NIGHT RIDE Revision Options

[Psyche]

Night Ride

The ambulance slices thin night air through inconsequential streets. I sit in the back, beside the frail man. Oddly, I get the feeling that I’m in a camper: there’s the burner, bottled water in a corner, emergency kit, seats for kids.

We pitch and bounce over cobblestones in peripheral avenues. I worry about the frail man: internal ruptures, bleeding, that sort of thing… maybe something inside him will snap. His head rolls sideways and he drops a thin leg over the edge of the stretcher. Bending forward, I lift it back, but the medic says: "It’s OK, let him be, he’s well strapped in." I glance at him doubtfully. The medic languidly places a cushion to protect his head.

Street lamps peer at me through small ambulance windows, playing with shifting shadows in the hushed interior. Now and then a lone policeman on a corner lifts an arm in respectful salute. I spot silhouettes of drunken men stumbling out of late night bars. A few valiant prostitutes cluster nearby. The ambulance’s harsh beams focus briefly on their wary, scarlet lips. I wonder about them, their lives, their kids maybe, their men, different things… A startled night bird swoops up from a pile of rubbish, carrying nameless refuse in its beak. I shudder at the coarse scene. Other worlds, no less real than my own relatively sheltered one, pass in procession before my eyes.

I’d imagined the siren would have wailed constantly, but no, we make our soundless way through night time echoes, stopping at all the streetlights. Not an urgent case, I suppose, calculating in my mind the frail man’s earlier convulsions, the galloping fever, and his heart condition.

He still has a high fever. Back home, we’d been putting loads of iced-cubed towels under his armpits and on his groin, following instructions over the phone. Now he looks at me through the eyes of a scared child. I smile at him and hold his hand. He doesn’t appear to know me, but he grasps my hand weakly, unmoving, calmer now.

One more bend in the road and we’re in the Emergency Unit. The stretcher slides out neatly. Cool morning wind doesn’t care about the frail man wrapped in a light coverlet. Medics give orders, personnel in green move fast; things are under control, it seems. He’s hurried through a door that snaps at me: Restricted Area!

I wait on a hard black plastic chair. My mind wanders. For some reason, I remember the frail man waving his hand at me in greeting, as I used to descend the stairway from night university. He was straight and strong then, handsome. His smile was contagious, bursting with energy. We’d rush off to a nearby stand-up grill to eat good Argentine steaks, washed down with glasses of Mendocino wine. Then we’d stroll out to walk around the city streets for a while, before heading home.

Now I sit on the unfriendly chair and wonder how long they’ll keep the frail man in the Unit. Nearly five hours stagger by; my head nods regularly.

The hostile door swings open. A doctor tells me that I can take him home now. “Just keep putting ice-cubed towels on him, if the fever returns”, he says authoritatively. I dare to ask what treatment they’d given him. “Oh, nothing special”, remarks the doctor, “mainly we used ice”. “Oh…” I say dimly.

The ambulance drives us home; the frail man smiles faintly, perhaps remembering his welcome, secure bed. The return trip is slow, weaving through early morning, impatient traffic. The driver uses the siren intermittently.

I’m too tired to reflect on anything now, nor even to glance out the windows.

By Psyche

Sylvia Maclagan, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2007.
All rights reserved as an unpublished work.

[Guest_Cailean_*]

This was quite good with the right amount of description - not too much to slow down the action, while still enough to get a sense of place, albeit a "moving" place.

I think it's perfectly fine for having all your characters nameless. Names often can be overrated - if you keep your characters nameless they can be anyone. The frail man can be your brother, your father, your uncle, your son, your cousin, your lover. Each reader may have a different interpretation on who the frail man is to them and it will affect their interpretation of the story. If you, for example, name him "Dave", readers will go "Well, that sounds like my uncle Osbert, but he's called Dave instead, oh well." and there can be a level of distance. The "everyman" concept, combined with in some ways a minimalist structure of description works well for this illusion. I was told by a sales teacher once "Tell me and I'll forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will understand" and I feel that this "less is more" style is involving the reader.

We don't know his name and the only actual descriptive terms we receive of him is when he's actually well - straight, strong and handsome, these are all possible attributes to everyone once again, straight and strong can be quite subjective as well as handsome. I feel that the way you have written this, as I mentioned on my poem, is a strength rather than a weakness.

