“A Choice of Accommodations”
Ever notice how some accommodations look a lot better from a distance than the do once you get up close? This creates the perfect opportunity for imagery to situate the juxtaposition of expectations dashed by cruel reality:
“From the outside the hotel looked promising, like an old ski lodge in the mountains: chocolate brown siding, a steeply pitched roof, red trim around the windows. But as soon as they entered the lobby of the Chadwick Inn, Amit was disappointed: the place was without character, renovated in pastel colors, squiggly gray lines a part of the wallpaper’s design, as if someone had repeatedly been testing the ink in a pen and ultimately had nothing to say.”
The Swedes
Imagery is also put to effective use in describing those also arrive at accommodations shared by people from around the world. The dominant cultural touchstone here is Bengali and it is a far path to trek farther away from the fundamentals of that ethnicity than those who call Scandinavia home:
“There was a Swedish family in the neighboring bungalow, with a boy and a girl who both sunbathed and swam in their underpants, as if they had forgotten to pack their swimsuits… The woman and her husband made an incongruous couple. The husband was a large man, his skin burnt, straw-blond hair to his shoulders, hair longer than his wife’s a face a like a ham.”
North to Alaska
The narrator of “Year’s End” tells of heading north and being informed by a gas station attendant that eventually the trip would hit Canada. The imagery describes a vision of America’s ever-changing topography which is capable of instilling wonder and dread at the same time:
“The sky was different, without color, taut and unforgiving. But the water was the most unforgiving thing, nearly black at times, cold enough, I knew, to kill me, violent enough to break me apart. The waves were immense, battering rocky beaches without sand. The farther I went, the more desolate it became, more than any place I'd been, but for this very reason the landscape drew me, claimed me as nothing had in a long time.”
Emotional Devastation
How to describe complete emotional devastation? The kind of emotional breakdown capable of fundamentally altering the personality of a person. This kind of thing happens every day and most people know it when they see it, but how many can effectively convey the full dimension with simple words strung together in a logical order? Here’s how it’s done:
“He had put the seatbelt on her; her body had been stiff, unyielding. She seemed to know, without looking up, when they turned in to their road. By then, she had stopped crying. Her nose was running. She wiped it with the back of her hand. A light rain had begun to fall, and within seconds the windows and the windshield seemed covered with scratches, similar to the ones she’d inflicted on herself, the drops beading up in small diagonal lines.”
