Sitting Here posted:

Something Else

I'm torn on this piece because I really like it, but I think it kind of misses the mark on the prompt. What does it do well? It's a tiny story that packs in a lot of imagery. You imply a lot about the Tau Ceti aliens in very few words, and there's a genuine sense that if they'd arrived a little earlier, things might have been okay. But I'm not sure what I'm meant to feel at the end of the story. I certainly don't feel a sense of wonder, though the dog-like character literally wonders aloud whether the humans and Tau Cetians might have been friends. The problem is, I think, that the humans are all dead and the aliens are kind of just going about their business, so there isn't a character who gets to feel true wonder at any of it.

I was a bit confused by the POV. At first the story seems like it's in an omniscient POV, with the camera of the narrative pointing first at the last dying human and second at the arriving delegation of aliens. It's only in the 4th paragraph that the story shifts to I guess a first person POV, from the perspective of the dead human corpses. And then it goes back to an omniscient POV. That's not necessarily illegal or anything, but I was left feeling as though you could have grounded the narrative a little more in the 'we' of dead humanity. Maybe in doing that it would have been easier to transmit feelings of wonder.

Does it hit on the theme of wonder? As I said, not exaaaactly. But I think if you shifted the POV to include a little more of the dead humans' perspective (this is microfiction so we can take some poetic liberties for effect), you could instill a little more feeling into the story. Alternatively, you could make the aliens a little less aloof, maybe have them feel some sort of wonder at the state of Earth. I dunno, there's a lot of ways you could do it.