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Edit: Get in the Car

I’m fond of the dash.  I use it frequently.  I’m sure too much and inappropriately where a comma might do or a new sentence should start.  I use them because I like what I think they allow me to do: put footnotes in my writing.  I think they allow me inline asides.  I certainly use them like they are a free pass to insert interesting but unnecessary information in the reading.

Weekends are about editing around here.  I have the time to edit one single sentence and it will be one I wrote yesterday.  One with a dash.

She would eek out one ounce of politeness from this boy before she let him tell her to do anything—even something she desperately wanted to do.

I’m pretty sure the bit after the dash is a sentence fragment which I believe is the allowing characteristic that lets me use the dash.  I believe the information is paramount to the plot I’ve established.  The reader must know that Clara wants to leave with Billy.  I want to deliver that information in the least likely spot so that it’s something of a surprise.

Let’s see what my one grammar book has to say about the dash and its use…

Appears I’m not in the right ballpark.  Though I do now know when to use it.  I may even remember.  It comes up where you’d alternately use a colon.  When you’re presenting things.  At least that’s how I’ll remember it.  Almost like a punctuational i.e..

Unfortunately this only gets me halfway.  I haven’t fixed the sentence only confirmed I’ve not used the dash properly.  So lets get that bitch out of there.  I think we’re in comma territory here.  My track record for that means that we’re more likely in new sentence territory.

This proves tougher than I have time for this evening.  It nicely leaves me something to work on tomorrow.

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Get in the Car

“Get in the car.” Billy demands.  He nearly stresses each word.

Clara stares at him over the roof of his 67 Olds Delta 88.  The West Texas July baked the color out of the grass and the ambition out of the boys with trucks but not Billy.  He and his car had been inoculated against that withering disease sweeping level-land in the hot few weeks following High School graduation.  He could get her out of here.

Instead of rolling his eyes, his whole head rocked backward and he stared into a sky about as blue as a 20 year old photograph.  “Clara.  Come on.  Get in the care.” he entreated this time.

Clara squinted her eyes and pursed her lips.  She would eek out one ounce of politeness from this boy before she let him tell her to do anything—even something she desperately wanted to do.

She caught his eye and made him see her own demand as his head rocked forward again.  He closed his eyes when he asked, “Please?  Please Clara would you get in the car?”

She smiled and turned back from the passenger’s door to let him come around and open it for her.  Billy’s head finally swung all the way down, chin to chest, as he gave in completely.

He came across the front scuffing the heels of his cowboy boots on the blacktop turned grey.  Just as he would have opened her door he clearly had an idea and began wedging his hand into the front pocket of his jeans as he continued on past her to the trunk.  Making it three quarters round instead of just half.  He unlocked the trunk, rummaged a towel from around the jack, shook it out, folded it neatly, then returned to open her door.  Clara smiled again as he spread in best side up on the leather.

“Seat’s hot.  That should help.”

He backed out of the doorway, but Clara pressed into the same space quicker than he vacated it.  She grasped him around the waste and gave him a longer than friendly kiss before getting in and closing the door.  Billy stood outside the closed passenger door.

“Get in the car.”

Day 358

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Lady on a Jug

http://ffffound.com/image/787ab062e373c88327e2de3becde20fb0ec075d6

John sets an overfull Hammermill paper box on the worn rug of the upstairs room he and Katie decided would be their attic.  The several LPs on top sluice to the side and spill, ramp-like, under Katie’s grandmother’s rocking chair.

“Ah, shit.”  John spots Cream’s Wheels of Fire album in the spread and wonders where the turntable got unloaded.  “Katie!  Do you know where the record player is?” he absently aims his yelling out the door and down the stairs.  Ahead of him he hears a noise he doesn’t recognize as a sob.

“Ah, shit.  What the hell Katie?”

John’s wife perches on a stout earthernware vase which sits on a lace doily which is draped over an antique coffee table—also her Grandmother’s.  She’s cast aside her slip-on tennis shoes and is wearing someone else’s white high heel shoes.  The flat front soles she balanced across most of the vase’s rim.  She managed to get the pegs perfectly on the other side of the rim.  She’s squatting with her hands behind her back and her long comfortably brown hair drapes her face.  He is impressed, confounded, and curious simultaneously.  He’s too afraid to go nearer.

“I can’t get down,” Katie sobs.

John’s arms surround his wife; he doesn’t recall closing the distance between them to get to her.  He lifts her into his arms.  Katie scuffs off the high heels and plants her feet firmly on the ground but continues to cling to him.  There’s nothing to say so he keeps quiet.

“I just…it made sense…at the time.”

Got no more time today for this one.  I’ll try to come back some day soon.

Day 357