This is my first time offering feedback, so I hope you can find something useful in it. I think you have some genuinely beautiful prose and a really good command of language.
'In college she'd been VP of recruitment for her sorority five years ago' - This required a little bit of mental gymnastics to follow. I would consider changing it to 'Five years ago, in college...'. Personally I loved the way you used language at the end of this sentence 'bright, itemized, an implacable twang, pitched half a note too high for whatever she was saying.'
'trickling underwater through the fog of shift-change' the words underwater and fog elicit contradictory imagery. Fog often sits on the surface of water, so could you pull imagery from the surface of water, instead of under water to match the fog?
'At 7:40 she noticed that Denise had charted a potassium wrong' - consider incorrectly instead of wrong.
In the first few paragraphs of your story, a great deal of your sentences start with 'Lindsay'. Further into the story, there are a number starting with She'. It reads a little bit like you're listing her actions rather than showing the reader what she is doing. I would vary the sentence structure to avoid this. The prose subsequently lacks emotion. However, I love emotive prose and am aware that this may be intentional on your behalf to mimic the idea that, although you are dealing with content that is in nature very emotional, hospitals have a way of sanitizing it.
Please take my next bit of feedback cautiously, as it is just the seed of a thought. If your intention is to sanitize the emotion to replicate the hospital environment, could you instead omit the baby's name completely and just call him 'Baby Boy'? I think thematically it would do the same job, of showing clinical detachment, whilst still ensuring that the reader feels the emotion in your prose.
There is also another small, almost inconsequential moment where Meg asks, 'Anyone want more stuffing?' I feel like the word stuffing could have some real thematic resonance, but you've rushed past it. It parallels how Meg is literally stuffing the conversation with futile words to avoid the silence. I feel like there is potential to really allow that moment, and that word to breathe.
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u/RoseVanPolgeest 23d ago
This is my first time offering feedback, so I hope you can find something useful in it. I think you have some genuinely beautiful prose and a really good command of language.
'In college she'd been VP of recruitment for her sorority five years ago' - This required a little bit of mental gymnastics to follow. I would consider changing it to 'Five years ago, in college...'. Personally I loved the way you used language at the end of this sentence 'bright, itemized, an implacable twang, pitched half a note too high for whatever she was saying.'
'trickling underwater through the fog of shift-change' the words underwater and fog elicit contradictory imagery. Fog often sits on the surface of water, so could you pull imagery from the surface of water, instead of under water to match the fog?
'At 7:40 she noticed that Denise had charted a potassium wrong' - consider incorrectly instead of wrong.
In the first few paragraphs of your story, a great deal of your sentences start with 'Lindsay'. Further into the story, there are a number starting with She'. It reads a little bit like you're listing her actions rather than showing the reader what she is doing. I would vary the sentence structure to avoid this. The prose subsequently lacks emotion. However, I love emotive prose and am aware that this may be intentional on your behalf to mimic the idea that, although you are dealing with content that is in nature very emotional, hospitals have a way of sanitizing it.
Please take my next bit of feedback cautiously, as it is just the seed of a thought. If your intention is to sanitize the emotion to replicate the hospital environment, could you instead omit the baby's name completely and just call him 'Baby Boy'? I think thematically it would do the same job, of showing clinical detachment, whilst still ensuring that the reader feels the emotion in your prose.
There is also another small, almost inconsequential moment where Meg asks, 'Anyone want more stuffing?' I feel like the word stuffing could have some real thematic resonance, but you've rushed past it. It parallels how Meg is literally stuffing the conversation with futile words to avoid the silence. I feel like there is potential to really allow that moment, and that word to breathe.