Response to Cary Bayless's "Mountain Blood"

      This story seemed to be about the overcoming of a great loss to the main character, Chad. Throughout the story, the reader is given background information about a tragic night when a serial killer "damaged" his girlfriend ultimately killing her before he got the chance to ask her, Julia, to marry him througha  series of flashbacks. This story shows the struggle Chad has with dealing with the loss of not only his girlfriend, but the love of his live, and also having to witness it all. This obviously takes a huge toll on Chad, seeing as he still keeps the ring he once put on Julia's finger as she laid in a deadly coma. I believe this story has a strong message and mostly because Cary does a great job developing the characters in such a short amount of time. I knew enough about each character to make the story work and flow nicely. Chad has an internal conflict within himself over the tragic loss of Julia. He wants to be able to move on, but death is a tough and touchy subject, in which Cary makes it work here, tugging at the reader's heart strings. Chad definitely goes through a change in the end of the story. After losing Julia's ring,  he seems to be coming to terms with her death and what happened to them; however, at the end we do not see Chad fully change, but we see the hope that there will eventually be a time that he can overcome the tragedy and be able to completely move on.
     The time period throughout the story was a little unclear to me. Not that it really mattered to me, because I was so into the story, I did wonder for a split second how long it had been since Julia died and how long Chad had been working in the mountains. Also, I was curious to how Julia eventually died. Did they have to pull the plugs on her? Did she ever show signs of recovery? Did she dies from something different? Nonetheless, I thought the unanswered questions kept it interesting and did not take away from the story for me as a reader. In fact, it allowed me to fill in the blanks for myself and add my imagination into it, ultimaltely allowing me to connect to the story. I really enjoyed this story and the plot. the characters and dialogue were effective to me and I think Cary did a great job!