The Weeping Pool
Sharpsburg.
On the night after the cornfield fight, the Devil took upon itself the form of a woman and went out among the dead.
I was leaning on my musket by the west edge of the corn, watching the moon raise its poxy face above the trees. The damp made my musket barrel sweat and my bum leg ache, and it got deep into my lungs and made me bust out coughing. Tubercular vapors rise from the earth at night—according to the Sanitary Commission man—and I rasped and hacked so hard I thought for sure I had caught the bloody flux. When I finally stopped I felt like I had a week’s worth of breathing to catch up on. That was when I saw the Devil, a couple rods from my picket post.
The thing I took to be the Devil—or at least a devil—began as a wisp of foxfire. It was hovering over a dead man in a blue sack coat, who was sprawled on his back with an arm thrown across his face. After a moment, the light glided over to another corpse and hovered again. It was a soft, vague glow, like a candle guttering in a green glass bottle.
The dead were mostly Massachusetts infantry, mixed in with Texians and Virginians. We had quarreled with the blue coats over those twenty acres of corn all day but neither side had been strong enough to wrest the field from the other. At dusk, both parties had retreated to the surrounding woods, we to the east and the blue coats to the west. We left our dead behind us on the trampled, bloody stalks.
[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited December 13, 2004).]
I had problems with this passage:
quote:
As the light approached it sharpened up and resolved into the form of a woman, as if she were emerging from the depths of a deep pool. Her features undulated and rippled like a magic lantern image cast on water.
It seems to me that the analogy about light resolving into an image is too technically advanced for the central charcter. Also, two 'as ifs' in a row are too much. (as if = like). Would it make sense to just delete the second half of the first sentence quoted above and change 'resolved' into 'turned'?
[This message has been edited by mikemunsil (edited December 07, 2004).]
R
For purposes of posting on this forum, though, all you need is the first three of your paragraphs. I've noticed that when people exceed the 13 line limit by more than a couple of lines, they don't tend to attract as many readers for the entire text. There are probably several reasons, but it's something to keep in mind along with the stated purpose of that limit (which is to help protect your rights to sell the work to a publisher).
Interesting name, by the way. I'll crit what you've got, and give you suggestions on where I think the ending should go whether you like it or not, neh?
I'll take a look, though can't tell you when exactly I'll get to it.