Two Joggers(1295 words) - Writers Forum

Atom · 10-19-2006, 09:40 PM

Because I knew you couldn't go any longer without hearing another...

Two Joggers (1295 words)

The night-time air was temperate. A cool breeze rustled the leaves of tall oaks and swept unkempt grass across the dirt path. The wind and the noise made by two aged men panting was the only sound in the tranquil environment. Both men had newly grayed hair and were dressed in worn jogging suits. They were synchronizing their steps, neither of them missing a beat. The taller man threw up his head and groaned, slowing his pace into a walk. He hunched over and placed his hands on his knees, not caring to shroud his fatigue. The shorter one stood by his colleague, jogging in place. He said,

“ James! How easily you tire! Twenty years ago you would not have broken a sweat!”

James put one knee to the floor and looked up with the eyes of a hurt child. He grabbed his chest with both hands.

“ Too…much.” James gasped.

Sam stopped jogging and kneeled next to James.

“ Ha! A gag! You tried this same thing many years ago!”

James fell to the floor and rolled onto his back. His chest started jumping up every few seconds. He opened his mouth and squealed trying to get air. His eyes were half open and only the whites were shown.

“James…stop that! Lets go!” urged Sam, trying to make it home before midnight. “ Catherine is expecting me. Stop being foolish, let’s leave.”
Sam bent down and smacked James in the face playfully. “ Ha! Fine old man! I need to get home. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.” Sam jogged away in excellent health and disappeared into the dark horizon. James lay on the floor, covered in the shadows of massive trees and beautiful foliage, breathless and dead.

Catherine slapped at a gnat that had had the nerve to rest upon her neck. She looked at the puny insect moving one wing in desperation. “Sam!” she yelled, letting her voice carry up the stairs and into the study. “ Can you come down here! We need to get rid of these flies!.”

Upstairs, Sam had the phone to his ear and used his hand to cover up the bottom part. “ In a second!” he called back in an almost sing-song tone. He focused his attention back on the phone conversation. “ Hello, Margaret. I just called to ask you if James had come home yet. I needed to have a word with him.”

Margaret assured Sam that James hadn’t come home and Sam replied by telling her that he had decided to jog ahead of James. “ Well good night.” Sam said and hung up the phone with a slam. He almost whimpered and threw his hand up to his forehead, letting sweat slide down his arm. “ Oh god.! What am I supposed to do here! I let my best friend die…”

Sam took a deep breath and blew out a slow river of air. He drummed his fingers against his mahogany desk.
“No. That’s not it. James and Margaret are laughing right now, thinking I fell for this prank! Well we’ll see who has the last laugh.” the words left his mouth confidently, but Sam doubted his thoughts. He replayed the night’s jog in his head and James gasping for air kept coming up. “ So corny of him.” he groaned aloud, shaking his head and grinning as if he belonged in a mental hospital.

A human heart. Beating. Pulsing. A morbid squeal for air is heard. The heart is struggling to pump blood. Then it flattens. The heart turns to jelly and pathetically still tries to pump.

Sam opened his eyes. He didn’t wake up like he should have, yawning and stretching, he had just opened his eyes as if he hadn’t even fallen to sleep. He didn’t feel in the least bit rested. He turned over and squinted at his alarm clock.

3:00 AM.

Careful not to wake up Catherine, he slowly rose out of bed and walked to his study. He sat down on his leather chair. The dream bothered him but he didn’t connect it to James at all. He took a breath, “trying to suck into his spine” like so many relaxation techniques said to do. A second before he exhaled he heard a breathing sound. “ Hello?” he said, getting out of his chair.

It was silent. He felt an urge to get out of the room. He stood his ground. Another breath. Someone was in the room gasping for air. Sam spun around quickly. The silence was once more interrupted by a noise. It wasn’t a breath or a gasp anymore. It had turned into a squealing. The squealing was getting closer and louder. “ Hello!” he yelled once more to the same effect. The tension was unbearable. The sound came as close to his ear as possible, until he could feel the guttural inhalation on his face. He took off running. He burst through his front door without bothering to close it. In the back of his mind he heard, “ Sam, your letting the flies in!”.

He was sure that something was near him. Following him. Trying to kill him. He was terrified. His heart beat rapidly. He kept running. Before today, he hadn’t ran in ten years. Never had the need to. But now, he needed to. He was under a compulsion to run in a certain direction, almost as if he was being hypnotized. Every time he started to turn, fear raced through him and he changed his mind. He knew where he was running to, but he didn’t want to go there. He was being chased.

He was within twenty steps of James’s body. It was still there. James hadn’t been joking. Sam came upon the realization that he had let his best friend die. He almost stopped running., but sickeningly he hopped over the body as if it wasn’t there. His best friend, left for the bugs to decompose.

