# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 12 (`output/chapters/chapter_12.md`)

id: positive_prose_audit | stance: skeptical professional editor, cold read | standard of comparison: READING_GUIDE §2/§6/§8, chapter packet guardrails, voice cards

Focused-check summary up front: the two memories themselves resist generic romance — the chicken-thigh ghost held to the light, the Key Food circular, the clothespins drawn where they actually were, the Decorator's White formula taped inside the supply closet, the outlet plate with its two screws on the floor. These are non-portable and survive the smallness test. The LLM-clean residue clusters elsewhere: in *significance management* — a free-standing mood-lighting beat, a narrated weight-caption on the exchange, one too-crafted self-diagnosis in Theo's mouth, and a closing epigram that converts June's material memory into a transferable thesis. Findings below.

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## 1. Which paragraphs feel portable to another novel?

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "The lamp put a flat plate of light across the desk, and the two blank cards on it were the brightest things in the room." — A free-standing single-sentence hush-beat dropped between dialogue turns: the prop glowing during the meaningful talk. This paragraph could appear unchanged in any quiet two-hander romance — a Beth O'Leary or One Day in December scene would absorb it without a seam. It is the chapter's one installed "the air changed" cue, executed through lamplight instead of air. — ORDER: Attach the observation to Theo's live problem at that moment — the blank stock is blank because June's memory is arriving faster than his decision to write it down. Make the brightness register as an undone task pressing on him, not as mood; or cut and go straight to the four questions.`

Work shown on the rest: I checked every paragraph against the portability test. The opening (two lines through CONEY ISLAND, AGE 12; the kite made from a garbage bag that never got airborne), the radiator paragraph (the wrench, the coffee can for the spit-water, "a story about being handy"), and the chair/glasses/pens preparation paragraph all fail to transplant — each is welded to this book's props and this character's specific competence-anxiety. Strongest counter-candidate considered: "He locked the gate behind her and stood a minute in the lamplight with both halves of the evening on the desk" — the scaffold ("stood a minute in the lamplight") is generic post-visit lyric, but the completion ("his memory gone, riding to Greenpoint under a rubber band, and hers in front of him in his own block capitals") is custody rendered as freight and transcription, which is this chapter's exact engine. Passes on the strength of the second half.

## 2. Where does prose summarize pressure rather than make the reader inhabit it?

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "He wrote *fine* on the edge of the packing slip, saw Mara across tomorrow's table, and drew a line through the word. He looked at PARTNER on Odile's card, propped there against the tape dispenser." — The chapter's stated function — the public couple performance getting harder now that the material is real — is compressed into a private cipher. To follow it, a cold reader must hold June's Sunday text ("don't make it a thing"), tomorrow's diner seating, and the cross-out in one clause. This fails the followability test: the pressure is gestured at managerial altitude, not lived. — ORDER: Spend three or four sentences inside the dread. Name one specific thing Theo can no longer say casually at Sonia's table now that he has handed over the airshaft and holds her wall — a rehearsed cover line that no longer fits its own mouth would do it. The *fine* cross-out may stay only if it survives being legible without decoding.`

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "and it was true; the card under his pen looked too small for what she had put on it" — Narration weighing the exchange on the reader's behalf: this is the index-card version of the banned "the sentence carried weight." The significance is asserted via object-caption — and it is redundant, because the ending already proves the overflow materially when he recopies "everything" onto a fresh card. — ORDER: Cut the clause after the semicolon. If the size must register, run him out of card in-scene — make him turn it over or start a second card mid-list while June is still talking.`

Counter-candidate considered: "He had, in the intervening twenty-two hours, made it a thing." This is summary, but it is cashed immediately in dramatized particulars — the chairs moved to the worktable and back with stated spatial reasons, the dead pen exiled to the drawer, the second glass poured after he drank the first without noticing. Pressure dramatized, not reported. Passes. Likewise "He had four questions and three of them were repairs" — the repairs are then rendered as three specific suppressed sentences, and the suppression is performed by an action (picking up the middle pen). That is the restraint beat inhabited, not summarized. Passes.

