i wish you were dead by Sofía Abarca
They take hours, these conversations. Not because there’s so much say. There may be nothing to say, although you rarely know that at the outset. It’s just that the saying – even if it is a saying of nothing – takes so much time. It’s because the saying, the back and forth of the conversation, long and painful silences very much included, is a process where something, we hope, will be achieved. Some kind of clarity. Some kind of finality. Because nothing can be worse than leaving things as they are and being in the exact same spot two weeks from now, or two months. Or two years, God forbid.
I am a confessed and confirmed hater of timed text. But here it worked, or almost worked. I was anxious to hear what would be said. Also, my mind kept wandering. But that’s what it does in these conversations. Five possible directions you could go in have been thought of and discarded before something wells up that you blurt out without thinking. Silence. She looks off into the middle distance. Has she heard you? Of course she has. Nothing lies hidden. If neither of you is showing the truth about your feelings, it is because there is no truth about your feelings. You thought it’d be easier. But it never is.
It’s all very believable. Realistic. Not sure how I felt about the choice aspect. Having the protagonist tell the truth is the only way that I, the reader, can find out what that truth is, so choosing these options seems to be a no-brainer. It’s not my task to make things easier for these people. But with the choices I made the narrative development was rewarding, natural, and led to a conclusion that was almost satisfying. No thanks, I don’t need to play again. This is no doubt best for these characters. Certainly we’ve been given no reason to believe they can do better.
The dialogue reads well. The non-dialogue prose is another matter. It is frequently overwritten, ungrammatical, distracting. The very first lines of the game are:
That’s not a sentence. Here’s an example where the prose is very purple indeed:
The author has mastered the art of writing pithy, no-nonsense dialogue. Those skills should be applied to the rest of the prose too. Then everything will be good.