Page 82 of Diary of a Small Fish

Rinaldo paid us a visit, cleared Shannon’s clean plate, coaxed us into sharing some black forest cake and Fonseca twenty year-old and bustled away.

“After a few weeks, she called me and asked if it was okay to sell the pieces. I said, ‘you mean someone wants to pay money for them?’ and she said ‘fifteen thousand for the two.’”

“Holy shit.”

“No foolin’. That was more money than I’d ever seen at one time. So I sold them and gave her a few more. When perfect strangers looked at my work, I felt unbearably vulnerable. I couldn’t even attend my own show.”

She sat lost in thought for a moment, and then with a sudden, fierce intensity she continued, “You have to learn to feel that way about everything you do. Especially with love. When you are fearless about sharing anything in your heart, you are truly in love.” The fingertips of her hand clutched together upturned, her delicate chin leading the rest of her body pressing forward toward me.

Her words made my heart quicken and thump against my sternum. A racket of clacking plates and laughter and chatter caromed off the stark marble walls and as I stared at her the noises seemed to come together to form a crystalline bubble around us. I must have been looking at her oddly.

“What the fuck did I say?”

“I felt like we were on our own planet for a second.”

She guffawed at that—I don’t know why—and I could hear her laughter echo off the walls. I scanned the crowd to see many eyes cast her way and felt proud to be with her.

Rinaldo showed up at the wrong time again, using cake and port as his weapons. But even he couldn’t break the spell. Shannon paid him no mind and he flounced off.

“We can never come back here again, you know.”

(Page submitted by the author, Pete Morin; more about the book here)
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My Review

It’s hard to say no to dinner and romance and cake and wine, especially when it includes the passionate intensity of an artist in the grip of newfound success. It’s also hard to say no when an author makes things so clear with such economy. For instance, Rinaldo’s character comes vividly across despite the fact that we have no dialogue from him on this page; he is captured perfectly through his few simple actions, especially in the choice of verbs that is used to describe them. Similarly, the dialogue we do have is mostly missing its “she said” and “I said” cues, but the author has arranged the speakers’ actions and words in such a way that we’re never confused who is saying what, and he therefore has the good sense to leave out the extraneous verbiage identifying the speaker.

If I were to quibble with this page, I’d say it would benefit from a flash of Shannon’s eyes or a waft of her perfume just as she speaks the words that so engage our narrator’s heart. But for all I know, those details appear on page 81 or page 83, and the motion of her hand and form may be all that’s needed within context.

All in all, a skilled page from a writer who seems to know what he’s doing.

Page 82 of Silent Night

your skin slowly becomes more elastic, enabling us to put a silicone implant in several months later.”

She had a sharp intake of breath.

“We’ll add a nipple later, much later. Then you’re done.”

Deb set her chin. She cleared her throat. “How do you add a nipple, exactly?”

“A graft. And we dye the skin to be the exact same color as the other side.”

“A graft? From where?”

“Your upper thigh. We find that works well. On the inside. It’ll bug you for awhile. People do complain about discomfort. But we like that area the best.”

“But,” she blushed. “Is there hair? Does it grow on the nipple?” Her face was hot.

He continued looking at his clipboard. “Sometimes. Then you deal with that.”

He cleared his throat. “OK. Our other options are to suction belly fat out of your stomach and put that into your breast. So then you get a tummy tuck in the process.” He put his large hands on her abdomen and felt it, massaging. “Sadly, you don’t have enough for that technique. I wouldn’t worry about it. That process is very long, lots of appointments and painful.” He sat back and looked at her in the eyes. “The last procedure involves using skin from the shoulder area and building a breast, but I see a nasty scar there. What’s that from?”

She felt dizzy. She wanted to sit down, tired of standing here almost naked, so exposed and scrutinized like a bug under glass. She felt like an old car up on a lift. Rusty, deteriorated. And this nice mechanic/ doctor was here to put her all back together. She was a virtual Humpty Dumpty. Her eyes wanted to fill. She did not let them.

(Page submitted by the author, MH Gerber; ebook available here)

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My Review

A friend of mine just died of cancer, so perhaps I'm overly susceptible to the material. Nonetheless, I found this page thoroughly compelling. The author has captured an intense and personal moment, crisply spelling out for us both the clinical details and the protagonist's reactions to them. It would be very easy (and for most writers would be very tempting) to fill up a page like this with the inner workings of the character's mind (or heart, or soul, whichever you prefer). Instead, MH Gerber chooses to tell us what the patient is feeling by way of her physical responses, eschewing any description of thoughts or emotions until the last paragraph of the page. And even there, the character's emotions unfold through artful metaphor, not heavy-handed emphasis words about grief or mortification.

With a deftly placed intake of breath, a flushed face, and a couple of quick mannerisms, we've been shown rather than told what it feels like to be this person in this situation.

Just as skillful is the dialogue: simple, believable, flowing very naturally. The only hiccup on the whole page for me was the doctor's line, "We find that works well. On the inside." He seems to have meant to say that the tissue comes from the inside of the thigh, rather than that the graft works well on the inside. But even the momentary confusion that I experienced, while reading those seemingly transposed sentences, added to the overall effect, in that it was disorienting to me, and difficult to process, and those feelings were exactly the ones being felt by the character. It's completely believable that the doctor would invert those two sentences, and while they might be clearer to the reader if reversed, I think there's a real value in choosing to leave them as they are.

An excellent page, and one that tempts me to step outside of my typical genres to see if the rest of the book is as moving and rich.