- The opening (don't quote all of it, and use summary techniques to help): "I try not to think about the fact that my son is dead. I try harder not to remember that his funeral was the sixth time I had ever visited him. It was a three-day trip from Waco to San Diego to the funeral and back, and I spent most of the time I was there getting in fights with my ex, Cindy, who kept complaining about my tie and drinking far too much and chewing with her mouth open. Now that I’ve gone back to Texas and stopped hating her so much, it seems most nights I could fall asleep, wake up, and have forgotten about the whole thing. But when I wake up every morning there’s still something. The grief counselor I’m seeing says I’m numb, but that word’s not quite right. It’s not sadness, really, just something of a general incompleteness, like that moment just before you put on a new pair of glasses and realize that all you’ve been seeing for months are shapes and colors."
- Flashback: "Here are the things I knew about my son: he played soccer, he loved the jazz saxophone, he was a vegetarian, and he scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on every test he took. His father was a drunk and left him when he was six. It took me four years even to pick up the phone and call him. I left his mother because of my drinking, and because she was becoming a drunk, too: a hateful drunk, which is even worse. I figured she was so drunk and mad all the time because of me, and I figured if I left town and dried out, she would stop drinking and stop hating. I was wrong. Every time I went to visit her, the garbage bulged with empty bottles, and I kept finding vodka handles behind the Cheerios or under a stack of magazines. She was always getting boyfriends and then trading them in for a newer, drunker model. Rob, her latest man, was a pallbearer at my son’s funeral. We stood next to each other when we lined up and he gripped my shoulder once and called me buddy. We had never met before, and I was struck by his hands—so warm and uncallused. It seems strange, but his grip felt just like my mother’s, as if she had lifted herself up out of her grave to hold my arms against her chest and fill me up with warmth."
Now, what do you have to say about her narration technique? Does the first person work for the story, and why? What type of 'voice' does her narrator have, and how does she create that voice with syntax; how would you describe the diction? (These questions are all possibilities to use to create a focused claim, so don't feel like you have to address each of them individually.)
- "There’s not a soul in Texas that would call Elaine a pretty girl. Her two front teeth split apart from each other as though they cannot stand to touch. She has thick cheeks and wiry red hair that she wears piled on top of her head. She is smart, but in the worst possible way, wielding her knowledge like a blunt weapon—shouting over other students in class, rejecting the rules of basic classroom behavior like raising hands."
What would you say about her plot resolution? What was expected and what was unexpected, and how did it make you respond as a reader? or...
Another, separate question that you can answer in a different paragraph would be, how does she handle scene changes, or how does she use spacing to create a certain tone?
- "I don’t turn the lights on in my house; instead I set the blade gently
where I propped my bottle of whiskey so many nights ago. Even in the
darkness it seems to catch light and glint it back at me.
The minutes pass and Elaine’s voice fills my head. She taunts me, but
not in her usual way. Instead, she is saying over and over again, you left me. It
should be no surprise that her tone fades into my son’s, and that the
two of them form a jangling chorus in my head. They grow louder and
louder, settling deeper in my chest, becoming something leaden and
mocking that I cannot escape. Still the letter opener tempts me. I dig
my nails into my hands, a gesture of resistance already familiar to me.
But my fingers slip through the wound, sliding into my palm as though my
flesh is softer than dirt.
The voices stop.
I exhale as my hips slip unconsciously lower in the chair. A sullen red color soaks over my nails and slides down my arm, until there are drops of blood dotted around the chair and the floor. I imagine that they will be almost impossible to clean. In the silence of the room, I feel Elaine settling over me. Her colors are muted and transparent and she lifts her chin with the air of a teacher correcting a particularly stubborn student. I cannot turn away. She settles into my chest with a weight that feels nothing like a lover, nothing like a child, but something metallic, rusted, as though my body were nothing more than a plank of rotted wood, splintering at the middle under the first touch of a nail."
