>>24297> I have been trying to make my stories shorter. Sometimes when things are left to the imagination, it can be even more arousing.It can, indeed. For example, having a subsequent scene with the protagonist having her planned stillbirth would've been excessive, blurring the ending.
In my opinion the ending should feel impactful, sorta like a punchline in a joke. And it might have been more impactful just ending the story with "leaving her daughter behind forever", if only it didn't create a new problem of unresolved daughter death. But currently this last paragraph is a little bit dry.
This dryness I think consists of having no emotions in this last paragraph and just listing events, it's probably related to that "show, don't tell" thing, as this paragraph feels more like telling then showing. There is neither a desperation of the dying child nor a fascination of the protagonist watching it die, just a clinical statement of the heart lasting a bit longer than lungs. "Death occurred at XX hours YY minutes, end of protocol".
Returning to my previous thought, it makes me wonder if you did write the "leaving her daughter behind forever" as the last line, but then had to resolve the daughter's death somehow, which resulted in this additional less inspired paragraph. Like, you didn't write it with writing the ending in mind, as in your mind the story has already ended with the previous paragraph. That would make it a sort of epilogue, I guess, but it's still too short and dry for a proper epilogue.
But anyway, as I said, don't mind me rumbling, the story overall was very hot and it properly made me cum, and that's what counts.
> I hoped that starting in the middle, then flashing back to the beginning, would be a good device for introducing the characters.Ah, now I see. Unfortunately, until you said it I didn't realize it was a flashback (or it would probably better say the starting scene was a flashforward), so that's why it made me confused. Now that I look at it again, the hints are there, so I guess I'm just not that attentive of a reader…