Carrie--

I'm not done reading yet, but already this is a fantastic edit! The changes you've made since I last read this piece have really taken miles and miles up into a new level. I'm excited. : D

 Hi! I like what you've done with this.  The characters seem very real, especially Essie -- she managed to annoy me very quickly.  So good job with that! If you can elicit an opinion or feeling from a reader, you're already doing well.

First thing, just a slight typo:

Her voice was the like the shrill call of a sparrow at dawn

You have an extra "the" in there. Very little thing.

Next, I like the alternating view of Essie in the antique shop with the beehive and the narrator going to the store.  I'm not entirely clear why they alternate, though -- usually there's some sort of simultaneous climaxing or contrasting information being released. Perhaps you could clarify this a little bit. I do, however, love the following:

Those boys who could hardly manage to look anyone else in eye were now hard at work perfecting technology for future asocial generations, knowing in their hearts that the shy, awkward youth of America silently thanked them every time they had to buy a pack of batteries or bottled water—they could spend an entire shopping trip without being noticed by a single person.

I like this because you managed to capture one hell of a truth, one I know personally.  You put it very succinctly and perfectly -- Good job!

The only other issue I have is the end.  What exactly happened to Essie?  Why did she leave so suddenly? What is she doing now? Why is the narrator not going back to school?  Is she depressed? If so, why? Does it have to do with her sister?  You have a very succinct way with words that I love -- I firmly believe that (and would love if) you could find a way to wrap up the ending a little better. This ending just left me with a lot of questions and I am dying to have answered.

Thanks for a great read! Good job!

Hello there!

I enjoyed this. It was fun to read and, as always, well and amusingly written. Well done.

I have a couple of grammatical, mostly insignificant nitpicks:

first, the phrase about Essie's breasts "waggling randomly" bothered me; I'm not sure that randomly works as a word here, and I think that the verb "waggling" does the job sufficiently by itself. This is, in fact, the only adverb in the whole piece that bothered me. Huzzah!

My other problem is with your dashes (--)--the places where you use them feel to abrupt, too awkward. I thought about it long and hard (well, sorta long. And hard enough), and think that the awkwardness could make sense with the character, and the narration, and whatnot, but that the abruptness doesn't, since the narrator is overcome, in the present, with lethargy. It's mostly stylistic and not that big of a deal. The only one where I think it makes meaning less clear is

Cheapest organic seems best—and try to ignore how much time I’ve wasted essentially just standing and staring.

I had to read that sentence a couple of times.

Other than these things, your narration and style were amusing, coherent, and well put together.

I agree with the critique above about the juxtaposition of the two trips to stores: I thought long and hard about those to connect them, too, to try to figure out their purpose. I came to some conclusions about contrasting the sisters' personalities, their interactions with clerks, impulsiveness and lack thereof, and whatnot, which is all well and good, but I'm not sure it gives sufficient motivation for the explanation at the end of the narrator's depression and isolation. I'm not sure that the conflict is clearly articulated enough here, but I think that trying to define that will help you find a more fitting ending. I guess I like what you've written, but I want to see something happen after that. I see two things here--the sisters' relationship and the narrator's self-imposed isolation and estrangement--and I think that they aren't quite fitting together yet. I think that doing so might help with ending the piece? Maybe?

I hope that some of what I've said is helpful. I really liked this, and found it a good read. I'd like to see anything else you do with it in the future.

Carrie,

Good character development and good work on narrative style. I like where this draft has gone. I have to agree with Aleki and Meghan that the two lines of the story aren't fitting together yet. It's like you've given the reader one of those jumbo 5000 piece jigsaw puzzles, and done some of the work for us in one corner, so we can see the sister's face, and then some work in the opposite corner, so we can see the narrator's outline, but in between is so much empty space. We don't have very much information to help us connect the two characters. There's no reason behind anything. I believe Meghan is right that more explanation would strengthen the ending of this piece.

At the end of this story, we should feel like the protagonist has grown in some way, even if she's simply recalling her memories. She can and should learn something new from the experiences the reader follows. The first two pages really sing. I had no issues with any word choice, syntax, or anything else. After those pages, I began to get restless because the story didn't seem to be going anywhere. I guess the conflict here is the protagonist's discomfort at going to the grocery store, which she must face since she's out of milk. Since the sister storyline seems to have nothing to do with this conflict, the reader expects that there's some other secret agenda, but one is never revealed.

