Summer is dead to me.
The sand grates under my toes as I crush my feet into the compounded mixture of dead animals, plants and life. The grains of golden delight slip through my fingers like an hourglass fading in vitality as time rushes out though the narrow opening. Gone.
People play in the water and on the sand, soaking up the last vestiges of summer heat before the cool autumn infiltrates and school or work dampens the remaining enjoyment. Chubby-cheeked children build sloppy sandcastles under the suspicious supervision of protective parents, and adults lay like seals on the sand to toast their fragile skins to deliciously crackled browns and reds.
I raise one sandy hand. It’s rather odd really that children play amongst the remains of a desolate world beneath the sea. Flushed out and spread across the land under the sun to shrivel away. Lost in the masses. I wonder if this is what heaven is like. Do all the human souls fall into the earth like spiralling feathers, drifting lightly towards a world so different from our own? Or do we rise on strings as tenuous as the tides towards the Geppetto of the sky by our feet, as the blood rushes to our heads and we stare down at the world we’ve left behind, already so much like a distorted memory?
‘Mia!’
I raise my blood encrusted hand to my eyes to squint against the summer sun.
My friend waves from where she’s sat at the edge of the sea, legs together like a tail swishing in the shallow air of the ocean, liquid oxygen.
‘Come join me, it’s so nice and cold!’
Her hair lays in straggled ropes about her head, catching my stare as I immobilise into stone. Rooted to the spot. She looks at me like I’m the sunstone allowing her to tell time, but I’m soon eclipsed by a much larger shadow, a tower of rocky muscle equally frozen by her eyes.
‘Alec! You come join me too!’
Her siren song lures him in irresistibly, leaving me frozen in agonising stillness, every muscle locked in terrified isolation.
‘Come onnn Mia! We’re at the beach, you can daydream at home later!’
‘Yeah, come on Mimi.’ Alec’s broad voice rumbles like thunder over my head.
‘Mia! You promised!’ My friend’s voice strikes like lightning straight down to my heart, ripping through tendons and flesh through the soles of my feet and into the innumerable bodies below.
‘Maybe later. I’m tired.’ My voice creaks out like the dust on clothes in an ancient wardrobe. A light and inconsequential cloud that fades greyly into the background.
‘Fine, but later– eek!’ Summer doesn’t get to finish her sentence before Alec scoops her up and carries her away into the ocean like a kelpie with his beautiful princess lying languidly in his arms with her hands entangled in his curly mane.
She laughs through love-swollen lips as he nestles his head into her neck and gently lowers them both into the crystal depths.
I pick at the sand on my hands but can’t seem to remove their stain, no matter how hard I scrub the spots won’t fade. The spots of sin. Sinful spots.
I stand and turn to walk away from Summer and Alec as they play in the sea together, sleek dolphins flickering their fins as much as peacocks flaunting their feathers.
I trudge up the ever-growing list of casualties to walk down the sandbank as the cool evening begins to settle about me.
Summer is dead to me. It is over, and so are we.
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142,241 Literary Works • 677,072 Reviews
Good morning Liv!
This section is very reliant on adverbs and adjectives. You might want to think of a more descriptive way to get the same image across :3I was loving the reviews you were writing and put your story on my TBR. And finally, I am here to check out your story~
I think you have a strong opening line :3
Tho I feel like the mix of dead animals and plants and then life is a bit muddled. You’re not talking abt a magic force here so… I think you are talking about the sand here? Is the life the bacteria etc that live on the grains of sand? What about the sand part of sand? What is the mixture you are talking about??? All you make me think of here is Lucy from Elfenlied, standing on a beach, surrounded by a swath of destruction…
I like how you bring the mixture idea back with the narrator thinking about the ocean and that the sand is basically what the ocean dredged up from the depths.
Hmmm I wonder if “it’s so nice and cold” is really something someone would say out loud?
I do like the Mia keeps the kinda morbid theme in her entire narration. Makes her really unique. She also has a very lyrical way to describe her surroundings and friends.
I especially like this:
Ohaaa one of her friends is called Summer, eh? Now the title and first line get a whole new meaning xd
Innnnteresting. Now I wonder if this is because of love drama, either of the “I was in love with Alec and now she has him and we used to be best friends!” or of the “Summer and I were supposed to be together and now she has Alec!”
Overall a very interesting story with a pretty memorable narration. No wonder Mia was all gloomy…
If you have any questions, let me know ~
Hi Liv! I'm here to review your short story.
I found your story to be such a richly rendered view of a late summer beach! Mia is delightfully cynical and philosophical. Since you included in the description that you were practicing allusions, let me attempt to analyse some of the meaning that you included in your short story! I apologise if I get anything wrong or miss anything; I'm not too familiar with the stories of Medusa and the sirens.
Before I begin, I do have a question. Is the unrequited love between the narrator and Summer or the narrator and Alec?
Symbolically, the friend being called Summer and the narrator's scepticism of the appeal of summer (the season) is really rich with meaning. So the person symbolises the season and the season the person. I love how you start and end the story with the same line:
which changes its meaning as the story takes place, transforming from referring to the season of summer to the character, Summer.
I enjoyed the cool observations of the narrator, and the showing-not-telling meant that the image that you conjured in my head was all the more vivid!
Here, Summer becomes Medusa. I'm a little confused on the symbolic meaning here. Is the narrator implying that this state of being is a punishment for Summer, as Medusa's transformation into a gorgon is a punishment on her? Or is it to create a sense of fear of the character?
For the sirens, I picked up on these lines:
The symbolism here I think, is that Summer is a symbol of temptation and destruction, while being irresistibly beautiful.
And for Lady Macbeth, the character I'm most familiar with, I picked up on these lines:
So the sand is the blood here, and Mia is Lady Macbeth. You introduce this idea of sand representing death, because it's made up of all these dead things. This works really well, because sand sticks everywhere, just as Lady Macbeth cannot get rid of her guilt, which is symbolised in the original play as blood. In your story, the narrator perhaps is trying to shake this "unrequited love", seeing it as "sinful", but cannot?
A tiny, tiny criticism would be to clarify the first line ("blood encrusted hand"), because I had to read the passage a few times to realise that you meant that the hand was covered in sand (which is "blood").
Overall, your story is verbose (in a good way!), fascinating, rich with imagery....
I really loved it! Keep writing.
Sincerely,
Cyan