Another clear and poignant comment. I love "expect her to accept" and "gasping and crying, writhing and dying". You are very good at this imagery of human depth.
You could keep going. The ending is kind of abrupt. You might want to add another sentence or two and then make it parallel with something like "Behold the ennobler/sanctifier who knows not the consciousness of nobility/sanctity." You can probably come up with better words.
This might be able to be rearranged into a poem, too, but I like prose better in general, so it's a hard call.
This is totally brilliant. I love your diction with hardly any word repetitions--not easy to achieve. You've seemlessly meshed the action and feeling of a car crash with commentary on the human condition. Imagery is excellent, I can hear the brakes screaming like children, feel the canyon walls rising around me, etc.
The only thing I would change is the last paragraph--it doesn't seem to fit. Until that point, the protagonist is all of us. He is bad in the way that we are all bad, but killing a child is extremely hard to relate to and sympathize with for most readers.
If I've missed something, and the child is really himself and he has killed his innocence, maybe you could make that more clear. If I haven't, maybe you can make the child be his own self/innocence/ and he's killed him another way than with a regular bullet. "holding the bullet of worldly cynicism/bitterness" or something like that and "child of my own forgotten acceptance/humility" might do it.
The penultimate paragraph with the catharsis is good. Overall excellent, and I would value your opinion of my one lowly story.
I like it. I would give a bunch of criticisms but you probably don't care too much as it's all just fun.
The only thing that really bothered me was I thought the sister was a newborn baby. I would include "older sister" and say superpowerless as something else, and include that she was looking down at him.
Hey Angel: What you have here is not a short story, it's a diary entry. You are telling what happened instead of showing. You need scenes, settings, and dialogue to do so. You have your characters, now develop the rest. What is here is a skeleton, a freewrite, from which you can write a short story, so do it, then send it to me.
It will be a really long story, so you may just want to first focus on writing a couple small scenes separately, like the scene in the car with Tom at the beginning. Take the memory of what happened, close your eyes, remember how he looked when you opened the door to meet him for the date, how he confidently shook you dad's hand or whatever, the muggy beaths you took of the summer air as you walked to the car, how his car smelled, how he smelled, how your heart felt beating and then shattering in your chest, what his tone sounded like, how he held the stearing wheel.
Even though it is a true story, you have to make it real for the reader. Your memory is enough for you, but not for them. I hope I have been helpful and not too harsh.
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