One-Shot Accidental Suicide

[Nemec]

This is my longest story ever. And least worked on. I guess kind of a NaNoWriMo practice. 1154 words in 5 hours. I'm gonna fail WriMo so bad. |D
Oh, and I didn't proofread this, so there are going to be loads of mistakes. Try to ignore them for now, enjoy the actual story, and don't worry, I will post a proofread one... Some other time.

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Lexi sighed as she stepped off the bus. She hated coming home from school. There were too many familiar faces. None of them understood her. They were either too immature or under the impression that she was too immature.

As slowly as she possibly could, Lexi walked up to her front door. Now that she thought about it, no one a school really understood her, either. She was just on the fringes of the group of people whom she called ‘friends’. They weren’t really friends, just people she could talk to on a regular basis. They didn’t help her when she was having trouble, never thought to even ask what was wrong when she sat alone at lunch sometimes. They often made fun of her emotional instability. When she got frustrated or overwhelmed, she’d start to cry.

The anger that usually smoldered in Lexi’s chest stirred as she opened the front door. Did she have anyone who really cared anymore? As a kindergartener, she remembered having plenty of friends. Of course, this was also before her stepfather joined the family, bringing with him his little spawn of demons.

Lexi walked quickly down the hall of her house, ignoring her mother, as usual, who asked how school was. Her anger ignited into a small flame as she bit back tears. She used to be a normal little girl, who lived with a normal brother two years older than herself, named Jake, and a normal father, named Chris.

Upon entering her bedroom, Lexi let the tears fall, her chest now a searing white-hot flame. At the age of four, her father died in a plane crash on the way back from a business trip to France. The brother and sister were forced to live with their mother, who had a divorce with Chris a year after Lexi was born. Signs of depression started around this point in Lexi’s life.

Lexi flung her backpack onto the floor beside her bed, which was too expensive for her liking. When she started living at her mother’s, she hated it. Her new parents were rich, so spent money on Lexi rather than actually loving her. Jake was the only one at the time to keep her from going into a deep depression. She couldn’t help but be happy around him and his light-hearted attitude about everything. Soon, her mother gave birth to her stepfather’s twins. As soon as the boys were brought home from the hospital, Lexi could see the difference between love for the twins and love for her and Jake. Yet Jake still seemed to keep Lexi from depression.

When Lexi was fifteen, Jake went out with some friends to a rock concert. He never came back. A drunk driver had hit and killed the only hope left in Lexi’s life.

Everything just got worse from there. The week of the accident, Lexi found physical pain could temporarily block out emotional pain. This started simply by her biting her hand when a painful memory came up, and quickly evolved into cutting. She started cutting wherever someone couldn’t see. Her thighs, upper arms, and wrists seemed to be the most common cutting places.

Lexi stood over the sink, looking at the mirror placed on the wall above it. Her face disgusted her. Tangled, dyed-black hair framed her sickly pale, tear-streaked face. Zits formed in clumps around her forehead, cheeks, and chin. Dark circles surrounded dull, bloodshot, dark blue eyes.

Fresh tears spilled over in response to seeing such a pitiful face. Lexi reached for the rusted razor blade she hadn’t used in months. She brought it to her wrist, but hesitated. She wanted temporary relief, not long-term diseases. After throwing the old blade in the trashcan placed beside the sink, Lexi opened the bathroom cabinet, and grabbed a disposable shaving razor and a small screwdriver. She unscrewed the blades from the shaver. She now had two new, shiny razor blades to pick from.

The events of the last few years flashed before her eyes as she reached for a blade. They grew brighter and more vivid as she brought the razor closer to her wrist. The muscles in her arm tensed at the feel of the cold metal object. Lexi was practically reliving her past by the time she tilted the blade and applied more pressure. Her mind was now focused on the prick of the point at which the blade met her arm. She winced as the blade cut through her skin. Lexi dragged the blade across her wrist, blood welling up at where she had already been.

She removed the blade from her arm, fearing she might have overdone it. She couldn’t help noticing that it seemed deeper than usual. Though it wasn’t that bad, she decided she would stop for now. Lexi cleaned the blood off of the blade, and then commenced with doing the same for herself until she was fairly sure she wasn’t bleeding anymore. She felt slightly light-headed.

