Can I beg for some specific feedback on a 2-page story? Pretty please?

Cafe Society
21

RealityChuck…ouch.

[spoiler] 1. Actually, I didn’t get it at all. I feel so stupid. And here I am, and experienced writer with lots and lots and lots of editing under my belt. Peh. So, answer for question 2 would be…none. For most of the story, I was too caught up in the “food’s” illogical theories. Yeah, I knew the “light” was beyond their comprehension, but I still thought they were being a bit too daft-- ie. “Maybe it’s weeding out the bad and bringing us the good. And sometimes it’s picking up the fallen and giving them back to us, broken.” Eh…eh?

So, yeah, I didn’t get it. My only thought was maybe it was an ant farm, but that didn’t make sense either for obvious reasons. A problem was how there was no distinction made between the light and the kid. If the food is smart enough to be trying to kill off food they don’t like, I’d think they’d be smart enough to distinguish between the light that fills up everything and the moving being that appears in the doorway at the same time the light is there.
One other thing-- how often do things fall out of your fridge?? Seemed to happen quite often in the story. I think things fall out of mine two, maybe three times a year. I hope you don’t have any food that stays in your fridge that long.
Oh, another thing. I’ve reread it and I don’t know if you were doing it intentionally, but it seems (I think) that the food only every leaves the fridge when it falls out. Seems rather odd.
A tip: maybe you could include a description of the sounds every time the fridge door opens and shuts. While trying to picture it during the reread after I knew what was going on, I found it odd that the food never noticed the noises.
Keep up the good work-- I think if you keep at it your writing will continue to express good potential and evolve even more. [/spoiler]

22

I thought the idea was good but its implementation needs a lot more work. It can be expanded into a full length story, but it needs to be a bit more developed. Right now how it reads makes the whole goal, the whole driving force, to find that twist at the end. By doing this, you say to the reader “all that I’m writing right now isn’t that important. Just skip to the end where the payoff is.”
If your story is compelling, if your goal is to entertain all the way through and not string people along to the end, that desire to skip the middle won’t be there.

Here’s the single biggest change you can make to accomplis this: stop saying “the thing.” You used that phrase 22 times in 2 pages. That’s three times every two paragraphs which is way too much. “The thing” made me first think of those '50s horror monsters. You know, The Thing!
But then my mind shifted a bit and I started imagining a MacGuffin. It’s a term Hitchcock coined for an object where the actual object is of no importance, it just drives the plot. But that’s not what this thing was.
No, this thing was important. It is important. It is “the thing.” You were substituting “XXXX” for “the thing” but there was no reason why you couldn’t just say “refrigerator” instead of “the thing” except that by doing so, you’d blow the whole twist, right?
So every time you say “the thing” what you’re really saying is “I’m trying to string you along because I don’t really want to tell you what the thing is until the end.”
You’re trying to play me, and, as a reader, I don’t like that.