I know there's more going on between these two girls. More digging?

Sections I particularly liked:

            When I’d finally finished getting dressed, I made my way downstairs to find Essie topless, digging through the dryer, practically crawling inside it....She pushed through an assortment of clothes in a nearby closet, found the bodice piece to a Wonder Woman Halloween costume, and slipped it on.

            “Mona, zip me up?”

            I obliged, wondering what she’d found so unsatisfactory about the various clean items in the dryer.

            “You’re wearing a Halloween costume? You don’t think that will seem a little odd?”

            “It’s only half a Halloween costume, and all the clean shit sucks. If anyone says anything about it, fuck ‘em.”

Essie left two years earlier, moved to Louisiana, making sure to steal sundry items from around the house before going—TV remotes, a box of cigars, most of our dead grandmother’s clothes from the 1920s. Very specific items stayed behind—a single shoe, worn down to nothing, that rag skirt I remember so well, and the blanket she’d stolen from Pottery Barn. She’d told everyone she was leaving “eventually” months earlier, off-handedly, as if it was a joke. When she actually left, it was without a word.

These two sections told me a lot about the characters, and the first, really helped to establish some kind of relation between them.

This was good, Carrie. I'm excited for the new draft ( :

I really enjoyed reading this.  Although I think that personally I might have pushed Essie down a well at some point in our sister-hood.  In all love of course.  She's really well written : ) and expressed.  I thought the two story lines seemed to go together pretty well.  Though for Essie's sister to be that despondent of a character I would wanna read more...

Hey!  Cool, well written story!  Will post more very soon.  Sorry for the lateness.

Here is that critique I mentioned earlier, as you might have surmised by the "critique" label on this thing somewhere, making this introduction rather pointless.... So moving right along.

I enjoyed this story, even more so than the last one.  I think it reads very well, and for the most part it fit together.  I like the back and forth between the two sisters, and Essie's dialogue and Mona's reflections reveal a lot about their personalities and relationship in just a few pages. 

“Is anything even open right now?”

 

I was never sure if she heard me when I grumbled things like this into my pillow—her responses were always ambiguous enough to be either answers or simply continuations of her own train of thought.

           

“We’ve got a full day ahead of us, so we need to get going now. Ten minutes!”

In a way, they seem to balance each other out, Mona's invertedness and timidness against Essie's rambunctious outgoingness (sure, that could be word.  Somewhere, somewhen.)  The characters seemed very natural, and I think that it is neat that you were able to write them like that (maybe I can say 'that' a couple more times). 

There were a couple of things that I thought didn't work so well, for what it's worth. 

In the segment

In fact, she was almost exactly like that

I thought that the 'almost' and 'exactly' were kind of an odd contradiction.  Just caught my eye. 

There were a couple of sentences that were a little awkward for me to read, just because they did not flow as well as the rest of the story.  If that was the intent, then you can just ignore the next few things I say.

The most generic, mundane, thoughtless questions which always received the same generic, mundane, thoughtless answers, in that fake-sweet tone of mine, until eventually I couldn’t talk because I “had a job interview,” which became “I just can’t talk right now.”

Someone mentioned to me at one point that I put a lot of pauses in what I write, so lately I have been a little sensitive to that.  It seems like the first part of the sentence, with the repetition of the

generic, mundane, thoughtless

fits but the latter portion could stand to lost a comma or two.  The sentence had a lot of pauses built in that I was not sure were necessary, or something. 

I feel the same about the next two sentences

I keep a bowl, a spoon, and a box of cereal next to my mattress, which sits, frameless, on the ground. I stumble with the milk through a maze of boxes, stacked precariously, nearly reaching the ceiling, filling my bedroom.

Although, the broken up sentences make a little more sense to me here (as I am looking over this again) because it is Mona's thoughts two years after her sister left.  So, maybe I pointed out something useful, or it is fine just the way it is. 

I kind of agree with what Meghan and Mimi have said so far, and I guess I would have like a little more explanation or insight.  I felt like I had to imagine or guess at a connection between the sisters at the end of the story.  It seemed to me that the sisters might have slipped into more the more extreme ends of thier own personalities, Mona by cutting herself off completely and Essie by picking up and leaving.  This could (and very likely is) not quite true, but the ending left the story feeling incomplete.  If Mona's card is from Essie, what is the significance of the winged "W"?  If I missed something, sorry, but maybe that could be developed to add some more significance or something.  Hope any or all of this was helpful.