Slowly, she went back into the bedroom to her stereo system, plugged up her iPod, and set it to shuffle. As she was turning away, a smudge of red caught her eye. She quickly looked back, seeing a bloody fingerprint on the iPod. Lexi quickly looked at her wrist. It was still bleeding. She also noticed a trail of blood droplets from the bathroom door to the stereo.

She rushed back to the bathroom, tripped, and found the ground was spinning underneath her. She tried multiple times to get up, failing each time. Eventually she gave up and noticed she was in a growing puddle of blood.

Lexi came to the realization that she was loosing too much blood. Her vision started getting fuzzy, and her life started to flash before her, as if someone had recorded her life and was replaying to her, backwards, and speedup. Eventually, it seemed as if this someone had pressed pause. Then play.

It was when Lexi was eight. She was talking to Jake in a field near their new parents’ house.

“Hey, Lex?”

“Yeah?”

Jake turned to Lexi. “Can you promise me something?”

Lexi looked suspicious. “What is it?”

“If I die, don’t hurt or kill yourself, okay?”

Lexi looked puzzled. “Why would I ever do that?”

Jake shrugged. “I just saw something on the news about someone being really sad about losing someone, so he killed himself.”

Lexi still looked puzzled. “Well that’s stupid.”

“Can you still promise it?”

“Okay. It’s not like I’ll do that anyway.”

The someone paused it again, as if waiting for some feedback.

“Well I fucked up.” Lexi murmured. Her senses started failing. She couldn’t feel the floor. She couldn’t smell the blood. She couldn’t hear her half-twin brothers playing in the house. Everything in her vision faded to black.

At the age of seventeen, Lexi committed suicide after grieving for her brother for three years, and her father for thirteen years.

 

[Butterfree]

Huh.

I... guess I just don't quite see the point of this. Girl's life sucks, she cuts herself, it unintentionally kills her. Oops? It's sort of neither here nor there - it's weird for a story about suicide because she never actually intended to die to begin with, but it's also weird for a story about an accident because it spends so much time telling us why it would make sense for her to actually want to commit suicide.

It may be that you were going for her subconsciously trying to kill herself while insisting to herself that it's completely accidental, but if that was the case, it didn't really come across in the text. We see her actually worrying that she might have overdone it, for one, and that kind of fervent denial seems like it would be more likely to arise if she were actually thinking about her promise to Jake, but there's no sign that she remembers their conversation until at the end. This would be far more effective if you showed us the promise first, had her thinking about it throughout, telling herself she's not breaking it if she just hurts herself a little, and then just guiltily imagining Jake's sorrow/disappointment as she dies.

If you were actually going for the "totally an accident" angle, meanwhile, then this would probably work better if you made her feel less suicidal, had her actually panic when she realizes she's dying, made her reaction to breaking her promise to Jake a bit more emotional than just "Oh, well, I guess I fucked that up."

Also, it really bothered me that she somehow managed to clean herself, think she'd stopped the bleeding and walk back over to her room completely without noticing the blood dripping down, particularly if it's dripping fast enough for her to be dying this soon. You can not notice you're bleeding if it really wasn't bleeding last time you looked at it, but significant quantities of blood dripping down your hand isn't something that should just completely escape your attention, especially not if you were just earlier trying to stop a bleeding exactly there - even if you tentatively think you've stopped it, you'd be glancing at it every now and then for a bit afterwards to make sure. I suppose this can work at a bit of a stretch if we assume she's just in denial, but again this really isn't hinted in any way in the text.

And, though I'm cautious to say this in case this is in any part based on personal experience (please do not take this as an assumption if it is not; I just like to err on the side of caution), her circumstances seem a little overblown, at least as they're currently described. Nobody understands her, her 'friends' make fun of her, her father dies in an accident, her stepfather and his children are terrible people, her mother loves those children more than her, her brother dies in an accident as well - it's the sort of "too much" piling-up of problems that are all elaborately not the fault of the supposedly sympathetic characters that characterizes angst-Sues, and as a result Lexi just overshoots being sympathetic. Her father and brother both dying in accidents is especially an offender here: fatal accidents are quite rare, and the odds of two of them completely coincidentally striking the same family ten years apart are astronomically small. Somebody losing two close family members is something that works out much better if their deaths are causally linked somehow (for example, if they'd died in the same accident, or, more viably here, if her brother had also become depressed, turned to drinking to cope with it, and subsequently he was the drunk driver that caused his own death).

