Linking from Target - Handshake

I really like what you did here. You have this unrelenting discomfort surrounding the piece. It’s an interesting thing to have the sexes at odds here (I am assuming the protagonist here is female). Corsets were worn to entice the opposite sex, but they came with some bad side affects. The cool thing you did was take that a step further, like the corset worked, she got the attention she desired, but it did not play out the way it did in her mind. Now she feels trapped. Those type of imagery and feelings are powerful because of all the underlying meaning. This is great.

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Our hands clasped together with a smack and the pages within those leatherbound hands bore a heavy inadequacy written into each shake. His held onto mine as though a pen lingering over bleeding ink, waiting to end the sentence on his terms. He punctuated it with a hard stab downward. My eyes rolled as I read between the lines, “I decide when to end this.” If his handshake was blotchy print, hers was a gentle fountain’s cursive caress over smooth parchment.

I see the connection of handshake to pen/journal entry, not quite sure what quality was the focus for the connection, maybe “telling”. The eyes rolling is a nice visual cue, since it has some tactile and visual senses involved. One little thing, at the end you say “hers”, I assume that is the protagonist’s hand we are meant to see, so should that be “mine”? Or, is there a new third character?