The Letter

Ohanson@fit.edu

First of all, good story! Was an enjoyable read. The plot read almost like a novel, and I'm sure that if you went in and found a few subplots to twist and spice up, it would expand nicely.

The main thing that pulled me out of your work was the lack in punctuation. This is the same problem that I explained before. Just huge hulking sentences that gave me no time to take a mental break, or to even know when I was supposed to pause during a sentence. This caused me to get a little confused at parts, and I had to go back and re-read it, adding my own mental pauses.

Do you happen to know if they send letters like that? Or if that's how the mailroom really does operate?

I'm not entirely sure if you wanted it to be vague or not, but I don't think I'm entirely certain what happened with the father.

He went awol, I got that part. But then he wrote a letter to his son? So, did he infact just leave the family? If so - why the letter to the son? And how did the letter get in that corner? Did the father drop it in the mailbox on his way out of town? Or did it get mailed to the postoffice and then misplaced? If it did, wouldn't it have a telltale stamp on the envelope already that would cause the mailsorter to NOT put it back in the sorting pile?

I realize these are nitpicky things, but I was just curious.

Why did the son become an alcoholic? Was there a disposition towards alcohol already in the family? There were quite a few things that happened in this story, but so little 'why'. I find that the 'why' is what is most interesting.

I found it odd how you switched from past tense narrative to present tense. That very well might have been intentional, to show the passage of time, but I still found that it stuck out. Maybe because I don't often see tense changes, especially in short fiction.

There were only a few POV things that I picked out, but that's not so much my cup o' tea. I'm sure Survivor has that covered just fine.