Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-36393004-20191010220711/@comment-44037304-20191012144117

Overall, pretty good. Not scary, but a pretty tasty short story nonetheless. You're really good with descriptive language and I enjoyed the conversational tone. I lived in South Carolina at one point in my life, and I could definitely hear the Southern cadence in the writing as I was reading it.

I agree with the above comment about the first and last paragraph. The first paragraph could be removed entirely, and the last seems a bit odd; to the reader, at least, there isn't really any mystery as to what happened that night. Sounds like you're already aware of that, and I'm intrigued by what new ending you've come up with.

I've got a couple of other bits of feedback too.

I'm not sure if this is feasible given the length of the story, but Jeffrey Scott's character is pretty much only defined by the narrator telling us that he's a jerk. He's never actually demonstrated to be anything, which leads me to not know if the kid was really a jerk or if the narrator just had a bone to pick with him. Since the crux of the story is just "a kid accidentally kills another kid and his parents cover it up", this might not be entirely necessary. Alternatively, that kind of ambiguity itself actually could be played with if you wanted; the unreliable narrator is a pretty great way to add a sense of unease to a story. The story is still pretty good even with this, so you can ignore this bit of feedback pretty safely, but it's a thought I had while reading.

In this phrase, you use the word "old" twice in rapid succession. It would read better if you replaced one of those with a different adjective.

A few brown stitches in an old drop cloth, some old pine straw

This is a run-on sentence, although I'm pretty sure a typo just got you and you meant to put a period between "muscle" and "I".

I had passed a few rusted-out old Fords and I knew I could hide and squatted behind that holey heap of Detroit muscle I tried to catch my breath and waited for the horde to bound over that last hill I had crossed getting down here.