Posted by Splay on June 28, 2004 at 13:40:59:
Welcome to a magical land of fairies and flutterbys, of sex and death. But even sex and death are not quite what you think here.
C's fairy tale is not for everybody. He dwells very much on his own fetish, as we all do, but his is idiosyncratic in the extreme (not that the fetish is extreme--it's kind of cute, actually), and the main story line is that of a formula fairy tale but with a rather arbitrary payoff. I don't want to put you off too much, though; I enjoyed it well enough in its own right as a story, and I found it fascinating as a glimpse into a sexuality I could never have imagined.
The language is literate. The typography is perfect. It's long enough. Everything comes in threes as in a standard fairy tale. There is foreshadowing and folklorical reference. Very nice work. But if I could have edited it, I'd have tweaked it thus:
The first paragraph would be in present tense.
I'd have circled many spots where a bit more poetry is called for, like "As they descended, the air caught their skirts and forced them upward...."
"Resting on each blanket was a small cat." would have become "Standing[?] on each blanket was a small white cat." There are other infelicities of this kind.
The reveal at the end would have been from the point of view of the cats. To have somebody just come right out and explain things really lets the air out of my balloon.