Ready to read? Ready to come down from your legal (I’m sure) celebration of 4-20 with a pair of intriguing, enrapturing, fascinating, chilling, and/or compelling short stories? Ready to weigh their merits and choose the better of two rapidly-created masterpieces?
Ready to participate in The Duel?
Then get your butts over to The Writer’s Arena battle thread and ENSURE YOUR CHOICE IS HEARD! Are you a Sad Puppy? Are you an Anti Puppy? Do you not care or have no idea what I’m talking about? Either way: GO – READ – ENJOY – ASSESS – COMMENT – and VOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTE!!!!!!!!!
The Improbable Author 
Good stories, but dang, Brophy really delivered this time. That was super emotional. Quite a bit of brooding, but very tight overall.
You really gave yourself a hard time with all the extra bits you had to write in. Prolonged the setup quite a bit. Still, cool foreshadowing about the girl being from Abel’s line. I liked the ending too, but I feel it needed to be a paragraph longer to really signify the change. I like it though, a self fulfilling prophecy kind of thing.
All in all, have to give this one to Brophy. There are few things I would take away from the White River Roses.
I could get into this whole writer’s arena thing. Some great writing here. Hard not to think whether I could go par to par.
Fuck it, I’ll do it. If only to challenge you.
Email ’em, dude! Yeah, Brophy cheated with his whole deep emotional development and evocative imagery thing. 🙂 I think my story may be a victim of its own Big Idea. I had so much plot and twist in there, the emotional development got shortchanged.
Well, you know, it goes from murder mystery to Cain and Abel. That’s at least two big ideas right here. I though I was following a murder and then you get into the whole bible story. Makes it a little less coherent.
Focus on the mark, make the murder a little less clowny . . .I would turn it down from a 10 to a 6 and it would be good with some trimming.
On the bright side, the foreshadowing was good. The woman being more religious and being of the opinion that Cain ‘got it easy’. So you got that going on for you.