Helpless (from Curly Red)
Lili Rose had always thought that her father was a strong man. Indeed, he was but that was in the past. Daddy “got sick” and one sickness “led to another.” By the time she was allowed “back in the house,” Daddy was “under hospice care.” He had turned into “an old man, shrunken by fifty pounds,” and “furrows in his face like you’d make in a piecrust with a fork.” The woman “stared and stared.” She could not believe that that person was her father. The face she knew to be “ruby-skinned, good-looking,” was “gaunt, and strangely collapsed about the mouth.” This imagery evokes a feeling of helplessness, for no one can stop time.
Ugly memories (from The Girl with the Blackened Eye)
She used to be “a silly little girl” who wore “tank tops and jeans so tight” she had to “lie down on her bed to wriggle into them.” She teased “her hair into a mane.” She was “that girl.” When they found her, her hair was “wild and tangled like broom sage.” It couldn’t be “combed through,” so it had to be “cut from” her head “in clumps.” Something “sickly like cobwebs” was in it. She had been wearing it “long since ninth grade” and after that she “kept it cut short for years.” She had been “forcibly abducted at the age of fifteen” and the memoirs of those days refused to leave her, even fifteen years later. This imagery is supposed to show how a person can be broken by a certain event.
Terror (from Happiness)
Nedra’s nostrils are “pinching with the strong smell,” and she is “beginning to gag.” There’s something “sickish-rotten like guts, and human shit, a shameful smell” you would recognize without “putting a name to it.” And she “hears flies.” And then she sees “them.” They’re “a buzzing cloud like metal filings on the broken heads of two men.” Men she doesn’t know. “Blood and brains” on “the filthy carpet of this room that would be called the parlor.” Like a child “had smeared crimson Crayola marks across a picture.” This imagery evokes a feeling of disgust and terror.