He kept running. For what he didn’t know. He couldn’t stop. His energy was drained and his shortness of breath was intense but he couldn’t stop. Sam began to feel dizzy and there was a mounting pressure in his chest. A tightness. He ran for minutes. He was out of the wilderness and on the sidewalk near buildings. He couldn’t take any more. He was dizzy and his vision was blurred. The pain in his chest was excruciating. He slumped to the floor at the entrance of a hospital. It was 4 AM and not a soul was outside, but miraculously he was seen from a hospital window.

Sam woke up lying on a hospital bed, receiving oxygen from a nurse. Later on that day he had to sit still and think about the night’s events. Sam had survived a heart attack, ironically the same thing that had killed his friend. A tear slid down his cheek. Catherine sat in a chair next to him, looking at him fearfully. She was crying too.

Sam had a tube in his neck to help him breathe. His body was depleted of energy. Later that day, Catherine kissed him goodbye and left for the house. Sam sat on the bed motionless, thankful for this life.

Sam heard the sound of someone breathing to the side of him and turned his head towards the doorway. No one there. The breathing became louder and Sam moaned trying to get out of bed. Sam was screaming, laying in bed with his eyes shut tightly. The breathing was right again next to his ear. A nurse ran in the room. For the rest of his life, Sam lived with the burden of James’s death on his conscious, replaying his gasping for air over and over again.

gohn67 · 10-22-2006, 01:27 PM

hey Atom,

The prose is good. It's clear and consice. It flows well. It's readable. No grammatical errors that I noticed.

I like the opening paragraph.

You do a good job of showing his fear. For some reason the whole heart attack stuff made me think of Poe's "Tell Tale Heart" for some odd reason.

Storywise, I found it too unbelievable and unrealistic.

-Why would his Sam not help his friend? His reason that he's a practical joker, but after a while I think Sam would think something is wrong. Also these are guys are like in their 50s, so a prank would be pretty juvenile, especially a really elaborate one.

-His reaction to Margarett is also pretty juvenile, to pretend that he didn't know anything about what happened to James.

-I don't understand why the body would still be lying on the street. You'd think someone would find him soon or later, and try to help him.

-He gets a heart attack too? From his fear and lack of running, it appears to be? There's not that much of a difference between jogging and running.

The other thing I wanted to know is do they jog like this every night or every week? Or did they just randomly decide to go jogging today for no apparent reason? Either way you need to have a reason why things happen today. For the first one, why is it tonight that James decides to pull this prank that he hasn't pulled in years instead of another time, since they do jog every week or day. And for the second, why did they decide to jog today?

The one possibility, I thought of was that the ending made it seem like the whole scenario was some kind of dream that Sam had during his heart attack. I think that would make it slightly more believeable, but what would be the point.

I hope this is not too discouraging. The story can be improved with some revision because you have good control of your prose. Right now there are a lot of minor story issues that can be resolved with some thinking.

Fantasy of You · 10-22-2006, 01:45 PM

I agree with gohn, almost 100%

The jogging scene irritated me for some reason. The dialogue doesn't seem very realistic, and it's kind of amplified by the situation. I mean, take the first words that are spoken. People don't talk like that, so your characters shouldn't. It should be an easy fix, though...

And gohn's right. His response to the heart attack doesn't ring true for me. I mean, you could slip in something about him doing this before, and him jogging off, but not in the dialogue. It comes across wrong, especially when the dialogue is as it is. I mean, read it through...

And then I echo what gohn said.

Both of them having a heart attack was the icing on the cake for me. But the icing tasted of horse turd. Not everyone who's old dies of a heart attack. It just brings the whole story into one barrel of exaggeration.

You tend to rely on twists and cliff hangers for your short stories. I don't know what to say about this one. It's worked and failed before, so I guess this would be classed as a failure, as far as twists go.

Try to write something without relying on a twist, something that holds itself up and can stand its own ground, with real characters and some sort of realistic situation. This reminds me of your Hitchhiker story..

Sorry to sound harsh, but you can do better than this... Maybe you're rusty

-Fantasy

Lucid · 10-22-2006, 02:10 PM

Atom, I pretty much agree with everything Gohn said. I was thinking exactly the same things when I was reading it. You would probably laugh at your age if somebody fell over and acted like they were having a heart attack, but once people get over 40 or so they would take that very seriously. And there is no way that by 3:00 am his wife or somebody else would not have found him. And I'm not sure that it's fitting that the other guy gets a heart attack. He's not exactly evil; he just seems incredibly dense.

But besides the few reality flaws, I think you're a good writer and I'm looking forward to reading more stories from you.

Merforga · 10-23-2006, 04:22 AM

-No grammatical errors
-One of the biggest things for me was the protaganist's reaction to his freind having a heart attack in the early part of the story It just doesn't seem to fit his age.
-Also the dialogue was unrealisitc. which made the story less beleivable.
-Overall though it was a decent story just work out the rough spots

Vulgar` · 10-27-2006, 08:29 PM

Liked the story, I already sent you the longer feedback to your email, go check it.

Keep doing you