A short story that I wrote a while back for my English class. Constructive criticism on my writing in general would be much appreciated.
note: Death Note was my inspiration lol
Invite to Immortality
Her worn tennis shoes scuffed against the sidewalk, a sound lost to the rhythmic beat of the rain. It always rained now. Or at least, that was all Naomi remembered of the past two weeks. They passed like a grotesque dream – the kind that you could never escape from. You saw what was happening and knew it wouldn’t stop. You could only await the end of the spiral of pain. And this time, like in so many of those dreams, lay death.
Naomi never wanted to go to another funeral in her life. They forced her to admit that a part of her life was gone forever. She pulled her jacket tighter around her, hoping that the rain disguised her quiet sobs just as it did her tears. It never did take much to make her cry and she was ashamed of it. She was weak, unable to stand without her family and friends supporting her. And now, with her closest friend gone, she threatened to collapse.
She walked slowly into the warmth of the house, head down. Her mother smiled wearily at her. Naomi tried to return the small gesture, but couldn’t. Her head rolled down once more, facing the clean kitchen tiles before she ran up the stairs into her room without so much as taking off her shoes. She threw herself down on her bed, and lay there, limp. At last, the young girl dragged her body from the now damp sheets and stumbled over to her bedside desk. She collapsed into a sitting position and shakily opened the bottom drawer. Tears almost overtook her. Her hands quivering even more, she withdrew a thick, black journal. Its pages were slightly battered and beginning to yellow, but it’s cover spotless and black as the deep abyss.
Naomi hadn’t opened it or even so much as looked at it since she had first received it. She flipped through. The last worn page was smeared with black ink, a few lines of space left at the bottom. A week ago it had had her friend’s name scribbled in it. The spot where it had been was now also obscured by ink. She shook her head bitterly and flipped back to the first page.
Naomi locked her door and once more flopped boneless down upon her bed. Her hand groped around for a few seconds behind her desk-top lamp before her fingers closed on what she was looking for. A pen. An exceedingly strange pen. It was made up of convoluted strands of burnished metal that at the same time jaggedly conflicted yet melded smoothly into each other. Its point, stained black with ink, was long and cleanly tapered, yet it lacked the delicacy that would normally be expected. At the opposite end was a single rose, contradictory in its design just as the rest of the object. It seemed simultaneously crudely carved and worked exquisitely. Naomi thought it was ugly.
Now she picked it up. It felt almost icy in her hand. Gingerly, she lowered its tip to the paper. She drew a single vertical line and withdrew her hand. Naomi lay there, again frozen for a few seconds. She wrote the date slowly in the upper right corner. She shook her head again, stood up and, throwing down the pen, ran into the bathroom to wash up and get ready for bed.
She stuck her head into the room before coming in. The pen and journal lay motionless in the lamplight. Not long after, she began to write.
“...And she kept getting farther and farther away. I didn’t know what to do! She left the journal on my desk and I don’t know how why! And then she just came to me after school two days ago and threw the pen at me! What’s that supposed to mean!? And then my best friend has a heart attack and DIES. Why!? Why did she leave me alone..."
Naomi fell asleep with her bitter thoughts, and the journal lay open. Her soft, warm breath was the only sound to be heard in the room. Sluggishly, almost as though waking from a great slumber, the rose grew forth a tendril of her bitterness, curling and spreading until a single vine brushed her arm. Through the hours of the night, slowly it crumpled away becoming naught but dust. Perhaps they were ashes. Her name had appeared amidst the many black scribbles of the last page.
In the following days she continued to write out her thoughts and desires. She spilled her deepest held secrets out onto the brittle yellowed paper.
“...My mom says I spend too much time locked up in my room. It’s not like she cares. No one cares. I’m just a stupid crybaby. Worthless. That’s all I am! WORTHLESS, HELPLESS, HOPELESS!!! I couldn’t keep her from dying. It’s all my fault. It’s my own fault I’m alone now. And NO ONE CARES. ‘You should eat more, honey;’ ‘Why don’t you go out with your friends, dear,’ Yeah right.
I hate them. I hate them all.
“Winter break’s almost over. It still won’t stop raining.”
Every night she would fall asleep writing and every night the rose’s tendrils grew longer, wrapping around her arm and the pages which she had so passionately written. She would leave the light on and it would fall on her hand and its creations – its tools. The days stretched as though each was an eternity.
“...Now my friends hate me too. Now this is my only way out. This stupid book. They say I’m changing. They’re liars. No one ever tells me anything that matters. If they do, then they’re lying. They don’t care for me – they just use me for their own amusement and then they abandon me just like she did. WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME!? Why won’t anyone tell me what’s going on??”
Over time, Naomi grew thin and her bloodshot eyes almost glazed. She smiled when there was nothing to smile about and she threw fits every time her family and friends tried to talk to her. Eventually, they all gave up. She had stopped going to school as well. Her blonde hair became tangled and wild. Her name, scrawled in a messy, almost childish hand on the last page of the journal, had long since darkened.
“...I can’t breathe. It’s like her hands are around my throat. Oh God, she blames me. Everyday things keep getting darker and darker. They’re all laughing. All laughing at me. I can’t see. I can’t feel. I can’t breathe...
I know...now I know. She was running away from this. She wanted to save herself so she cursed me...too late...now it’s too late...”
Her face twisted into a grin.
The tendrils unfurled more quickly now. They wound up her arm, some whispering their dark secrets to the pale skin of her neck. The vines had grown thorns and they pierced her mind as they did the flesh of her wasted arm, poisoning her.
Naomi wrote deep into the night. Her mother had finally stopped turning off her daughter’s lamp, watching her fitful sleep, stopped whispering words of consolation. It hadn’t made any difference. They were blind to the ghastly nightmare blooming before them. She was left alone with her thoughts. And the journal. Alone with the vines and their seeds, which embedded themselves in her flesh. Her ragged nails sometimes clawed and scraped at the cover of the journal as she slept. At other times she was still -- trance-like, with her eyes just barely open. Either way, the binding showed no signs of wear. It remained its impregnable black.
It was a while before Naomi’s lifeless body was discovered, as she now looked little different than she had in the last days of her life, if her existence could even be called such at the time. Long now had she been dead in mind, and now her body paralleled its state. Her aching hand had grown still and cold. What little color had remained in her face disappeared. A funeral was arranged and all her neighbors and friends were to attend. When they moved her body, they had set the journal down on her bedside table, by the clock. Her name was no longer written in it. Like the ones before it, the crude letters were marked over in black. Past her name’s disappearance, its many pages were wiped completely blank.
The notebook flapped open. The pen rolled out from between its leafs.
A waterfall of ink-black paper fell from a pocket in the back cover, obscuring the cream-colored rug from view.
