[| I, CWAS |]

This is an old original draft of a story I had published in a local literary magazine awhile ago. Short story format isn't my forte, but it makes for nice practice

The celebratory hour of attainment of the seventy-fifth year, and not a sign of degenerative dotage could be attested to; it was considered a milestone even by his insouciant mind’s beliefs. Count one more accolade for the man who brooked through life and conquered the average expectancy of existence. He spent the entire day so far in a wainscoted bedroom, entrance left ajar, staring at honorary degrees, and sports palms from his youthful days of rugby, but most importantly, he studied his tangible identity.
Inhumed memories of the tribulation circa nineteen forty-four erupted giving way to stolid reactions, immobile in his stance and eyes gazing into the abyss. His intellect had gone awry searching for retrospective comprehension; he asked himself was he blessed to view the sunrise through the glistening jalousie of the infirmary? Or cursed in his lack of the honor obtained in a soldiers omega through the capriciousness of the battlefield. The once menacing left hand that filched and fired his first casualty’s K-32 Krieghoff Luger at Normandy, now thinly grasped a half-empty seidel. Slightly inebriated his mind attentively paid homage to the interior anomalies that he neglected to amend.
The phone rang startling him out of his reverie. “Hello,” He said, sitting down in his recliner.
“Happy birthday old man.”
“Hello Daniel.”
“Me and Sue were wondering if you wanted to go out for you grand old seventy-fifth,” Daniel said.
The old man let out an apologetic sigh. “Daniel I’m not up for it today, been a bit, a bit under…the weather.”
“Well we can drop--.”
“Some other time Danny boy, I’m so tired, thanks for calling but I’m very tired, ill give you a ring later, ” the senior bid his only child goodbye. The memory of his squad would not cease. Everyone from the acerbic Lieutenant Morgan to Captain Fairchild, but most vividly his own brother Jonah Everest, came rushing to him as raindrops in a great deluge of the past.
For months now the aging ex-G.I. made numerous otiose efforts to confabulate all to no avail. Even the incessant consumption of holy fermented grain, became abortive after the perpetual pattern of aurora and eventide. Eventually his will failed and his mind drifted into a state of abstract sentience.

“Private Everest!” A mail carrier shouted as he threw a letter onto a young private’s gurney. The young man unenthusiastically opened the envelope. The surrounding world was still in jubilation, the Great War was over and the axis was now defunct, yet Franklin Everest lay confined to an infirmary in France; his excitement was transient at best. As he unfolded the letter, he immediately saw the formal letterhead and the personalized salutation:
I am proud to inform you that the President of the United States has awarded you the Medal of Honor with citation to yourself, Private first class Franklin Everest, United States Army, for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of your life above and beyond the call of duty in action against enemy German forces at Normandy, France, 6 June 1944.
In keeping with custom, this Headquarters wishes to arrange a formal presentation of the medal and citation to you under such conditions and at such place as may suit your wishes and convenience.
I tender my sympathy and condolence in your bereavement over the loss of your platoon.

Sincerely General Abraham Brigham
A grin briefly made an appearance before the thoughts Jonah and his chimerical opinions emerged. His fists clenched together, fingernails digging into his palms, a masochistic attempt to fight back the tears swelling in his eyes.
“God I miss you!” he muttered with tears trickling down his cheek, he made a futile effort to reach for a photograph of his deceased brother that lay what seemed like an infinity of inches away.

The servile soldier sat idle overlooking the headstones of causalities from conflicts passed. The reverberation of the seventeen-gun salute for general Brigham still echoed inside his head; it was a stark contrast to the somber toned marathon of small memorials he attended for his infantry comrades. Families of the deceased and onlookers trekked through the grounds, ignorant of the aloof senior citizen clinching a glistening medal. Raindrops trickled down his forehead galling his eyes. With a coup d'oeil his faculty received a wake up call, and placed the medal in his pocket; He languished from head to toe, collapsing onto the damp soil. Hands now mired, he stroked his fingertips through the dirt that imprisoned his kin. Slowly he desired to no longer wage war on the essence of the warriors tacit creed.
‘Here Lies Jonah Everest’, after reading it the realization was still unfathomable even after more than a half-century. “Jo-Jo-nah,” he muttered summoning all the strength afforded to him; soiled hands now covering the detested departure date. “O…O brother…I’m so…so very…sorry.” The fluids that enriched the earth, aggregated with the teardrops of a deprived soul.
With a swig of whiskey from his flask, memories became crystalline.

