Carlotta
The narrator informs the reader that she once had a cat whose provenance reportedly involved a buccaneer who named the feline Carlotta. Idiosyncratically metaphorical cat, that Carlotta:
“Almost everyone in the house feared my pirate cat. She scratched those who chased her off the furniture. She howled like a ghost when she was stuck inside a wardrobe.”
Murder/Suicide Pact for One
The narrator recalls an observation offered by Edward at one point in the past which in the present is flowing up to the surface to bite her consciousness in the heart:
“To kill another person is also violence done to yourself, and you bear the damage to the end of your days.”
It’s Not What You Think
One of the great powers of metaphor and simile is that two completely different acts can be described using the exact same language and still be appropriate. For instance, the rich imagery of this excerpt is not describing what most would likely think when taken out of contact. Just the opposite, in face:
“He moved his great mass and hovered over her like a dark cloud and she wore a grimace of fear, as if she were about to be crushed to death.”
Lingering…Inconveniently
There’s nothing more exasperating than a person who is clearly approaching death taking their sweet time getting there. Apparently.
“It was like staring at an old tortoise that never moved. I would have had sympathy for her if she weakened more each day until her face turned gray and she died. But she was the same every time I saw her. It made me so mad.”
The End of an Era
The story is situated during the period of the overthrow of the Ching dynasty and the transformation to republican rule. It is a time of nervous anxiety that explodes into a frenzy of metaphor:
“the house had been abuzz over the coming overthrow of the Ching dynasty…servants had also caught the fever of change. They recited a litany of tragedies under imperial rule…Opium had turned their men into the living dead.”
