Activity

What lessons can we learn from Chris Fabry’s prose? What techniques does he use to turn a phrase so it sings?

For reference, here are some of my favorite lines from the book.

• She spoke as if I weren’t there, as if I were an inanimate object without feelings or emotion or appetite. As if my weight prevented me from hearing.
• Mawmaw’s kitchen featured bacon fat that hung as heavy in the air as wet quilts on a clothesline.
  Jesse ignored me and told Dickie, “If we do nothing, she’ll bleed to death.” “They call that something, don’t they?” Dickie said. “A catch-22,” I said. “It’s from a book about World War II.” They both stared at me like I was something you’d have to clean out of a barn.
• All your family is good people. You ought to come around more often.” He said it to me, but I could tell he meant it for his own children, who had flown and hadn’t returned.
  In the pictures, I had a buzz cut that accentuated my ears and made me look like I could fly with a stiff breeze.
• After a dinner of pork chops, green beans, and sweet corn slathered in butter and as salty as Lot’s wife, I got out my glove and threw a tennis ball against the house.
• Inside, the musty smell of old books and the quiet made something come alive in me. Ceiling fans blew knowledge and dust bunnies around the room.
• She was a thin, older woman whose earrings looked bigger than she was.
• “Jesse made me a promise. And you know she keeps her word. I think it was her way of breaking the family curse and being different than her father.” Earl curled his bottom lip under his overbite and blew air in a sigh. He stared at a spot on the hill like he was searching for a site for a deer stand.
• I think it was then, with Jesse telling her story, that I moved from pity to something deeper. I’d been attracted to her from the moment we met, drawn by her cocksure attitude, her quick wit, her toughness of skin and spirit, and the way she accepted me. Drawn by those blue eyes and the shape of her and the way she moved. There was something primal about the way she processed her life. I couldn’t help being pulled into her orbit, like the moon clinging by gravity to the Earth. Part of me wanted to be Jesse. Part of me knew I never would.
• He was taller than my father and lanky, and his arms hung to his sides like drapes covering unopened windows.
• “You were sweet on her, weren’t you, Matt?” he said, smiling and squinting, the lines in his cheeks like odd- numbered interstates running north and south.
• “You gave them to us a long time ago,” Zenith said, cackling, her double chin moving like a turkey wattle.
• Her hands were next to mine. And I could see the blue-green ocean in her eyes.
• Her face fell and she hovered over her plate as if it were the Last Supper.
• I tried to get more information but it was like trying to get blood from a turnip.
• As I poured syrup and took a bite, the smell and taste sparked something. It’s funny how tastes can turn pages in the mind.
• The smell of ozone was fresh and the earth felt like it was taking a long drink before it went to sleep for winter.