Eyes still heavy at six-thirty a.m. the two brothers hunkered together, both their lineaments strewn with sand, blinding their vision. “Stay down!” the elder private commanded his brother, with his cubitus forcing him to, had the younger not obliged. A rapid glance up could be a death wish; wandering German artillery shells seem to take out the elements of the first infantry haphazardly. Clutching his M-1 Garand, Jonah Everest rose firing aimlessly into bluffs.
While his brother advanced only a few meters, young Everest lay frozen attempting to allay the surrounding ambience; shells separated soldier’s extremities, splattering their life fluid onto his fatigues. Surely it’s all just an excessively realistic lucid dream; and they’re still at their small ranch home in Ohio. Mom would be awakening them any second for breakfast, sausage omelets with blueberry flapjacks, which was her own specialty. He became disquieted when he could not spot Jonah through the haze of gun smoke and spewing earth.
“Jonah! Jonah!”
An opened hand rapped his shoulder and startled him, “Stay the hell down, Wait till I--.” In brevity, his brother paused, then immediately collapsed onto Private Everest.
“Jo-Jo,” he whispered to himself. “Jo-Jo! Get up Joe,” he commanded while shaking his brother violently. He shouted at his comrades, “Help! Someone! There was no response; his pleas were deafened by the cacophonies of warfare.
“God! Why him, help please anything help please do it!” he pleaded to the heavens pounding his brother’s chest plate, as acute pains ravaged his dorsum.

Doing away with plebeian sentiments, he wailed as if he were a newborn; clutching Jonah’s headstone as if it was going to vanish. “I’m so sorry,” he said while simultaneously hawking phlegm. “I didn’t deserve it. All I did was survive that’s all.” His arbitrary quest for brotherly absolution had rattled him. An open hand clutched his stomach moments before disgorgement, throughout the quick involuntary act he never managed to release his tight grip on the container; which contained but a few drops. “I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to,” he apologetically uttered while rummaging back his forelock.
“I-I should have been the one. Jo-Jonah I know, please…forgive….”
He became plagued by his own opinions of failing miserably, the expectations of his tutelary. Out of all deleterious pursuits he had undertaken only now did the storming of the German defilade seem to matter, for only it clamed the throne of the non-abdicable of memories. “It’s my…Fault. I knew it was an error, or…or…or some--.” With a flood of tears to accompany the monsoon of guilt he pulled his medal from his coat pocket; he stared at the eagle perched on a cross cannon.
“No!” As he turned it over, he released it from his grip. In what seemed like an instant the highest of honors sat there in the grass face down reading, ‘The Congress To.’ The eternal indelible name inscription now had a sticker over it bearing the name ‘Jonah Everest’.
In his trembling left hand he held his prized spoil, the Krieghoff Luger. Its thin bore hadn’t ejected a single slug in over half a century. “Brother, I wonder if this old thing still works.” He brought the barrel upwards to his sweaty temple. The years of uselessness had to in some manner come to a conclusion tonight. “I never deserved this! I didn’t appreciate it Jonah, I swear to you.” As he erected his posture he distinctly spoke, “but you did.” With one shot, a thunder of hundreds of decibels echoed across the quaint landscape. As the smoke arose and disappeared, he stood with an altitudinous left arm. “But you did. Thank You.” Finally a smile appeared as he placed the gun barrel down into the soil. “Good Job Soldier,” he said as he saluted his long gone brother, goodbye, with mettlesome honor.

[Maxim Litvinov]

Cool it with the thesaurus!

I'm sure it's a lovely story ... it's just that I can't finish it because you want to preface every damned noun with an adjective. Learn some self-restraint! Learn to write in a style designed to engage your audience and not set yourself on a pedestal of poetic pedantry above them.

Just my thoughts.

[| I, CWAS |]

never used a thesaurus in my life. Its literary fiction, demands a whole different mentality than mainstream. Maybe i still suffer from Iowa writers workshop syndrome. The point of literature is to be above the fray. Thats why it sells so little.

