Charlotte
The story “Bringing Home the Bones” commences with a portrait of a woman named Charlotte. And that portrait is not a dark-toned chiaroscuro sketch, but one painted with the full palette of shades and hues provided by the use of imagery:
“She liked her colors strong and separate: the greens of ryegrass and alfalfa, the blue of sky, the darkness of garden soil, and the colors of cows. Brick and white Herefords. The pure black of a Black Angus. Her fawn-colored Jersey against the grasses of her field, against a clear horizon.”
Georgina
Georgina in the story “Celery Fields” is also painted with a brush stroke vivid with the color imagery. In this case, however, it is less an insight into her own color preference than the trappings of expectations gone unfulfilled:
“Andy's truck was as white as a wedding cake, a pure color that seemed wrong here. She'd expect green-whites like the celery her granny once protected from the sun, and she'd expect red-whites like the crazy eyes of that pony that had been trapped in the mud a decade ago.”
Madeline’s Mother
“The Perfect Lawn” is a story about a teenage boy’s obsessive stalking of a cheerleader named Madeline. Kevin is in deep, so deep that he is stuck in the tar of irony. The flash of Madeline’s underwear as she does her cheers has so captivated the boy that he fails to realize she is perhaps the least interesting person he will ever meet. Not so her mother:
“Mrs. Martin's orange-lit face grew demonic in the rippling light. Her pale eyes shone wet, and the long shadows of her eyelashes reflected upward onto her forehead. She was some sort of thoughtless witch, unconcerned with what spells she was casting. Her snakelike fingers wrapped around each other and around her cigarette like an unholy tangling of limbs.”
Big Joanie’s Big Moment
“Circus Matinee” presents a story of what happens when routine bites hard and ambitions are low. Big Joanie never expected to be front and center as the main attraction at the circus, but then again she also never expected a certain tiger to not follow the script as performed hundreds of times:
“Big Joanie doesn't move. Her size twelve canvas shoes stick to the snow cone juice and flattened cotton candy as the tiger's feet meet clean floor mats, swept and scrubbed after each show. For six years, in sometimes three shows a day, Big Joanie has seen this tiger pour into the caged center ring, but she never considered the possibility of the tiger walking free. Now she imagines tiger feet prowling her spine, stepping on vertebrae which float up her back like bone islands.”
