Chapter 1
Hello everyone! I would greatly appreciate any and all feedback of my short story. These paragraphs do NOT connect; they are disjointed and are my attempt at gothic/strong imagery. Please treat each paragraph individually. I'm a beginner writer so please be kind! Or be ruthless, I don't mind. Feedback will be reciprocated.
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Religion was her only constraint. Even then, it was a flimsy thing that barely held under the absence of her own conviction.
She was the rot of her family. A mangled limb part of a whole; half-torn by the points of her own teeth, gnawed by her own shame.
His words—a blade. One that unpicked the jagged stitching of her skin holding together her bloody insides, where an ugly thing stirred from the space between her ribs where her heart should have been. Where did it go? She swore she had one. No—her heart lay by his feet. Faintly beating, the rhythmic lub-dub of it an echo in her ears.
Guilt thickened the words in her throat until they were no longer words but tar—thick and intransigent. It clogged her oesophagus, seeping through her trachea to her diaphragm. White bone cracked and turned red. Her lungs burned with the need to expel something—anything—before it suffocated her.
Her saccharine smiles were not to be trusted. Golden syrup strung taut between perfect teeth. It would thicken, congealing until her mouth snapped shut with enough force to crack a tooth. Telling her truths from her lies was like telling salt from sugar: only by taste could you know, and by then it was often too late. Her lies were bitter enough to sting your mouth, her truths sweet enough to rot your teeth. Either way you’d feel her long after she was gone.
Rain beat down on her. It didn’t wash away her sins or cleanse her. It soaked them, made them heavier until her bones seemed to remodel under the weight. Her spine curved, vertebrae pushing through flesh. The angle was obtuse—the beginning of her metamorphosis.
She did not belong. She imagined her hands as instruments meant to cleave open another’s ribcage—to carve a hollow space where she could contort herself to fit inside. From there, she could observe the body as a living mechanism: lungs expanding, diaphragm contracting. Perhaps then she might learn what keeps people moving. After all, only the dead can teach the living. But they were not corpses laid out for study. Though her breaths were quiet and her body tightly folded, the seams misaligned at the surface would always give her away.
