Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-29447668-20160805000618/@comment-24101790-20160805031903

"My rent would not be paid, and I would be evited, (evicted)"

"Please, dear God, let them pay the fare so we can be on our way. I don't want to be fired.' (apostrophe not needed)"

"He also paid no attention to the driver's please (pleas, not please) to pay the fare."

"I crept up behing the worst offedner (offender)"

"The young man had cursed his last curse." Curse his last curse if redundant.

"He looked at me, said "oh (Oh) shit" and..."

"We were all set to go and be ont time (on time) for work."

ETC.

Story issues: "Instead, they were either speaking in tongues - which nobody did outside church - or they were speaking Ebonics." feels off when the next line is easily decipherable: ""I don' gotta pay no goddam fare for no goddam ride, muthfucka,"" It's like saying they were speaking unintelligible gibberish and then translating it.

Story issues: You really need to cut back on the repetition. I know you're trying to establish a theme with 2 Thessalonians 3:10, but six times is a bit excessive ("The Bible said those who do not work shall not eat."). Anywhere more than four times comes off as a bit redundant especially when it feels more like padding than adding something new to the story. To put it in context, your story is about 21 paragraphs long, six of those paragraphs are the repeating line, so about a third of your story is just repetition. If it was more spaced out or the line felt like it had more of an impact (portraying the protagonist's fear of being jobless/homeless), but here it just feels like buffer.

Story issues cont.: "My right hand was in my purse, as if I were fishing for change to pay the fare for the young men." This begs the question, if she's really in such a hurry, why not just pay their fare or try to flag down a taxi? It feels like a pretty over-exaggeration for the protagonist to jump right into murder when there are other options.

There really isn't as much a sense of desperation to justify the stabbing. You build up the physical stress, but there isn't much history or backstory to drive the protagonist to murder. Maybe if she had been destitute previously and was terrified/traumatized, the stabbing might feel more justified/rationalized in the protagonist's eyes. Right now, it feels more like a 'Well, that escalated quickly' situation. The story could really use quite a bit of proof-reading, fleshing out the concept, and delving in to the reasonings of the unstable protagonist to really make the story more effective.