[Maxim Litvinov]

Look CWAS - I don't want it to look like I'm having a go at you, but then again I do want you to understand my criticism.

Irrespective of whether you use a thesaurus or not, it *seems* that you do... Nice words are *good*, but when you have a whole string of them - 'insouciant', 'wainscoted', 'tangible', 'brooked', 'jalousie', 'capriciousness' etc. etc. - you start to sound like someone who is using literature more as an outlet for their large vocabulary, rather than a way of connecting with other people.

It doesn't seem natural, but turgid. You can expect something similar from a 19th Century writer, but it seems pretentious from a 21st Century one.

I disagree that this is what 'literary, non-mainstream fiction' is about. Sure, use words that someone in the mainstream would have to look up in the dictionary. But use the words sparingly - because they capture the message you are trying to convey and bring it almost perfectly to the reader's eye, because the *feeling* that the reader gets from that particular word poetically conveys an impression that the mere literal reading cannot.

What the style feels like to me is that you're trying to build a wonderful castle of words for yourself. Not a marketplace for others to indulge in your feelings. Your castle has walls that cannot be climbed because there is no foothold of word recognition, and there is no door of easy emotional access either. Perhaps I'm wrong. And certainly I use terrible metaphors. But I just wanted to make sure my criticism registered.

[| I, CWAS |]

Look CWAS - I don't want it to look like I'm having a go at you, but then again I do want you to understand my criticism.

Irrespective of whether you use a thesaurus or not, it *seems* that you do... Nice words are *good*, but when you have a whole string of them - 'insouciant', 'wainscoted', 'tangible', 'brooked', 'jalousie', 'capriciousness' etc. etc. - you start to sound like someone who is using literature more as an outlet for their large vocabulary, rather than a way of connecting with other people.

It doesn't seem natural, but turgid. You can expect something similar from a 19th Century writer, but it seems pretentious from a 21st Century one.

I disagree that this is what 'literary, non-mainstream fiction' is about. Sure, use words that someone in the mainstream would have to look up in the dictionary. But use the words sparingly - because they capture the message you are trying to convey and bring it almost perfectly to the reader's eye, because the *feeling* that the reader gets from that particular word poetically conveys an impression that the mere literal reading cannot.

What the style feels like to me is that you're trying to build a wonderful castle of words for yourself. Not a marketplace for others to indulge in your feelings. Your castle has walls that cannot be climbed because there is no foothold of word recognition, and there is no door of easy emotional access either. Perhaps I'm wrong. And certainly I use terrible metaphors. But I just wanted to make sure my criticism registered.

That is just the way i compose. I've only read a handful of commercial or mainstream novels in 29 years. Even today The writers in the small world of literary fiction I'm in could recieve the same criticism. Are you familiar with nicholson baker? I know you have read James Joyce, I mean Ulyssess and Finnegans Wake even got to me after awhile.

I didnt think you were taking a shot. Alot of people misunderstand my style, which really isnt unique to me, its just the crowd I fall in with. And those people are usually the ones who read the magazines I publish in (which only run about 250-500 copies). I am thinking about developing some less insular works.

[Al Khabir]

*Applause!*

Excellent! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

[Slip, Freudian]

Twas good, I enjoyed it, even if English is not my first language. It really doesn't matter if you don't get all the words, you can always guess from context. It did seem a bit like a longer story boiled down into a novel though.

I liked the way things that had happened were in the focus here, and dictated the whole athmosphere of the novel. Reminds me of the Russian greats, like Tsehov. Not that your that a good a writer.

[megoingcritic]
If I would have written this, I would even have left out the whole war experience. Then I would have described the actions of an old man on his 75th birthday and the room he was in, maybe somehow subtly hinting to war. The picture of the brother would of course need to be there, maybe it was wide shot with some of the enviroment too. Essentially the same novel, but without the old mans memoirs, just his actions.
[/megoingcritic]

But thats just me, I suck as a writer.

[TROI]

It looks like what would be splattered on the wall behind a thesaurus that had just be shot in the head from close range.

[SueDeNîmes.]

A nimiety of prolix circumlocutions renders your prose virtually opaque.

[Hamilcar]

Thoroughly unreadable.