It's been on my lilly list to investigate some of February's OWCs and one of the first things I look at is the title. Does it catch me? Yours did and you can imagine how pleasantly surprised I was to find out this one was written by you, Michel.
The first thing that struck me was the cinematic feel with the light from the flame in the darkness. Things like the boarded up windows and Peter, busy with his gun and ammunition.
I was able to feel the fact that they were afraid of something and their holing up against it. Locking themselves away. When Louise says, "You'll have to go out one day", I felt like her words were just so very real in so many respects.
It feels to me like these people are in this "situation" of which we don't have a background of, (of which many people here already given criticism) but I think you could remedy that by having "the something" that they're afraid of be the unknown.
Please forgive me as I go off now on how I'm seeing this, but these are my feelings.
I feel that this is more of a sub-conscious piece with hidden brilliance that no one else is getting even though some of it is as clear as day.
For instance:
The element of darkness is covered from the very beginning wherein we participate in the slow fade in with the candle. The daughter, Marianne, is blind. Well, she is. I guess there's a lot of ways to write that differently to show it, but hey, if an actor or actress can't "get with that", then they can't and whatcha gonna do? Do you want to show more in that regard? Then go ahead, but I certainly wouldn't gripe about writing "She's blind" and let other brilliant people come up with how they want to show her sitting in her blindness. "She's blind." Heck, it's better than writing "The brown dirt". Duh, most dirt is a shade of brown, unless it's red, but that's another story.
What I'm getting at here is that IMHO, there's nothing wrong with writing it short at times. Just plain. That's what you did here and it was good enough for me. I pictured a girl sitting there without the advantage of sight.
Anyways, the idea of blindness and darkness come together as they typically do. What you might like to do is examine Marianne's blindness and how she might actually become a main character in this. After all, she's inside of darkness already, she wouldn't be afraid of what she's used to. You know what I mean?
Wouldn't she be rife with all kinds of internal feelings and manifestations that "the sighted" would never have had the pleasure to know? And wouldn't she have these perceptions due to the darkness? And thus, wouldn't the darkness have a special and wonderful place and purpose from her unique perspective?
I'm speaking Kabbalistically, which I spell with a "K", and I do believe there is a very important difference between the "c" spelling and the "k" spelling, but I'm not going to claim for sure at this point.
Anyways, this brings me to the following on page 4:
All around the front door are painted with blood cabalistic
signs.
This is as bad as me when I've written Kabbalistic attributive worlds and words that Rumley, in THE MAGIC OF LETTERS studies, but a good percentage of the people on the planet drop their jaws with a WTF because I haven't given enough for them to chew on first.
So the questions are:
What do the signs look like?
Where is "all around"? On the door posts? Passover perhaps?
What blood was used to paint the signs? The blood of a goat?
**Note that most of the criticisms above mine have to do with the lack of supplying context to what is currently happening. Again, as I said before, you might remedy this by clearly defining their fear as being the fear of the unknown.
Regarding the use of the name, The Dark Lord. I definitely thought of Harry Potter, but I really can't think of any other name that I would call an overseer of darkness than Dark Lord. I guess due to the fact that everyone will be thinking Harry Potter, you'll have to come up with something different maybe.
But still, The Dark Lord is The Dark Lord. It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it. Whatcha gonna do?
This brings me to the conclusion of your story and the conclusion of my lilly review:
I feel that ending this story on the note you did, doesn't give credit to The Creator who in fact, has everything worked out just fine and proper.
Even though we're currently blind to the fact. Double
Oh, that was a triplet. Good.
Seriously though. In the end, we've got The Dark Lord coming in with Thomas and killing everyone including Thomas, who had moved into working with TDL for whatever reason. He's probably like us. Gets into all kinds of shit because he "wants stuff". Stuff that TDL promises, but all of TDL's promises are false promises and we all know where that leads...
But still, we're faced with "Why?" Why this senseless slaughter? And what does TDL get from it? The poor shmuck's left all alone. The lilly Dark Lord had nobody to play with. I'm starting to feel sorry for him.
He has absolutely nothing. He's completely alive. Completely alone. And yes, completely in the dark.
Can anyone help that dude?
Michel, I think this is a promising piece that you might have fun with in the future.
Sandra