Afternoon opens with the casual, brief exchange between a character and his or her thoughts. I stare at the page, and conclude that I already like this story. Continuing to read the still screen- it is still by the manner of descriptive words such as cold, and winter, and ice- I frame the fragmented scenes as a collage of war- instilled by the lines that read, “By five the sunsets and the afternoon melt freezes again across the blacktop- into crystal octopi and palms of ice—rivers and continents beset by fear, and we walk out to the car, the snow moaning beneath our boots and the oaks exploding in series along the fenceline on the horizon, the shrapnel setting like relics, the echoing of far ice. This was the essence of wood, these fragments say. And this darkness is air.”
I found that instinctively I had placed the setting of this story in the arms of a courageously cold and bitter war. How interesting that this mode, this present scene, is introduced in thought by a series of terms and descriptive terms. Beset by fear, conjured shots of fearful trance, projected by faceless expressions of soldiers sprawling the fields of ice and heavy snow.
A war in winter-
Which is carried by the line, “snow moaning beneath our boots”- almost an immediate mental depiction of these soldiers that I have so vividly pictured in my mind, certain that this is the tale the author intends to share. The depiction is of moaning fighters, trucking upon bitter cold snow, trampled on by heavy boots- military, most likely. The terms shrapnel and darkness did aid my erratic assumptions, either. For shrapnel is in war, used for battle. And the darkness speaks of billowing smog of artillery smoke and gun powder, canons, and whatever fantasy like image I am projecting- one that molds separate time periods as one.
Much like the instances we discovered in the hegirascope, and the first assignment of linking particular nouns to specific sites, words do in fact bring about a memory, a feeling, a fleeting thought that signifies its importance to you, and whether or not it deems further inquiry or interpretation. I saw these words and thought, surely this is a novel of cold hunger, much like the story, “Ordeal By Hunger”, (a war story involving the chronicles of men becoming men throughout a war zone). The tale, again, exemplifies that fantastic dementia between words, mind, interpretation, and sequence. (sequence, I speak of the placement of the words on the page, coinciding with the placement- rather importance- of certain words to the reader).