Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25364542-20141028051310

''This is a story I wrote a year or two ago called B. Like I said, criticism is welcome and appreciated (seriously, as long as it's constructive I won't get upset, so be as harsh as you feel you need to). Anyway, here's the story:''

Sue worried about him after he dropped her off that night. She often worried but was usually able to talk herself into relaxing, but not tonight. It was the look in his eyes as she got out of the car, so sullenly dark, so hopeless. B was often troubled, the boy had demons that was evident, but he never really let much more than vague statements give clues about his personal or family life before they started dating several years prior. She never pressed the matter not wanting to cause him any additional grief as he sometimes went into periods of inconsolable gloominess, and would often bottle up his feelings and attempt to drink them away. She called out of worry but the call went straight to voice mail. Given the late hour and her own lack of transportation she decided to let it rest until the morning and went to bed, though she lay awake many hours, eventually falling into a restless sleep. ​B stepped out of the car after cutting the engine. He moved his eyes slowly downward as though he didn’t want to get a very close look at what laid in his wake. Sure he had been drinking a little, but he was a careful enough person. He simply hadn’t seen him, it was a dark night sure, but the man had come out of nowhere it seemed. ​He could only muster a weak shout in the body’s direction, but he received no response. “Oh god!” he sobbed putting his head in his hands, “What have I done?” He began to weep and screamed, “As if I’m not miserable enough!” crying loudly and kicking the driver’s side door, eventually falling to a sitting position on the ground, propping himself up against his car. He became immediately silent as the slain man let out a weak, mangled sound. B crawled over to the man and it was only when he had brought himself down close to the man’s face that he recognized the noise as laughter. B reached his hand toward the man but drew away as his initial confusion gave way to uneasiness and then fear, seeing the man move his mangled body to what resembled a sitting position, his laughter becoming nothing more than the cackle of a mad man. Though he tried, B couldn’t manage to produce words. The desire quickly left him as their eyes met. The laughter ceased immediately. Hatred, not mere anger or contempt, but cold, festering hatred, filled the man’s entirely black eyes, the hatred felt toward someone who has wronged you irreparably, the type that cannot be soothed with time but, rather, feeds on it. The fearful expression on B’s face gave way to one of disbelief with a wave of confusion, he forgot the man, thinking only of what he began see in those horrid black pits. He sank slowly to his knees, but his eyes remained fixed. In those eyes he saw many people, he recognized some though he couldn’t remember from where, their eyes replaced with those same hate-filled voids. B suddenly became aware that he was sobbing uncontrollably, and, the spell that held his eyes seeming broken, he moved his eyes slowly down, his whole body falling onto the gravel and dirt making up the side of the road. His face took on a blank expression and he ceased crying. The man was the first to break the long silence, “Fitting, n’est pas?” His chipper tone belied the hatred in his eyes, though his voice seemed familiar, “Glad I went for one last grand tragedy, always nice to pull blood from stone.” He smiled. “Who or what are you, what the hell is going on?” B demanded exasperatedly. The man put his finger to his lips, “I am who you made me.” The man replied plainly. “What do you mean? Who were they? Why do they seem so familiar?” B demanded, panic showing in his voice. ​“Oh them? Just memories now,” the man snorted with malice smiling to himself, “But of course you don’t remember.” ​“Stop feeding me riddles you son of a-,” B gasped as the man stood up, no longer the feeble form he had been, and lifted him up by the front of his shirt until he was once again looking into the abyss of his eyes. He saw the same people but something clicked in his head this time, confused anxiety giving way to terrible comprehension. Suddenly B found himself there surrounded by all of them and he knew why they hated him. It was everyone he had ever hurt, lied to, harmed in any way. He remembered all the terrible things he had done, repressed, and with this recognition the hate in their eyes became his own. He understood it now, he hated himself. ​B snapped to as he landed on the roadside, the man looming over him though the figure was no longer strange. “And at last the blind man doth see,” The figure said mockingly. “You see, everyone has demons, evil things they’ve done, people they’ve harmed or have harmed them, but you, you let those demons in, and so that’s what you became, that’s what you are.” ​B looked up at him knowingly, and he became suddenly very tired extending his arm feebly toward the man as he watched him walk toward his car, get in, and fire up the engine. As the car pulled away B looked one last time at the figure sitting within, and though he felt that he couldn’t be looking at himself, he knew no one would ever be able to tell the difference. B closed his eyes. 