"Deception" by Laurel Kostakis

Laurel Kostakis' piece, "Deception," is about a middle aged woman who finds out in a disturbing way that her husband is cheating and no longer loves her. What she wants is to be loved, needed, and no longer lonely. This is her own internal conflict - her children have grown up, her husband is always working, and the dog she had once loved had died. But the conflict of the story comes when Marcy's husband, Kevin, tries to kill her in order to save his extramarital affair and comes into direct contest with an at-large, armed and dangerous burglar.

As always, Laurel delivers an interesting piece with an interesting point of view. I think the fact that the narration  is in third person limited form and follows Marcy through the entire piece, instead of Kevin, who is, apparently, a murderer, or the unnamed burglar, who is very much capable of murder, actually presents an interesting perspective on the entire situation. It would have been easy to follow the other two characters and hold the attention of the reader - in fact, that could almost be expected. But Laurel chose to follow the victim, a difficult thing to do without hinting very heavily to the reader that the narrator is, in fact going to be the victim in an obvious manner.

One thing that could help the piece would be to establish the ages of the characters early on. For some reason, reading the first few pages, I was convinced that Marcy and Kevin were a younger pair. There was no evidence that this was the case, but there was also no evidence to the contrary. Another thing to pay attention to is that, like my story, "Leaving," the end of the conflict is given to the reader very quickly. The end of the story is actually done in a very timely pace, however.