"Senses" short story series Pt 1/5: "Crimson" by J. D. Outcalt (with writer's commentary and other notes)

I accidentally deleted ten hours of work so have this flash fiction instead

Hello friend! I hope you are well.

Me? How am I doing? Well considering I accidentally deleted the newsletter piece (approx 2.5k words) that was supposed to go up today, not great!

Despite that, I’m good.

So since I lost what I prepared to share with you today, instead I am going to be giving you a peak behind the curtain of my writing practices.

A pretty consistent piece of advice that comes from writers is to simply write. Write often. Write about many things. Write bad things. Write good things. Much like a muscle, one of the best ways to strengthen your writing skills is to write. This involves mostly writing bad things, but by doing so, you learn from your mistakes and missteps. So when the time comes around to work on that magnum opus you’ve been dreaming about, you’ll feel like a grizzled vet.

I have found it tough to have stare at a blank piece of paper and conjure up an entire story from start to finish, so I have recently started to use writing prompts to help warm me up before getting into bigger projects. The fun thing about these prompts is that they give you restrictions. It can be nauseating to imagine amount of possibilities that could come from simply thinking “what would I like to write today?” But by having a rule or sign to help guide your thoughts, you can push the limits of your writing capabilities. Could you imagine if I threw you into a jazzercize studio and said “okay, do the thing”? You’d be lost! But instead what if I gave you a VHS tape with an instructional workout. It would be challenging to do anything with it, becuase there is no way the studio has a VHS player, but atleast you have a goal now. The problem now becomes “how the hell do I do a jazzercise,” to “I just need to find a VHS machine.”

Weird analogy, I know, but hopefully you’re following me still.

Today, I am going to share with you one of these first exercises I’ve done. This story was born of a very simple prompt: Write a short scene (3-4 paragraphs) using only visual description. No sounds, no smells, no touches, only what you see is happening.

So, here it is! I call it Crimson. No edits. Raw.

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Crimson by J. D. Outcalt

In a clearing in the woods stands a girl. In that same clearing lies a deer. The girl looks the corpse up and down. This isn’t something she has seen before. She has probed the idea of death before, but only in a confused, abstract sense. She doesn’t understand what words like “abstract” mean yet, either. This doesn’t bother her, as all she can do right now is stare at the fountain of blood pouring from a hole in the deers neck.

Off in the woods, Terry Reacher tears down the trail his bullet weaved through the woods. His bright hunting vest is responsible. Thats what his girlfriend had called it. Actually, it was the lack of a hunting vest she called “irresponsible,” but upon finding a little girl sitting next to his prize, he understands why. But eventually she moves, which unfreeze’s Terry’s body. 

His body tightens again, but this time in rage. He would rush the girl and pull her by the hair back to whatever hick trailer home she stumbled away from. Probably Babbling Brook. A bunch of rotten eggs have been slowly pouring out of the confines of their aluminum cans and saturating the woods and town with their unruliness. 

This is the sort of issue with those sort of people, they didn’t care what their kids do. They kick them out the front door and don’t care where they go or what they do until its time for bed. Who cares if they tore through the woods— hunting land, to be specific— with no supervision or highlighter vest. The devils could corrupt any environment they want because two stupid teenagers were too fucking cool to wear a condom.

This devil, though, did not come from Babbling Brook Trailer Park. This devil was from somewhere that Terry Reacher hadn’t even the slightest amount of intellect to understand.

Terry’s lips formed a cuss to throw at the girl. It’s something he wouldn’t say in the company of the devil’s parents or his girlfriend, but the thrill of taking the deer’s life filled him with confidence. His chest was puffed out and his stance widened. But the girl paid him no attention. She wasn’t wearing her hearing aids.

Emboldened by his kill and his rage for being ignored by a girl, he went to rip the little girl’s attention from his prize, but stopped as the child started to move again.

She no longer let just her eyes fixate on the geyser of blood. Now she had moved her hand to prod the hole. With each poke, just a bit more blood spurted from the hole. The girl’s face was blocked by her golden hair falling around her face, but her smile stretched clearly from ear to ear. Running her bloody fingers through her hair, red blood glistened in the sun amongst the blonde. 

The sight gave Terry pause. Was this girl on drugs or something? His body shrank. He assumed a demeanor that most folks would be familiar as the worst cashier at the Hunter’s Ridge Walmart. Gone was the Terry who claimed lives. Here was the Terry we were all familiar with. 

Terry cussed at the girl once more, an attempt to regain the strength he miraculously mustered after the kill, but she ignored him again. 

A glob of saliva slipped from the girl’s mouth. Her smile disappeared into a wide mouthed pant. Terry could see how her chest rose and fell more quickly. The muscles in her neck twitched and grew red. Then, the girls slowly lowered her mouth towards the deers wound. 

Her lips covered the hole and drank. Slowly, she slowly drew away, the red blood covering her mouth. She leaned over the body and breathed. Her hand wiped her mouth and she licked the remaining blood from the back of her hand. The girl tilted her eyes towards the sky and smiled. It had been so long. 

The only thing that was able to break the girl from her reverie were vibrations in the ground nearby. She glanced to find a man with shabby clothes and an annoyingly bright vest scurrying on his ass out of the clearing. 

All Terry saw before he turned to run was the girl’s entire face. Where two eyes should have been were two empty sockets. Two holes bored into her face with an ugly, painful roughness. They resembled the wound his bullet created in the deer. And the smile. He would never forget that smile.

How long it had been since she had caught one alive?

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This was a fun piece to write. Honestly, given the prompt, the language feels a bit too much intrusive. I think the challenge here was truly to use visuals to tell a story, but that doesn’t always translate well. I think I could’ve pulled back on the thoughts we got from Terry and the girl, but I think this would be a much shorter story if that were the case.

My favorite part of the story is when the girl begins to feast on the blood of the deer. I think this creates a pretty big tone shift away from Terry’s pettiness and judgment into something more frightening and uncanny. Not to mention I think this is the best example in the story where I could use strictly visuals to tell a story.

Some missteps and learnings from this come down to a lot of technical things, like point of view, verb tense, and grammar. You’ll notice that the point of view pretty jarringly into the head of the little girl in the last sentence of story, which leaves the ending feeling dirty and unclean. But those are easy fixes that come in edits and revision. But I think there was something about using strictly visuals that intrigue me when writing this scene. It made me think about how withholding particular senses from the reader can manipulate the distance or closeness we feel to the characters in the scene and our connection to them.

One of my biggest weaknesses as a writer is knowing when to divest and withhold information for the sake of building tension and curiosity. So, I can very clearly see many threads I start to weave in this draft. Obviously, the nature of the girl is called into question. Who is she? What is she? Theres also mention of trouble with division between the trailer park kids and the people of Hunter’s Ridge. Not to mention Terry’s background. While all this would be certainly be tightened up in revisions and edits, it is interesting to look and see all the morsels or comments I left for myself to work with later in the story. I have no answers to these questions, but that is the beauty of discovery writing. Once you move forward, you think of details can enhance the scene you are writing. Details like I previously mentioned.

These are the subtle details that help to reflect upon, because you can summon up your wisdom to think about how some of these help the story, while others might draw you out of it.

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I hope you enjoyed this lil’ commentary of Crimson. It was a fun piece to write, so hopefully it was a good one to read. Writing these commnetaries aren’t something I do on my own writing, so let me know if you enjoyed it! Or maybe you would like to see how I analyze other stories? I have loads!

See you all soon! Stay healthy!