It may be hinted here (when her mother asks her how school was, "as usual", but Lexi deliberately ignores her) that her mother cares about her but Lexi doesn't notice because she's too caught up with wallowing in her own misery, which opens the interpretation that Lexi may be an unreliable narrator, that she's just jealous of the younger twings, that actually she's just imagining her friends making fun of her and that the reason they don't ask her what's wrong is just that she doesn't indicate it and doesn't attempt to tell them her problems. And this would be fine - this is very likely exactly how many unhappy teens feel, and it's an interesting concept to explore. However, the lack of definitive hints towards this interpretation combined with the two presumably real accidents cause her to remain on the artificially-piled-up-angst side nonetheless. I would suggest you either tone it down a little or give a little more in the way of hints that her mind is exaggerating her situation, depending on how you intended it, and definitely make the actual accidents not quite so much of a lighting-strikes-twice thing. This would make her situation more identifiable and realistic.

(If you have actually lost two close family members in unrelated accidents, this is why a writer's job is harder than God's, to paraphrase How Not to Write a Novel. Nobody's going to complain when something extremely unlikely happens in the real world, because that doesn't change that it actually happened. Your story did not actually happen, unless it's an autobiography, and therefore you won't get away with making extremely unlikely things happen unless the story is specifically about exploring the consequences of this unlikely event.)

Finally, some of your word choices really don't pack the punch they ought to. This applies especially to this bit:

Her vision started getting fuzzy, and her life started to flash before her, as if someone had recorded her life and was replaying to her, backwards, and speedup. Eventually, it seemed as if this someone had pressed pause. Then play.

This isn't worded like someone is dying; the record player analogy is just rather too mundane, and the way it brings up a "someone" who had apparently been doing the recording is awkward, almost comical (I picture a literal tape player somewhere in a corner of the room, with a disembodied hand pushing the buttons). We are all familiar with the concept of one's life flashing before one's eyes as one dies; you don't need to provide an analogy to invoke it in the reader's mind at all. Rather than discuss a "someone" who "pauses" the recording, you could just as well simply say that something within her lingered on this one particular memory, and instead of "someone" pausing it again afterwards, let her remember her brother looking at her, suddenly seeing accusation in his eyes. Or something like that; this, at least, is not the way to portray the seriousness of the situation.

In a similar vein, your description from the cutting onwards is jarringly impersonal. Instead of showing us the emotional release she experiences to let us understand why she does it, you focus instead on a detailed physical description of precisely what she's doing with the blade (I don't know about anybody else, but I personally found it kind of squicky; that doesn't have to be a bad thing, as there is certainly merit in portraying the full unpleasantness of something like self-harm in a way that makes the reader feel uncomfortable, but I'm not sure it was necessary here), and then you continue in a tell-ish, summarized way to describe her washing it and returning to her room, the same way you'd talk about her brushing her teeth in the morning. You even find the time to talk about her iPod and whether she set it to shuffle or something else. It would be better to include more relevant detail and be closer to Lexi in this bit: "She looked anxiously at her wrist. Was it too much? The cut seemed deeper than usual. She watched it for a moment as it continued to bleed, then quickly turned on the faucet to wash the blade as the red on her wrist trickled down her arm and into the sink. It usually didn't bleed this much. She put the clean blade down beside the sink and put her arm under the faucet instead; it stung as the blood was washed away..." Et cetera. It would also be more believable that she would fail to notice it's still bleeding if you dwelt on what she is thinking about while she walks back to her room instead.

...now that I look over the bits before this again, how does she suddenly appear in the bathroom? She goes to her bedroom after coming home, reminisces about when the twins were born, goes on to think about her brother's death, then cutting, and then all of a sudden she's in the bathroom about to cut herself. Also, if she hasn't cut in months, what triggered her sudden relapse - why is she thinking about all this stuff now? It would work out better if you started with some sort of incident that actually reawakens these memories instead of a routine school day; otherwise we get the feeling we're seeing an average day and thus that she cuts, if not every day, at least very frequently.

I won't touch the errors, since you admitted this isn't proofread; I'll just say that you really ought to proofread everything before you post it, as a general rule. Not proofreading always results in leaving in embarrassingly silly typos and the like.

 

[Nemec]

Thank you so much for the crit. I wrote this thinking more about just writing a short story than the actual story itself. I'm thinking about just re-writing it altogether, making each part of her life a chapter, instead of just sticking in pieces of her past, and just thinking everything through.

Again, I thank you for the crit. I'm going to go proofread this now.