All Comments on 'Shrivel'

5 Big Stars! Such beautiful prose. So beautifully written. Looking forward to reading more of your gems.

Good story, darker emotionally than I prefer. Good none the less.

Stunning words, emotionally moving, your writing is so visceral. Well done, as always! 5*s

Brilliantly attentive to nuances and contradictory feelings within a relationship. Desire is a fickle maelstrom and as Yeats wrote "a pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love." The author maps various gulfs exquisitely. The gulf between ideals of love and attraction and realities. The gulf between two people driven by different fictions of attraction and speaking words of intimacy even as chasms if distancing multiply. The gulf between a fantasy of love and attraction and the very real impediments and exigencies of complicated lives. It's hand down the most beautifully written story I've ever read on literotica. If there were a one time in a lifetime use of fifty stars on a story here I'd use it but I must be content with five. Bravo.

A wonderful weaving of emotions, love and lust in the real world. ‘Affair love’ and ephemeral love are no less real than traditional coupling, and are sometimes the very purest of love. Lovers freely, and completely, together…when they are. Revealed beautifully in this story.

This is an extraordinary story!

The writing is magnificent: word selection, cadence, tone…all amazing!

You capture the emotional swings of the relationship skillfully and deftly navigate through the highs and lows.

5 stars times 5!

I try to limit the number of stories I read on here for fear of accidentally writing and copying a style or theme I have already read. I don’t have to worry about that here. There aren’t too many people on Lit who could repeat what you did here. Each and every paragraph reads like a standalone stanza to a poem. You then put them together, building up the tension, to the foretold sad end. It’s barely 3k words but packs the details of stories on here that easily go over 12k.

If anyone is happening to read these comments - go back and do it! Just pull almost any one of the paragraphs and read it by itself.

A wonderful first effort.

This is heartbreakingly beautiful. The honesty in your words is a gift. Never stop.

I’m by no means any sort of literary critic, but I can recognize when a story transports me as yours has. Thank you for sharing this journey.

I missed this story when it was published because I either write or read, and I was writing. This story is wonderfully constructed. Your prose is every bit as good as your poetry. How this story does not score a perfect five from everybody who reads it confounds me. Thank you for writing

Exquisite

Dense, lush, atmospheric, yet still well paced and never out of control. Remains close to the edge throughout, a lovely perceptive chronicle of the dangerous aspects of lust.

Splendid.

I missed this one first time around. Such a well-thought out, tight, beautifully wrought story. You write in almost poetical fashion, and every single word is so meaningful, heart wrenching, and exacting. You are a true master of the craft. Looking forward to the next one.5 star quality.

Day late reading this piece; very much painful, poetic prose. And you pull no punches when you characterize his wife as a Bambi — how sad all around, which is exactly your intention. Captivating, poignant, really quite beautiful.

The intensity of this story had me sweating, trying to figure out what was keeping me on edge. I still don't know. In my head I felt like I was hovering over the lovers.