is perfect. It doesn't describe before, and it doesn't describe after, but in this segment it gives you a great idea of both. Putting it in paragraph form would have made it easier to read, but besides formatting suggestions I can't find anything wrong with this piece. I absolutely love it.
-JB
I really liked this piece! Peter is such a vivid, likable character to me and his inner thoughts seem very genuine and natural. Your description of Peter's father and Elliot's description of Darcy's hair were fantastic. You were able, in just a few words, perfectly convey those ideas. I did have two problems with it:
1: Based on the language I'm not sure that an 'E' is the appropriate rating for it
2: The use of the italicized paragraphs didn't seem consistent to me, and so I think I missed their meaning.
I think my favorite thing about this short story is how you use Peter's guilt to make the reader think he had an active part in Elliot's death. In the end, it almost seems like a happy ending to find out Peter's true role though. Great work!
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