Creepy! I love it!

And I wholeheartedly agree with your profile description.

This story has a lot of potential. It does a great job of conveying a sense of tension and desperation.

However, I can’t help but think you could have set the scene better. You have over 300 characters with which you could describe the protagonist or the victim or the circumstances as a whole to help draw the reader in.

Also, you tend to use commas where semicolons would be more appropriate. If the punctuation is separating two complete sentences, then a semicolon should be used. Even with proper punctuation, though, this doesn’t read very smoothly. The thoughts are too short and don’t blend into each other. For instance:

“That’s when I hear the footsteps coming up the stairs, it’s too late.”

could become

“That’s when I hear the footsteps coming up the stairs and realize it’s too late.”

There are parts where the disjointed style works very well (like the three sentences at the end), but when used throughout the whole piece, it doesn’t read as cleanly as it should.

Thanks for entering!

I quite like the brevity of this piece. It’s left open for prequels and sequels.

I do agree with kaellinn, though when it comes to your punctuation. There’s also a lot of repetition of ‘coming upstairs’. We already know that someone is coming upstairs so it doesn’t really need to be said again and again. Try to think of different ways to state the same thing more than once.

But these are just meant to be helpful pointers and the overall story is very good :)

I think you should make it a bit longer. There isn’t much story to it so you can’t really, reading it, be pulled into the character’s lives. You don’t know their personalities or who deserved to die. I think you could convey this if you used up the word limit.

I love all stories in the present tense as it adds so much more suspense. I also really enjoyed that first paragraph- you can really be there.
A…X

The rushed storytelling actually works well considering the subject matter, but I’d look closely at some of your sentences, which run-on in some places – the second paragraph particularly. Try breaking some of those longer lines into short sentences and not only should it become more readable, it willbuild the tension that this piece is built around… MH :)

There’s a little off phrasing here

“Then I hear a second pair of feet coming upstairs, now there are two of them.”

and you might change “I just did” to “I have just done”.

Aside from those small things, this is a really interesting and brisk murder/crime of passion piece. A little polish might be in order, but you’ve done a really good job at demanding the reader’s complete attention and that’s huge.

I kind of agree with the shopping list comment, the "I"’s at the beginning of all of the sentences make it like that. Maybe if you changed that?

Although, on another note, I almost like that because it makes it sound more urgent. But I also think you could make it sound urgent and not have the I’s at the beginning of all the sentences.

Overall, you left it nice and open for sequels/prequels. Great job!

Thanks to everyone for the invaluable comments, I had a rush of adrenaline and published it without properly editing it. I think it now reads better but more feedback and suggestions are welcome.