September Prompted Fiction: Afterlife: Letting Go: 517 words

[kajones_writing]

Based on the prompt 'One of the hard things about adjusting to the afterlife, if you still have your most recent life's memories, is letting go. I'd like a story exploring that.' from ysabetwordsmith.

Nathan knew he needed to move on. Everyone else had, so it was just him clinging onto what had been and Aras, his spirit guide, had slowly been reducing the time he was permitted to spend watching the family he'd left behind. When he'd first died, he hated thinking that word but that was what he'd done and he needed to get used to it, he'd spent all his time watching his wife and children. He'd spent three Earth weeks continously watching them live their lives, including witnessing his own funeral. Then Aras had walked into his house and told him that he was wasting his afterlife. Nathan had laughed at him. Watching his family was the only thing he could imagine doing.

 

 

It wasn't until he'd only been able to watch them for twenty-three hours a day that he realised he'd been guided into a house by whoever it was that had met him, he hadn't been paying attention, and so far it had one piece of furniture in, which was the chair he'd been sitting in to watch his family. The chair wasn't even comfortable. He'd spent his free hour walking around the house and planning what he was going to furnish it with. Aras had taught him how to create furniture when the time was reduced to twenty-two hours a day.

Once the house was furnished he had no idea what to do with his time. The house had a study that was full of empty bookcases but he didn't know if it was possible to fill them. He'd just wanted the bookcases there because it reminded him of the home he'd left behind. Between the two of them, he and his wife had filled a whole room with overflowing bookcases. One day he'd watched her empty the bookcases that had been his and take all of his books to one of the charity shops. That was the same day Aras had taken him to the nearest bookshop. They'd had their first real conversation that day, which was when Aras told him that he was Nathan's spirit guide.

When he was only spending twenty-one hours day watching his family, his wife had put their home up for sale, he'd started thinking about what he was supposed to do with his afterlife. He couldn't work out the point of it all, so he'd asked Aras. Aras had just smiled enigmatically before leaving the house and not coming back for a week. That had been a very long week. Nathan had spent his spare three hours thinking about why he'd been given an afterlife, but still couldn't stop himself from watching as the house he still thought of as his home sold and his wife moved into a little bungalow. The day she moved out he'd cried. Aras visited him that day.

“At the moment,” Aras said, looking between Nathan and the mirror he used to watch his family, “the whole point of your afterlife is about letting go of what is over. You will never live that life again and you need to understand that.”

 

© K A Jones 2011

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

This is haunting and beautiful. I like the idea of gradually turning someone from what was to what is. I'm also intrigued that there are those in the Afterlife who -- in various roles -- help people adjust.

>>When he'd first died, he hated thinking that word but that was what he'd done and he needed to get used to it, he'd spent all his time watching his wife and children.<<

This is a run-on sentence. A good breakpoint would be after "used to it."

>>When he was only spending twenty-one hours day watching his family, his wife had put their home up for sale, he'd started thinking about what he was supposed to do with his afterlife. <<

Comma splice; either break into two sentences after "sale" or insert "and" after the comma.

Re: Thoughts

[kajones-writing.livejournal.com]

I like run on sentences and comma splices. :( I'll have to find something else I can use that works like a comma splice. The effect they give is something I think works well with some characters.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll keep this in mind when making comments. I do use these myself for certain characters. Some editors will let you get away with it, others not so much.

In my experience, the key is legibility. The longer a sentence is and the more complicated it is, the hard it gets for readers to follow. A relatively short sentence with a comma splice or run-on is no problem. More than three phrases -- or two if each is elaborate -- tends to be confusing. It's also harder if the bits of one idea are separated by something else in the middle of it.

Play around and see what happens. You've got room to grow. If I keep reading your work, I should develop a sense of the characters and the storylines -- they don't all have the same flavor. Heh, and another cool thing about crowdfunding: there are no writer/editor/publisher arguments. I throw out my feedback as I have time to make it, and you take it or leave it based on which bits you agree with.