This review contains only my opinions and suggestions. I hope you may find it useful.
Overall impression
I enjoyed this story a lot. You build the characters well and you have great control in your writing. The air of suspense and mystery that exists throughout the story is effective and held my attention.
What I liked most
I was impressed with the use of dialogue in this story. Personally, I find it difficult to write stories with a great deal of dialogue, but this piece is a good example of dialogue flowing very naturally.
Probably my favourite thing about this story is the way the title relates to the story itself. At first, I found it odd that you should choose to reveal what was surely to be the climax of your story in the title. But the fact that the story actually ends before the event of the title takes place is really effective. It makes for quite a dark ending, but I like that sort of thing! Also, I like that it's possible to interpret it as not necessarily being true - perhaps the title is just a thought the girl at the airport has after she and the protagonist have parted ways. I like the fact that the story can be considered open-ended in this way.
Suggestions for alterations/corrections
I only have a couple of suggestions, both relating to apostrophes - I have made my changes in red:
Attention passengers of Flight 505... (no apostrophe)
The tinny song of the airport intercom sang Pittsburgh's first class passengers' song... (plural rather than singular apostrophe)
In conclusion...
This was a well-written, interesting story. The way you use the title to reveal the ultimate ending is really interesting and it works well here. Very nice work.
Thanks for directing me to read this story after I read your other piece. Again, I really enjoyed this piece and found it moving.
You build suspense well with your writing style and structure, which makes the revelation of the box's contents all the more poignant when it comes.
One of the things that really struck me about this piece, having read your Happiest Day of My Life story, is the fact that the same memories of Donald are mentioned in both stories. It really serves to highlight how few memories there are, which is sad and touching.
At the end of the story I felt it was interesting that you talk about the guilt your mother felt after her son's death, feeling that perhaps she could have done something to prevent it, and your reaction is "If only she had told me". It seems that the guilt she felt following Donald's death has transferred, albeit to less of an extent, to guilt you feel following her death. It seems to be an interesting idea about the nature of guilt and grief.
Once again, this is a very well-written piece. The only suggestion I have in terms of the writing style is to maybe change the sentence: "Thirty years later the deaths of my parents happened within six weeks of each other." I only feel it might be appropriate to change it to make it an active, rather than passive, sentence because that might make it flow a bit better. Perhaps: "Thirty years later, my parents died within six weeks of each other."
All in all, I thought this was another impressive autobiographical piece. You write in a straightforward style and yet convey emotion well. Great work. Keep writing!
I really enjoyed this story. The air of mystery is great — at the end I really felt like it was the narrator who had killed Etienne, but I can see how another reader might not interpret it this way.
I love the phrase "Etienne was murdered by a man he had truly never met" — the idea that his killer was someone who was known to him heightens the suspense and drama of the piece.
The only sentence I was unsure about when I read it is the beginning of the second paragraph: "He wrote an entry in his journal, right before it happened."
I was going to suggest that you might want to leave this out and then change the later sentence "His last journal entry read" to "His last journal entry, written the night he was killed, read". The reason this occurred to me is because it seem strange for the narrator to know that Etienne had written in his journal immediately before he was killed — unless, of course, the narrator himself was the killer.
So my suggestion is this: if you want the reader to know that the narrator is the killer, leave it as it is now. But perhaps if you want to maintain an air of mystery about the identity of the killer it might be an idea to change this section, as the way it's written now implies that the narrator was there the night Etienne died.
In terms of the writing style, structure, spelling and grammar, I only noticed one minor mistake: in the sentence " Remind her how much you love her", remove the space between the quote marks and Remind.
Generally, I found this to be an interesting, nicely written piece. Keep writing!
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