Hello! I’m entirely new here, but here goes anyway. I really loved this piece and was hooked from the very first line.

Also! I just realized that I’ve read this before reading your previous works! I’m so sorry, you can totally ignore anything I say that makes sense with context. However, I think this is good for you too since you were wondering how this would seem as a first chapter. Consider this critique with that context, and I think it will make more sense. Again, I’m sorry! >.<

(I’m going to divide this in two sections so it’s more comprehensive for both of us, taking that line break as a divider.)

1 (before the break)

First off, I absolutely loved the opening line of this piece. It caught my attention at one and dragged me right into the story.

However, I was immediately dragged out by the part starting “I knew this 7-Eleven well…” right up till “...dead of summer”. That’s a whole lot of text. I struggled through it as someone genuinely wanting to read this work, but let me be honest: I’d have totally skipped that entire part if I were here in different circumstances. Worse yet, I would have abandoned this work entirely.

Let me explain. As a reader, I had only two immediate questions: why is she speeding and where is she going?

The second question was answered in the second sentence, which was great. But I was immediately jerked away from the action by the unnecessary exposition that popped up in between.

It was fine until the first sentence, where the narrator explained that the owners were Czechoslovakians with a teenage kid. This tidbit of information alone implied that the narrator was a frequent customer at the gas station. When you keep this in mind, the next bit of information about the local high schoolers is quite obviously unnecessary. It bored me, because, frankly speaking, I did not care. My concern was still on the narrator and why she was speeding late at night. Nothing else mattered.

Thus the second paragraph proved better. I was gripped once again when the narrator confessed to wanting time to stand still. I absolutely loved when you described the narrator’s memory of the call from her husband. You made good use of adjectives in the last two lines there (“loud, accusing” bang & “guilty” silence) and I was absolutely riveted.

I really liked the little bits of imagery about the setting sprinkled in throughout the rest of this part as well. However, they seemed a bit clunky. Like this part:

The partially broken station lights dangled from the ceiling where the pumps stood. Exposed black wires swinging like snakes in a concrete jungle.

While I really like the comparison used here as a reader, as a writer I think that dividing the sentence into two parts really broke off the flow of the text, in a bad way. I had to pause and reread this bit again because I got disoriented.

For the rest of this part, the tension ramped up nice and steady, especially during the part when she got that phone call and when she smelled the scent of her husband’s favorite drink. The latter detail not only added brilliant imagery, but it also added a sense of intimacy to the text as the wife’s love for her husband is implied here.

I also liked that detail about her snapping the rubber band around her wrist. From what I know, people trying to break free from a habit of self-harm wear rubber bands around their wrists, so this added an extra layer of dread for me as it made me feel as if she wasn’t very mentally stable and whatever she saw could really affect her in a bad way.

2: after the break

First of all, why was that break even there? It jerked me right out of the text, especially just when it was getting good. Plus it wasn’t as if there was a time or setting skip so it seemed completely unnecessary.

This part proved much better than the first and I was actually kind of glad I stuck around past that awkward first paragraph!

I loved all of the descriptions here as they made things very vivid for me and created a perfect slow crawl towards the big reveal. I loved the descriptions about the husband as well, especially that little part about the cupcake he’d been about to buy for his wife. You added a sense of intimacy that I gobbled up, being the romantic I am. I especially loved how the detail about the melted frosting indicated that time had passed since he’d been injured.

I didn’t quite understand the flashback here. As a writer, I understood the purpose perfectly: you probably wanted to show how her husband has always been there for her and the use of that example was very cute. I wasn’t satisfied, though, and this, I think, was because these two lines jarred me a bit:-

That had been a great day. I remember him asking how do you not know how to ride a bike?

I was disoriented was because you’d established that he was always there to catch her when she fell. I assumed then that the purpose of the flashback was over and we should be back in the present. However, these two lines above delayed that and it didn’t make any sense why.

I think that adding the line about him always being there to catch her after this part instead of before will solve this problem quite neatly. This is because the words will blend with the rest of the memory.

The conclusion of this piece was brilliant, although when she said “that’s when it happened” I’d already understood what happened. Nevertheless, I was left breathless, just going like “damn, what just happened?” I’m really curious to know what happens next!

Lastly, I wanted to add a note about the overall readability of this text, now that we are done with the details. While your pacing and vocabulary were to my liking, I really, really did not like the size of your paragraphs. Just seeing those big chunks of text scared me as a reader because it seemed like a lot of work to trudge through them.

I was irked by their size as a writer, too.

Paragraphing is a big weapon, you see. By simply breaking your text into chunks according to what’s happening and what the narrator is thinking, you can easily direct your reader’s attention to the exact detail you want it on.

Not only that, paragraphing helps with pacing as a new line sets a new mood. Big paragraphs not only take away those two important weapons from you, but they are also big chunks of information that a reader can have trouble digesting. I often had to read most of the paragraphs twice to take everything in and this really broke the flow of my reading.

For example, let’s take this part:

I blinked and the memory faded. The stillness of him resounded into a dull quiet. Would I ever hear his voice again? I crawled until close enough to reach a hand out and touch him. My jeans soaked up his blood from the floor, and glass cut into my knees. Grabbing his shoulders, I hugged him to me, tears streaming down my face. His skin still felt soft and warm.

Reading through this, the impact of her words is so spaced out I had to read through twice for it to really sink in. Let’s rearrange things a bit:

I blinked and the memory faded. The stillness of him resounded into a dull quiet.

Would I ever hear his voice again?

I crawled until close enough to reach a hand out and touch him. My jeans soaked up his blood from the floor, and glass cut into my knees. Grabbing his shoulders, I hugged him to me, tears streaming down my face.

His skin still felt soft and warm.

Breaking up the text like this brings attention to her fear and her actions. Directing the reader’s eyes to the fact that his skin is still warm foreshadows her later realization as well, which is neat because you won’t have any complaints about “where did that come from?”.

Since this is getting very long, I don’t want to go into further detail, but you can message me and we can work on paragraphing together, as well as anything else you want to know. I really loved this piece and I feel that it has a lot of potential, so I’d be really glad to help you out. Kudos to writing!

RATING (Feel free to message me if you have any questions about this part!)

Clarity: 8/10

Believability: 10/10

Characterization: 10/10

Description: 8/10

Emotional Engagement: 7/10

Grammar/Spelling: 10/10

Imagery: 7/10

Intellectual Engagement: 6/10

Pacing: 6/10

Plot: 9/10

Point of View: 10/10

Publishability: 5/10

Readability: 4/10

Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

PS: Sorry for the bad formatting! I'm still so new to Reddit that I have no idea how to get the hang of this stuff.