OK, now to the nits :) You tend to capitalize a few things that I wouldn't have, it's a minor aside but I feel the text would flow easier without the capitalizations (Night University - unless that's the name of the university, rather than just a university that is attended at night, Emergency Unit but oddly I would keep "Restricted Area"). On the other side of the coin, since you are attempting to create a feeling of speed (and in many places, that speed is quite apparent, good stuff! :) ) you might want to speed it up a little more with using shorter sentences and have a more "broken up" sentence style. Even single word sentences work rather well (technically speaking they are extremely grammatically incorrect, but what have rules done for us lately, eh? :) ). Although we don't need the speed of a car chase, I feel that the pacing could be sped up a little more, especially describing the journey. Your nameless protagonist (also undescribed, but that's perfectly fine! Helps with relation if the reader sees themselves as "I") and her/his musings don't need to be sped up unless there's a specific reason they need to be faster, however! I personally don't see that, her/his thoughts should tumble out at an appropriate speed and I don't feel they need to. Your call.

Just a few suggestions, but ultimately it's a matter of personal taste :) However, your somewhat minimalist description style works rather well - not everyone can. In some ways it's not minimalist but some people may consider it such since some writers can describe pretty much everything while in this piece you are concentrating on what really matters. That I can appreciate! I deplore pointless detail for the sake of detail, there are no wasted words here.

(If I post Forsaken sometime, the story I mentioned with the undescribed protagonist, you'll see the similarity I am sure! You may see some similarities between this piece and Under a Twin-Moon Sky here, where the protagonist has a name and an ethnicity but we learn more about how she feels rather than what she looks like.)

This Critique was created with the assistance of Western Australian Shiraz, for better or worse!

Cailean

[Psyche]

HI Cailean!
Thank you so much for your highly insightful comments. I've read everything and have taken note of the nits. I've also learnt things from you.
I'll see about the capitalized words and anything else that may occur to me in relation to your commentary.
I'm relieved that you don't mind nameless characters! I like to experiment with different styles, tho' mainly I try to concentrate on one issue in a story. How different from the classics! I'm presently reading The Brothers Karamazov, where Dostoviesky takes the liberty of writing LONG chapters which include several twists & turns, and descriptions are numerous, both of characters and places...Well, another time, another context!
I hope to revise my story asap., must go out now.
Thanks and good luck!
Sylvia

This was quite good with the right amount of description - not too much to slow down the action, while still enough to get a sense of place, albeit a "moving" place.

I think it's perfectly fine for having all your characters nameless. Names often can be overrated - if you keep your characters nameless they can be anyone. The frail man can be your brother, your father, your uncle, your son, your cousin, your lover. Each reader may have a different interpretation on who the frail man is to them and it will affect their interpretation of the story. If you, for example, name him "Dave", readers will go "Well, that sounds like my uncle Osbert, but he's called Dave instead, oh well." and there can be a level of distance. The "everyman" concept, combined with in some ways a minimalist structure of description works well for this illusion. I was told by a sales teacher once "Tell me and I'll forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will understand" and I feel that this "less is more" style is involving the reader.

We don't know his name and the only actual descriptive terms we receive of him is when he's actually well - straight, strong and handsome, these are all possible attributes to everyone once again, straight and strong can be quite subjective as well as handsome. I feel that the way you have written this, as I mentioned on my poem, is a strength rather than a weakness.

OK, now to the nits :) You tend to capitalize a few things that I wouldn't have, it's a minor aside but I feel the text would flow easier without the capitalizations (Night University - unless that's the name of the university, rather than just a university that is attended at night, Emergency Unit but oddly I would keep "Restricted Area"). On the other side of the coin, since you are attempting to create a feeling of speed (and in many places, that speed is quite apparent, good stuff! :) ) you might want to speed it up a little more with using shorter sentences and have a more "broken up" sentence style. Even single word sentences work rather well (technically speaking they are extremely grammatically incorrect, but what have rules done for us lately, eh? :) ). Although we don't need the speed of a car chase, I feel that the pacing could be sped up a little more, especially describing the journey. Your nameless protagonist (also undescribed, but that's perfectly fine! Helps with relation if the reader sees themselves as "I") and her/his musings don't need to be sped up unless there's a specific reason they need to be faster, however! I personally don't see that, her/his thoughts should tumble out at an appropriate speed and I don't feel they need to. Your call.

Just a few suggestions, but ultimately it's a matter of personal taste :) However, your somewhat minimalist description style works rather well - not everyone can. In some ways it's not minimalist but some people may consider it such since some writers can describe pretty much everything while in this piece you are concentrating on what really matters. That I can appreciate! I deplore pointless detail for the sake of detail, there are no wasted words here.

(If I post Forsaken sometime, the story I mentioned with the undescribed protagonist, you'll see the similarity I am sure! You may see some similarities between this piece and Under a Twin-Moon Sky here, where the protagonist has a name and an ethnicity but we learn more about how she feels rather than what she looks like.)

This Critique was created with the assistance of Western Australian Shiraz, for better or worse!

Cailean