a moment of possibility

a moment of possibility by his terrible beauty

girl tells boy she's in love with him. a moment of possibility.
Banner Credit: Anita Darling

Ali Thinks: There's just something I love about stories written in the second person. I think I love them so much because they're so hard to pull off, but when they're good, they're really good. "a moment of
possibility" was no different. his terrible beauty took something everyone is afraid of-- confessing feelings to someone else-- and wrote it into a story just under 800 words so heart wrenching and beautiful that it actually gave me "all the feels."

I'll be honest, when I looked at the story length, I wasn't really expecting much. Short stories are good, fantastic even, but some are too short to think anything particularly astonishing will come out of it. But, then I got to reading and was knocked off my metaphorical socks.

Even though I have never felt what the main character was feeling, his terrible beauty's words rendered it impossible to not have some sense of empathy. I recently learned that there is a very slight difference between empathetic and sympathetic in definition (empathetic being able to actually feel the emotion and sympathetic being the ability to understand the emotion), and I realized that there is also a fine line between the two in writing. Any writer can make their readers see the emotions, but not all of them can make them feel it. To be able to make someone that empathetic in less than 800 words, I think, deserves an award.

So here it is: "a moment of possibility" has been nominated, and won, the award for the-shortest-story-to-give-"the-feels."