Molly Kirkpatrick - "Blood"

Molly Kirkpatrick's "Blood" is about a girl of an unknown age, assumed to be in her late teens to mid-twenties, that has been sent by her mother to a psychiatric ward after the death of her father. Throughout the story, we learn more about her relationship with her parents, her feelings about the ward, and who really should be put in the ward.

I really love the voice of the story. While I know it's a voice that you commonly use, it's something that you always manage to pull off very well in a variety of situations. However, in this particular story, the voice is not established early enough, and the first instance of that wonderful voice was found to be particularly jarring and surprising. It doesn't come up until page two's, "...but, dude... They really don't." An easy fix to this would just be to take that paragraph on page two (the entire thing) and transpose it to the opening of the piece. I think this would help immediately establish setting and would require very little work to make this entire issue disappear.

Another thing that I really liked was the use of the mother's need for cleanliness. It did border on disturbing, which I felt you really wanted to do. Anyway, I know that I was disturbed by her skin peeling from her hand because of showering too much. Normally, I'd say that it made me want to go take a shower, but... yeah.

I kind of had an issue with the character of Kado. While I know that he's not that important to the story, I feel that he relies a bit too much on the hippie/vegan stereotype to convey who he is. I cannot really think of any unique details to his characterization. Rather, he seems to be there to provide a new element to go back to the father. He seems unnecessary and could be cut entirely without affecting the main story.

I also must admit that I'm not a big fan of how much money they seem to have: a beachhouse and a boat and goodies at a marina seem much for people that live on a teacher's salary exclusively. How the hell could they have afforded such things?