The review for a story Rising by @anikekirsten from @mgaft1

When someone walks the distance of the road that she normally drives, it changes her perspective. The slower pace allows one to notice the richness of events and details that, at higher speed, escape the scrutiny and merge into a blur.

The author of Rising elects this type of pace because the event she attempts to focus on could not be given a fair shake at a faster page.

If reader’s attention pointer would have moved at a faster pace, the entire activity in the story can fit in one sentence. You can imagine a woman talking to her doctor “I had a convulsion while getting out of the bath. What do you make of it, doctor?”

Often people don’t remember many trivial events in their lives. For example, every day they have to get up, take a shower, brush their teeth, have a breakfast and go to work. Thus, even though these events occupy physical time, the philological significance of them to the person practically equal to zero, as a he or she won’t be able to distinguish one day from another.

On the other hand, the moments of psychological significance, later in life could be perceived as happening much longer than their actual physical time span. Imagine the moments when a woman first meets her future husband, gives a birth to a child, or losing her parents.

This is exactly the case in this story. Because of the psychological gravity of this event to the protagonist, the span of psychological time in this case greatly exceeds the span of a physical one. Even though the complete implication of this first realization of a convulsion is outside the story scope, the slow pace that leads to it indicates that its consequences to the protagonist were significant. In the end of the story, the protagonist contemplates on these consequences, which is the only additional stroke in this psychological picture.

It was interesting to observe a surgical precision and a dedication in the description, which the author gives to the sequence of events, occurring in the bathtub scene.

Surely, we are aware of reality via interprets that our brain gives to electrical signals that come from different body transducers: those responsible for pressure, temperature, pain, sight, sound, olfaction and a sense of touch. Whether these interpretations indeed reflects the real state of affairs or not is out for grabs. More importantly, if someone manipulates those inputs or the way we interpret them, we could easily think we eating a juicy New York stake while chewing a bowl of rice.

The culmination moment in the story, when the protagonist close to losing her consciousness, seem to point to this uncertainty in existence in a tangible reality. This almost exaggerated artistic scrutiny make, in my view, this story a post-modernistic work.

Respectfully, @mgaft1.