Yma’s Untitled Short Story Excerpt (847 words of 5,879)
by newerawriters
Marlina knew she wasn’t beautiful anymore, and that made the infidelity even worse. Her rage, which had slipped just below homicidal in the hours leading up to the press conference, catapulted back to life with razor teeth as she watched her husband confront reporters with the practiced execution of a politician in a dead run ahead of scandal. Marlina had watched this footage in various iterations for two hours followed by commentary from political analysts, reporters, and pundits. The one truth she could distil from the brewing crisis was that nobody believed her husband.
She shut off the television, and silence flooded the empty house. It was a large house without pets or children, a vast space soaked in loneliness and regret. Marlina’s steps echoed in the marble hallway, and she paused before a massive gilt-edged mirror. The slack, bleached fabric of her face was tear-stained and rung through with grief. She hadn’t brushed her teeth or her hair in three days, and had to cancel her standing appointment at the salon when the scandal broke. The gray roots amplified her sense of sexless decrepitude and the aches of a woman much older than fifty-three. She continued stiffly down the hall towards her favorite room, The Great Room.
The dome-shaped skylight showered fall sunshine on Italian frescos. Gods and goddesses of antiquity burst forth naked from clouds, stars, ocean, and giving earth. A floor to ceiling glass window opened on a long view of the garden, its ornamental grasses, holly hocks, hibiscus, snap dragons, danced like blue children before distant orchards heavy with the rush of autumn. The Great Room was a tribute to classical aesthetics and resembled a museum more than a space in a private home. She had spent a sizable portion of her inheritance on reproductions of sculptures found in the ruins at Pompeii. The collection even included an original of a Roman woman wrought in marble, her tunic sliding off the shoulder to expose the barest edge of breast. But the paintings were her sanctuary, a narrow portal into a world of pale-skinned virgins recumbent in sumptuous landscapes.
She dreamed herself as the titian-haired beauty in Lord Frederick Leighton’s “Idyll,” white gown clinging to her skin, head at gentle rest on her friend’s soft chest. Marlina felt delicate fingers in her hair, and inhaled fragrances from a world saturated and stunned by the setting sun. The flute player with his handsome back entertained them, and sometimes at night, in the vast silence of The Great Room, Marlina could hear his music.
The Xanax soothed to soften, cradled in hallucinatory warmth. Her stiffness had finally receded, and she walked slowly towards the divan, then wrapped her body in a peach soft blanket. Languorous and wish-licked she slid into the “Waterfall.” The landscape was classic Maxfield Parrish, trees and violet mountains refracted through shadow and light. Marlina imagined herself as the young woman with auburn hair wearing a periwinkle frock and a smile next to her slender-hipped companion. She felt the rocky outcrop warm on her belly and the bottomless churn of the waterfall’s descent.
The reverie passed, and Marlina dropped back to earth in a moist daze of despair and tranquilizers. She tried to forget the fights masquerading as battles over whether or not they could afford in-state or out-of-state tuition. Tried to forget the fights over too much time in the office or whether or not to fly first class; their undeclared war dressed itself in imagined money shortages. It posed as arguments over vacations they didn’t dare take together because to spend an entire week alone together was to die a little bit at a time.
The truth was they could no longer be in each other’s presence more than a few hours without the burnished creep of something close to hate surfacing. The truth was that all of their fights were one fight, one sustained howl of existential horror, deceit, and disappointment. One fight comprised of many mistakes with crushing consequences. One long fight about six years of separate bedrooms, and two years of separate sides of the house, about the skin-peeling horror of a life built on ashes and a twenty-seven year marriage in free fall. All of which now culminated with Marlina drugged up, imprisoned in her home by reporters camped cannibal-style at the end of her driveway, and fervent prayers that Nick’s mistress would keep her mouth shut.
She thought that all tragedy was tied to the same rope, and to pull on one was to shake loose the furor of every anguish preceding it. Marlina recalled the softness of her dead mother’s hands, and how she used to stroke her hair at bedtime when she was little. How bald and small Mommy looked after the final, futile rounds of chemo. She remembered her sixteen-year old son’s face bleeding, cracked beyond recognition in the passenger seat of her new Mercedes. Too fast, too damn fast, she thought, and began to cry, until naked and wet from the storm of her sobs she rocked to a dead sleep.
YouNiversity Project 2014 
This is a short piece with lots of layers and dimensions. Like many of the best short stories, it begins post-facto and ends without a ribboned resolution. The emotional gravity is there from the beginning, because we get, again and again, the two human emotions most important to storytelling: fear and desire. These propel the narration forward while ramping up the dramatic effect of this short piece.
The language, too, is arresting and beautiful, which is a nice contrast to the ugliness/stark reality of the present action (one of many examples is: “Languorous and wish-licked she slid into the “Waterfall.””). Yma does well with contrasts, not only between light and dark and ugly and beautiful, but also between the world of art (especially a preserved, curated version of the past which mirrors her own) and the world of the real. Throughout the short story we get vast descriptions of The Great Room but I think readers are lacking in some more of “the world of the real” descriptions to latch on to (besides the great and stomach-churning interior details we get throughout). By delving deeper into the everyday/the real world, this juxtaposition that Yma employs throughout would only be heightened.
My favorite line might be the last line’s preceding manifesto: “She thought that all tragedy was tied to the same rope, and to pull on one was to shake loose the furor of every anguish preceding it.” Actually, from that point until the last, crushing lines, the work is reaching new levels of emotional anguish and poignancy. I think the strength of these lines can be found in their level of specificity. Whereas in the prior graf, readers get a more general (perhaps hackneyed?) version of “a marriage gone wrong,” here, readers are hit with an intense, concrete collage of tragic moments in the narrator’s recent life. I would work specifically on going further within that preceding paragraph; give readers more of the “everyday horrors” of living, even the most mundane (horrible, perhaps, BECAUSE of the ordinary …) details.
