The Slam: Slammables
Machine
by C.C.
In the quiet belt of suburbia that sat just outside the city of Whirrington’s limits, the harsh screech of metal against metal hung in the air as a young boy heatedly shoved his brother against a chain-link fence. Three streets away, the gears in a mother’s hands clicked furiously as she hemmed a dainty periwinkle prom dress.
Day faded into darkness, and the moon crawled across the sky. A few threads of its clear light crept across a girl’s trembling face. Her hands, bathed in shadow, touched her throat; she marveled at how it shook with every sob. As the moonlight gradually thickened into a soupy gold, she lighted on a solution to her problem.
She began by practicing breaking up her smooth walk into jerkier motions. That night she painstakingly buffed her soft skin with oil; the following morning, and every morning after, she would slick her hair back with grease. She checked for rust after every rainstorm.
Slowly, her joints began to creak, as if they were held in place by pulleys. Her flesh hardened and took on a more riveted look. On an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday, she woke up to find her muscles replaced with thousands of tiny gears.
The inhabitants of Whirrington took note of the former invalid’s transformation. The girl began to draw admiring looks from boys and men. Waiters and waitresses no longer had to scrounge up disgusting concoctions of lard and fat for her at restaurants, and she took as much pride in ordering real food as she did in her quickly balding head.
The years rolled by. A sunny April afternoon found her teetering on a stool, admiring her reflection as she inspected the dress being fitted to her form. She could see the street behind her in the mirror, and the people milling about it. Her eyes fell on one of the strangers. He was dressed strangely for the warm day: a heavy overcoat and a dark, wide-brimmed hat. His stride wasn’t the mechanized pace that she was accustomed to. The features that she could discern were pale and imperfect. Suddenly his eyes found her, and they weren’t stately black lenses but a glistening blue... In a heartbeat she had recalled how her body used to be, how its softness had repulsed her, how she had hated how it compared to others’ smooth chrome shells, and how she had shut herself up in her room convinced that no one could ever... He indifferently turned his gaze away. Wildly she jumped off of the stool, but her heavy dress and her legs were tangled together and she found herself falli...
Later, paramedics would sweep cracked gears and bolts into plastic bags. They would avoid carrying the pieces of the girl’s face to the silent ambulance until it could not be put off any longer. Her eyes were an unnatural white, and their wide gray irises gave the robots chills as they worked.
This is a really neat story! I love the mysterious sci-fi element to it, and I like how the reader has to figure out what's going on as he/she reads. Because of how the reader's thoughts and impressions change throughout the piece, I thought the most helpful critique to you might be for me to tell you what thinking went on in my head while I read. I know that sometimes when I write stories where the thinking changes throughout, I am so focused on the ending that I miss some confusion that might occur for the reader earlier on; I think this may apply to you as well. There are a few confusing parts in this that take away from the story and never quite get cleared up, so hopefully this summary of my thoughts while I read is helpful:
Paragraph One: Is the lady sewing the dress the boys' mother? Why are the boys fighting? (It wasn't until the second time I read this that I realized the “screech of metal against metal” was because the boy was metal as well as the fence. I just thought it was the links of the fence rubbing against each other from the pressure of the boy's body being thrown against it.) Whose dress is that?
Paragraph Two: Is this girl the owner of the dress? Is she the boys' sister? Or are they fighting over her?
Paragraph Three: Why is she doing this and what does it have to do with the prom dress and the fight?
Paragraph Four: Oh... she's a machine! Why did this change occur? How does she feel about it?
Paragraph Five: Why was she considered an invalid before? Why was she eating fat and lard? Why is a “quickly balding head” drawing “admiring looks”? Is she really a robot, or is this a metaphor for something like how she's a “robot” because her beauty is fake and doesn't match her inner feelings?
Paragraph Six: It is her dress! Why isn't she trying it on until three years after it was sewn? Wait, everyone's a robot! That makes sense! But why isn't the stranger a robot? Is he one of the boys from the beginning?
Paragraph Seven: The girl wanted to be just like everyone else, but in the end, it would have been better not to be. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, anyway, and her “machine” body was her downfall. Upon seeing the stranger with a non-robotic body, she missed her own because he didn't pay attention to her supposedly “beautiful” robot body. Now I get why she thought she was an invalid before. Her society has taught her that humanity is horrible and ugly. I like how I figured that out throughout the piece. What I still don't understand, however, is how the first paragraph relates to the rest. Why did you mention the dress being sewn and the boys fighting? Why did it take the girl so long to try on the dress? Did the boys at the beginning serve any purpose other than to show they had metal bodies (which I didn't get on the first read through anyway)?
Overall, I really like this story and its message and the way it got me thinking. You just might want to add and/or take away some parts to make it clearer for the reader. I feel like you have more in your head than what got put into the story, so you probably understand it more than any reader would. That's okay, just know that you have to think about what the reader knows. Hopefully this helped! Happy writing!
critiqued by Jenna, Missouri
May 17, 2010
May 17, 2010
This is incredibly powerful. I love the way that at the beginning of the story, the city you describe seems perfectly normal, but then looking back a second time, the phrase "the gears in a mother's hands clicked furiously" can be taken in two ways -- and only later does the reader understand that the gears are literally in her hands, not just manipulated by them. I love the way you reversed the standard of beauty in this -- this robot-person would not be considered beautiful in our time and place, but beauty is the standard of what a society as a whole has been influenced to think by years of doing it the same way. One small thing that I think might be improved is at the end of the second-to-last paragraph when you didn't complete the word "falling." This sort of bothered me and distracted me a bit. I think it would convey just as effectively the feeling of suspense and inevitability if you just went ahead and put the full word, though it's a small detail that doesn't matter too much either way...
Great job! I loved reading it.
critiqued by etoile, Salt Lake City, UT
May 17, 2010
May 17, 2010
Slammings