All right
Amanda Pierce sits in the cubicle to the newbie’s “right.” “Crayon artwork” that is “sheet after sheet of precisely drawn concentric circles and ellipses, in black and yellow” decorate her working place. These are made by her “six-year-old son” named Jamie, who is “autistic.” She is also married to a lawyer. That is all information that she wants her colleagues to know. However, they prove to be better informed! For instance, they know that her husband “subjects her to an escalating array pf painful and humiliating sex games” to which Amanda Pierce “reluctantly” submits. She comes to work “exhausted and fresh wounded each morning,” wincing from “the abrasions on her breasts, or the bruises on her abdomen,” or “the second-degree burns on the backs of her things.” This imagery evokes a rather unsettling feeling.
Office legends
Have you ever heard of urban legends? There are many kinds of them, for instance, office legends. Barry Hackers, who has become a widower not so long time ago, is sure that his “dead wife haunts him.” Everyone in the office has seen her, “reflected in the mirrors” of their computers, “moving past” their cubicles. They have seen her “the dim shadow of her face” in their photocopies. She also “pencils herself in in the receptionist’s appointment book.” This imagery evokes a feeling of mirth, for everyone understands that these stories are just nonsense.
A supermarket
“With each turn she took,” a gallery of food “unfolded before her, glutting her field of view in a visual engorgement” that “made her skin tingle” and “her innards twitch and pucker, a kind of pre-cookie jitters” that “never failed to arouse her in an unsettlingly erotic way.” The cookies “would be gone fifteen minutes after she got them home.” “Afterward,” she would lie “groggy on the sofa in the front of TV, sugar levels plunging, euphoria slipping away, feeling bloated and guilty and alone” until “she nodded off to sleep.” This imagery evokes a feeling of nervousness.