Yma’s story here is a patchwork quilt of desperation, heartbreak, and loss. It opens with a scene that immediately made me think of the TV show Scandal, and honestly, the set up made me long for Olivia Pope to show up and kick some ass. But Yma starts off with a soap opera concept and systematically unearths the Greek tragedy behind the melodrama. I agree with Chris that the details of a marriage gone wrong are sort of expected and do not offer the same sort of piercing emotional commentary that the ending paragraph does. For me, I felt the linear progression of sadness, the public revelation, the private anger amplified by the setting of a home turned museum, as though she is a relic of her marriage just as her collection of statues are relics of a long buried city, and then the drug-fueled haze breaking away to reveal a deeper wound, the loss of a child; all contributed to a great emotional catharsis that failed to make it over the edge and truly be satisfying. What struck me was that the drug haze breaking was the best part, and I would love to see what effect changing the chronology would have. How would this story read if the events were rearranged and cut up, so we are not given a full picture of what is going on until the end? I feel like Yma is not really concerned with the marital infidelity as she is with the deconstruction of woman who has been denied happiness for far too long. Breaking up the chronology, heightening the dream-like drugginess of the narrative, and honing in on the private misery over the public spectacle, and I think this piece would reach that next level.
I made an error in my previous comment. This is of course just a snippet of a larger story. I think Yma has a great opening here but as I already noted, there are ways of creating an even more compelling and unconventional opening that will entice and challenge readers.
Clarity: I like that this passage is bookended with descriptions of what is really going on in Marlina’s life, specifically her pain and her associations with the public or the law. In the middle is her dream-world, her escape from these harsh realities. The opening line talks about “the infidelity” and the second to last paragraph talks about “Nick’s mistress.” These connections ground the reader amongst the dreams of Marlina and all of the other tragedies that are touched on in this passage including her mother dying of cancer and her son dying in a horrific car accident. Bearing in mind that this is only a part of a longer work, I understand that questions raised in this selection are probably answered in others. Nonetheless, I do wonder about Nick being a politician. It is touched on in the first paragraph that he is a rehearsed politician but that his audience does not believe what he is saying. And toward the end we learn that Marlina does not want the public to learn of Nick’s mistress, whether for her benefit or Nick’s (or both) we do not know. I wanted more of Nick’s power and how it infiltrates Marlina personally. I felt that Nick’s being a politician was glossed over and I wanted more about it. Again, more of this probably comes out in the remainder of the story, so is not necessarily something to clarify in this short bit in particular.
Emotional Impact: At the beginning of the passage, we are dropped into a saddened state where Marlina has been cheated on and she knows that she is not beautiful anymore. We are then thrust into a dream-world of beautiful paintings and Marlina becomes these beautiful, loved women. This causes tension in the reader because the reader knows that this is a fantasy, but at the same time, the descriptions of the paintings are beautiful and so make the reader feel serene, pleasant, loved at the same time as being sad for Marlina’s current state of being. The end has a real punch with learning about Marlina’s son dying in a horrific car accident. This sends the reader deeper into a state of despair for Marlina.
Cohesion: The largest cohesive element I found was the contrast between real life and art. As I mentioned earlier, there is a sandwiching of the imaginative world between very vivid, real-time descriptions doused in pain. The pain in Marlina’s life is offset with her imagination, her placement of herself in paintings. The other cohesive element I noticed was that of repetition. In the third-to-last paragraph and the second-to-last paragraph there is a listing element where each sentence starts off with the same few words but adds to the plot of the story. I thought that this element could be teased a little more and be used at the beginning of the piece as well to increase the sandwiching effect.
The immediacy of the first lines of this excerpt locked the door behind me, and compelled me to follow Marlina into a world of privilege as the wife of a politician who has cheated on her. The affair and her rage threaten to shatter an already deeply-wounded psyche, which seems to hang by a thread in the following paragraphs. In the end, it is a taut story of tragedy, emotional anguish, drug-induced delusions, and shattered dreams.
Yma’s strengths in this piece are the infusion of tension, the seamless juxtaposition of darkness and light, age and youth, delusion and reality, and the beautiful descriptions of The Great Room. We see these best when Marlina looks at her reflection and is only capable of seeing an old, sexless woman instead a fifty-three year old woman. The sense of despair, loneliness, and hopelessness are palpable and troubling. Then we enter The Great Room, her favorite room in a sumptuous home, where we are transported to a magical, mystical world of gods and goddesses and lush landscapes, where she imagines herself as a goddess, or perhaps, remembers the woman she was in her youth. There is exquisite tension in this scene as we wonder if she will return to reality, or remain a prisoner in her home, and in her mind.
When Marlina leaves her drug-induced fantasy world, we are brought to the present reality of her crumbling marriage, and at the end, we learn of the tragic deaths of her son and mother. There are many unanswered questions–we don’t know if her son was her only child, how recently he died, and how she feels about his death. Losing a child is devastating and life-altering. I’m wondering why she seems obsessed with her fading looks, her husband’s affair, and the mistress keeping quiet, and no mention is made of her son’s death until the end, and then all too briefly. How would it be if the deaths of her son and mother were woven into scene in The Great Room? I would love to see more about Marlina’s emotional journey, the inner workings of a woman in extreme turmoil, and how her son’s death affected her every day life, and perhaps a little less about her disintegrating marriage. I realize this is an excerpt of a longer piece, and perhaps the questions are answered.
Yma is a gifted writer. I enjoyed this piece, and look forward to reading the finished short story.