Page 28 of Chasing the Ghost

“He taught you the suffering of love. A lesson that nothing is permanent. You thought that you would be together for eternity. A childish promise. Do you forget this love and the lessons that came from it so easily?”

“I don’t want to remember. It doesn’t matter.” snapped The Woman, folding her arms across her chest, hiding her vulnerability.

“You are missing him. You are missing this first relationship, the basis of all you of deeper interaction with others.” The girl paused, waiting for a glint of recognition from The Woman. Finding none, she went on.

“Are you satisfied?” asked the teenage girl, motionless, expressionless. “Do you find what you are longing for in the affairs of a lonely teenager?”

The Woman narrowed her amber eyes, the sting of insult creeping. “I don’t want to miss anything. I want to see his memories. Be part of them. I want to share his happiness and be there to comfort his pain. A lifetime together.”

“A life together is shared experiences. Not living as a single entity. The choice you are making ensures that you have nothing to offer him, when it is possible to do so. The more of him you absorb, the more of you is replaced.” the teenager advised. “What are the names of your children?” she challenged, the darkness swirling around them.

The Woman smiled genuine at the mention of her children. “They are beautiful. With wide, blue eyes and blonde hair, just like Johnny. They look just like him.”

“What are the names of your children?” the teenager asked again, her tone an exact replica of her previous question.

The Woman could not answer the question but continued to smile, reveling in her children’s similarities to their father, in their heritage, in their hands that mirrored his, in their expressions that she had seen so many times in him.

Having proven its point, the voice disappeared taking it’s physical form along with it, leaving The Woman to stew in her thoughts. She savored what could have been a memory but was lost without definition and purpose.

(Page submitted by the author, A. Grams; ebook available here and here)
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My Review

This page presents an intriguing puzzle, with its nameless characters and ambiguous setting. By paragraph six, though, we get the clues that, when taken along with the book’s title, tell us these are both ghosts speaking, and that they’re talking about some form of haunting in which the Woman is absorbing or possessing her former husband.

The elements of obsession and the psychology of the Woman’s inability to face certain aspects of her past are likewise enticing, and create a dark mood.

On the down side, there are moments in which the author is too overt for my tastes, as when the Woman folds her arms, “hiding her vulnerability.” The gesture alone tells me all I need to know; the added description is redundant. Later, the phrase, “in their heritage,” is similarly extraneous. The sentence it appears in would be stronger without it.

These and other slips of prose suggest to me a writer with some maturing to do. When the girl repeats her question, in a tone that’s “an exact replica of her previous question,” the author uses seven words to awkwardly convey what could have been accomplished simply with one: “unwavering.” Then there’s the muddled metaphor of “the sting of insult creeping.” A sting can be an action (the sting of a wasp) or a sensation (the sting of wasp venom taking effect in one’s skin). In neither case can a sting literally creep, though you can make a metaphor out of the sensation: “The sting of the wasp’s venom crept across my skin.” When you go further, and have the sting be metaphoric as well, you’re mixing metaphors, never a good idea. And to me, the sting of insult is an action, so having it “creep” is contradictory. I had to stop and think the phrase through to come up with an interpretation that made sense: the feeling of the insult’s emotional sting spreading or increasing in scope. A writer should never force a reader to do that much work to understand a piece of figurative language; it subverts the whole point of writing figuratively.

A last point: given the ambiguous terms used to identify the characters, I found it odd that the one named character had such a thoroughly generic name, “Johnny.” The notion of a woman pining for a man named “Johnny” just seemed very cliched to me.

There’s some promise in the concepts presented here, but the execution undermines that promise a bit too much to draw me in.

(Note: this is a page 28 review because the work is a novella less than 82 pages long.)

Page 82 of Silent Night

your skin slowly becomes more elastic, enabling us to put a silicone implant in several months later.”

She had a sharp intake of breath.

“We’ll add a nipple later, much later. Then you’re done.”

Deb set her chin. She cleared her throat. “How do you add a nipple, exactly?”

“A graft. And we dye the skin to be the exact same color as the other side.”

“A graft? From where?”

“Your upper thigh. We find that works well. On the inside. It’ll bug you for awhile. People do complain about discomfort. But we like that area the best.”

“But,” she blushed. “Is there hair? Does it grow on the nipple?” Her face was hot.

He continued looking at his clipboard. “Sometimes. Then you deal with that.”

He cleared his throat. “OK. Our other options are to suction belly fat out of your stomach and put that into your breast. So then you get a tummy tuck in the process.” He put his large hands on her abdomen and felt it, massaging. “Sadly, you don’t have enough for that technique. I wouldn’t worry about it. That process is very long, lots of appointments and painful.” He sat back and looked at her in the eyes. “The last procedure involves using skin from the shoulder area and building a breast, but I see a nasty scar there. What’s that from?”

She felt dizzy. She wanted to sit down, tired of standing here almost naked, so exposed and scrutinized like a bug under glass. She felt like an old car up on a lift. Rusty, deteriorated. And this nice mechanic/ doctor was here to put her all back together. She was a virtual Humpty Dumpty. Her eyes wanted to fill. She did not let them.

(Page submitted by the author, MH Gerber; ebook available here)

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My Review

A friend of mine just died of cancer, so perhaps I'm overly susceptible to the material. Nonetheless, I found this page thoroughly compelling. The author has captured an intense and personal moment, crisply spelling out for us both the clinical details and the protagonist's reactions to them. It would be very easy (and for most writers would be very tempting) to fill up a page like this with the inner workings of the character's mind (or heart, or soul, whichever you prefer). Instead, MH Gerber chooses to tell us what the patient is feeling by way of her physical responses, eschewing any description of thoughts or emotions until the last paragraph of the page. And even there, the character's emotions unfold through artful metaphor, not heavy-handed emphasis words about grief or mortification.

With a deftly placed intake of breath, a flushed face, and a couple of quick mannerisms, we've been shown rather than told what it feels like to be this person in this situation.

Just as skillful is the dialogue: simple, believable, flowing very naturally. The only hiccup on the whole page for me was the doctor's line, "We find that works well. On the inside." He seems to have meant to say that the tissue comes from the inside of the thigh, rather than that the graft works well on the inside. But even the momentary confusion that I experienced, while reading those seemingly transposed sentences, added to the overall effect, in that it was disorienting to me, and difficult to process, and those feelings were exactly the ones being felt by the character. It's completely believable that the doctor would invert those two sentences, and while they might be clearer to the reader if reversed, I think there's a real value in choosing to leave them as they are.

An excellent page, and one that tempts me to step outside of my typical genres to see if the rest of the book is as moving and rich.