# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 12: The Memory He Chooses

Cold read against the reading guide register (§2: warm/precise/lightly comic, feelings through object/action/dialogue first, plain-speech floor) and the chapter packet's specific prohibitions (no re-diagnosis of the Ch10 useful-hands wound, no speech about the lost artist self, no Ch07 legal-clerical figures, no self-delivery captions, no stated "feelings are real").

Overall the chapter resists the genre's gravity better than most: the two memories are armed with non-portable material (six or seven unevenly spaced clothespins, the Key Food circular's chicken-thigh ghost, Benjamin Moore Decorator's White flat, the outlet plate with its two screws on the floor, twenty minutes of dead salmon). The failures are local, and they cluster exactly where the user's extra checks predicted: in the verdict-sentences Theo's narration lays over the material, and in the two places characters articulate their own wounds with workshop fluency.

---

## 1. Paragraphs portable to another novel

**Finding:**

PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "He could hear exactly how it would sound when he handed it over. Charming. Round at every corner. A memory with the pit taken out." — Three appositive verdict-fragments rating his own prospective telling; the fruit-pit aphorism would slot unchanged into any memory-exchange scene in any book-club romance (it could close a paragraph of *People We Meet on Vacation* without a seam), and "he could hear exactly how it would sound" grazes the packet's self-delivery-caption ban in prospective form. The garbage-bag kite above it is doing real work; these three fragments then tell the reader the verdict instead of producing the evidence. — ORDER: Cut the fragment trio to at most one clause and replace the verdict with the missing pit itself — name one concrete thing the Coney Island afternoon leaves out (who wasn't there, what the easy day cost, what June would ask that he couldn't answer) so the rejection is shown insufficiency, not a rated delivery.

**Checked and passed (strongest counter-candidates):** "only the word PARTNER, sitting there in pencil like it had always meant a specific person with a tote bag and opinions about edges" — the abstraction is immediately cashed in two June-specific objects; not portable. Also "The memory was nine years old and four floors up, and if he gave it to June she would have it" — the tautology is clean enough to look transferable, but it is the chapter's custody engine and is paid off literally by "Now you have it" / "Now I have it"; it stays. (Its other half has a precision problem — see §4.)

## 2. Pressure summarized rather than inhabited

**Finding:**

SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "Tomorrow Odile would give one brief instruction, and the cohort would settle at their easels, and Mara would ask the table how the handoff went, because Mara would absolutely ask, and he would have to say *fine* and stand next to June while she set out greens, and Ruth would watch them being a couple who exchanged memories on a Monday night as if it were nothing." — The pressure being summarized is the packet's point 8: the public couple performance getting harder because the material is now real. This paragraph delivers it as a managerial forecast — five future-tense clauses narrating tomorrow's difficulty from altitude — and the closing "as if it were nothing" states the thesis the packet says must stay unstated. The reader should live this pressure where the scene already provides for it: the PARTNER word on Odile's card, which the very next sentence reaches for and which the chapter opened on. The forecast does that catch's work twice, in summary. — ORDER: Cut the forecast to at most one concrete item, or convert it into present action — let him look at PARTNER, or write *fine* somewhere and cross it out — and delete "as if it were nothing" outright; the difficulty must be in what his hands do with the card, not in a narrated preview of Tuesday.

**Checked and passed:** "He had, in the intervening twenty-two hours, made it a thing." is summary, but it is instantly itemized and inhabited — two chairs at a decided non-interview angle, the second glass poured after he drank the first without noticing, the dead pen exiled to the drawer, chairs moved at ten past and back at quarter past. The summary line is the joke's setup, not a substitute for the scene. Likewise the four-questions/three-repairs paragraph makes the reader live the suppression in real time ("He picked up the middle pen instead") rather than reporting that he restrained himself.

## 3. Dialogue that sounds polished, therapeutic, aphoristic

**Findings:**

POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "That's the part. Nobody needed it. It wasn't for school, it wasn't for anybody, it didn't fix anything. I just wanted to get the wall right." — Theo is too articulate about his own wound: "it didn't fix anything" is a composed self-diagnosis of the usefulness injury Ch10 already exposed and the packet explicitly orders not re-diagnosed, and the four-clause anaphora ("it wasn't... it wasn't... it didn't...") is the miniaturized lost-artist speech the packet forbids. The under-pressure version would withhold the analysis: Theo under pressure lists facts and then goes plain, he does not produce thesis statements about his own psychology. The frame around it already carries everything — lining up three already-even pens, the mother's *Theo, 9* in ballpoint, the manila envelope. — ORDER: Keep "Nobody asked me to do it" and "I used to draw all the time" (both sanctioned plainness); cut the analytic middle and let him fumble or stop short — the line he can't finish does more than the one he resolves.

POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "And she was right. That was the job. That was me doing the job well." — June names the exact shape of her own hurt in finished anaphora; the line arrives pre-resolved, with the meaning already extracted, which is one step from the "I erased myself" the packet bans. June under pressure compresses and redirects to craft; she says the true thing sideways. The sideways version is already on the page — she immediately taps the card: "Put the outlet plate in... that's the true part." — ORDER: End her speech at "And she was right." (or at most "That was the job.") and cut "That was me doing the job well"; the outlet-plate redirect must carry the weight of what she won't say about herself.

**Checked and passed:** "It's better as the envelope." is compression at the edge of aphorism, but it is built from an object introduced two lines earlier and is June's documented sideways-true register; it withholds (she refuses the knowledge, doesn't interpret it). "And don't make me noble about it... No standing figure gazing upon the white wall... Paint the wall. The wall's the thing." reads composed, but the meta-awareness is diegetic — she is a painter issuing composition instructions for a commission that exists in the plot, and "my own genius decision" is the self-aimed joke her card requires under it. Both stay.

## 4. Figurative language where literal precision would do more

**Findings:**

FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "the desk felt like a transaction, and at quarter past he moved them back because the worktable felt like a deposition" — "Deposition" is the Ch07 legal-clerical register the packet says is spent and must not be inherited; "transaction" leans on the Ch08 fiscal register, also retired as narration. A paired institutional witticism where the comedy should come from the room. — ORDER: Replace both captions with the literal staging that produced them — what the desk physically puts between two people (the lamp, the tape dispenser, him on the staff side of it) and what the worktable does (four feet of bare plywood, nothing to do with the hands) — and let the chair-shuttling carry the joke without naming either institution.

FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "The memory was nine years old and four floors up" — The zeugma is clever and wrong: the memory is decades old; *he* was nine in it. The compression trades factual precision for a polished shape, exactly the swap this audit exists to catch. — ORDER: State it literally — he was nine in it and the kitchen was four floors up — keeping the floor count, which is the part that pays off in the airshaft drawing.

FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "as if the card had been chosen to be insufficient" — An intent-attributing paradox where the literal evidence is already in the sentence: heavy stock, pencil capitals slightly too large for it. The as-if clause converts an observed crowding into a clever caption about Odile's pedagogy. — ORDER: Cut the as-if clause and extend the literal crowding instead — the instruction running out of room, the "- O." jammed against the edge — which gives the rereader the same Odile-design signal without the narration winking at it.

FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "the two blank cards on it were the brightest things in the room, brighter than either of their faces" — The first clause is the chapter's one sanctioned light image, correctly rooted in lamp-on-surface; the comparative to faces is installed significance (objects outshining people = the exchange matters more than the persons), portable to any lamplit two-hander. — ORDER: End the sentence at "the brightest things in the room," or replace the faces comparison with a literal effect of the lamp on the cards (the tooth of the stock, the graphite catching).

**Checked and passed:** "immediate as a frame wanting a shim" — in-trade, Theo-specific, and the simile *is* the diagnosis (his repairs arrive with a framer's reflex speed); literal would be flatter. "the strap of the tote was still around her ankle as if she had tied herself to it" — the figure stays on the object and inverts June's documented exit-readiness; the observation is doing the work, the as-if barely extends it. "*GREEN FIRST. THE WHITE HAS TO COVER SOMETHING.*" was the longest-considered candidate in the chapter — block-cap epigram weight, Theo flirting with the art-oracle register his card forbids — but it survives because it is executable painting instruction derived from June's own stated process (the green reading through coat one), it is the chapter's single permitted underpainting use, and the chapter then ends on action (card behind the keys, riding home) rather than on the line.

---

## Chapter verdict

**LLM-CLEAN-FOUND**

Revision orders, in priority:

1. Cut "as if it were nothing" and compress the Tuesday-forecast paragraph to one item or one present action; let PARTNER on the card carry the performance pressure (§2).
2. Trim Theo's "That's the part... it didn't fix anything" to the two sanctioned plain lines; no self-diagnosis of the usefulness wound (§3).
3. Cut June's "That was me doing the job well"; end at "And she was right." and let the outlet-plate redirect carry it (§3).
4. Replace the transaction/deposition caption pair with literal staging (§4 — spent-register violation, highest mechanical urgency).
5. Reduce the "Charming. Round at every corner. A memory with the pit taken out." verdict trio to one clause plus one concrete missing-pit detail (§1).
6. Fix "The memory was nine years old" to literal age attribution (§4).
7. Cut "as if the card had been chosen to be insufficient"; extend the literal crowding (§4).
8. End the lamp sentence at "brightest things in the room" (§4).

The memories themselves are concrete enough to resist generic romance and should not be touched: clothespins, circular, formula, outlet plate, salmon stay exactly as they are. The chapter's problem is not the material — it is the eight places narration or dialogue hands the reader a finished verdict on material that was already speaking.