## 3. Where does dialogue sound polished, therapeutic, or aphoristic?

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "I've spent two days trying to figure out how to say that without making it an announcement with a correction attached." — Theo is too articulate about his own social calculus: "an announcement with a correction attached" is a finished editorial epigram delivered by a man supposedly flailing, and it sits one step from self-directed dialogue diagnosis (he is rating the shape of his own prospective speech act). His voice card says he over-explains when ashamed — over-explanation is messy logistics, not crafted noun phrases. — ORDER: Replace the epigram with a fumbled actual attempt — let him start drafting the group-thread reply aloud, over-supply detail, and fail to finish before June's "I know you weren't on it. I was." Her rescue line stays; his polish goes.`

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "*GREEN FIRST. THE WHITE HAS TO COVER SOMETHING.*" — The second sentence is the chapter's thesis in block capitals: a transferable epigram that would serve any novel about art and erasure, underlined by the narration's "because" clause so the reader cannot miss it. Worse, it is Theo doing to June's memory exactly what the scene just showed him refusing to do — offering the different reading, the better meaning. His growth here is custody, not solution, and this line is a solution smuggled in as annotation. His voice card bars polished aphorisms outright. — ORDER: Keep "GREEN FIRST" and the literal underpainting logic. Replace the thesis sentence with a painter's working note he would actually need tomorrow — the twenty minutes of dead salmon, budget-three-coats, where the orange interval sat on the wall — so the card stays a recipe he can paint from, not a caption the reader is handed on the way out.`

Work shown on what passes: "It's better as the envelope." — checked; sideways but fully followable as text (don't go find out whether the drawing survived), grounded in the manila envelope already established in the scene, and June pays it with a refusal of her own ("I don't want to know either"). In her register: the true thing said sideways. Passes. "Everyone pretends not to see it" — checked as a polished generalization; passes because it names a gallery-specific phenomenon (the peach ghost at four in the afternoon), not a life observation. June's two long process monologues against her "compact" modal mass — checked; licensed by the scene's function (she is deliberately handing over paintable material, which the brief itself requires) and the internal syntax stays short-clause and self-deflating ("which was my own genius decision," "I gave it ten more minutes and packed the tray"). Passes with the note that this license is single-use; her Ch13+ dialogue must return to compression.

## 4. Where would literal precision beat figurative language?

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "The strap of the tote was still around her ankle as if she had tied herself to it." — The "as if" clause decodes June's tell for the reader. Her own physical-tell spec is "keeps her phone/tote close without explaining it" — and the narration explains it. The literal image is already complete and already doing the work: drawings of Theo, Theo's memory card, strap around the ankle. — ORDER: End the sentence at "around her ankle."`

Work shown on what passes: "the paint coming off it in a long curl, like a fern" — strongest counter-candidate; passes because the simile *is* the memory's content — the nine-year-old's drawing eye naming what made the waste pipe worth drawing — not decoration laid over it. "Each arrived, immediate as a frame wanting a shim." — considered cutting; passes because it is trade idiom from Theo's actual bench work and clarifies that the repair-urges are professional reflexes, not considered positions, which is precisely the custody/risk distinction figuration is licensed to serve here. "He turned the lamp off last, as usual, so the room went dark in the right order" — checked; literal procedure carrying the custody mood with no figure at all. This is the register the flagged lines above should be revised toward.

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## Chapter verdict: `LLM-CLEAN-FOUND`

Revision orders, consolidated for the rewriter:

1. Lamp/blank-cards beat (line 75): convert the significance-lighting sentence into Theo's live problem — the still-blank receiving card as undone task — or cut it.
2. *fine*/Mara cipher (line 95): replace the compressed cross-out gesture with three or four legible sentences of the actual cost — one named thing he can no longer say at tomorrow's table.
3. "too small for what she had put on it" (line 95): cut the caption clause; if size must register, run him out of card in-scene.
4. "announcement with a correction attached" (line 23): replace the epigram with a fumbled, over-supplied, unfinished attempt; June's cut-in stays.
5. Closing card line (line 107): keep "GREEN FIRST" and the literal reason; replace "THE WHITE HAS TO COVER SOMETHING" with a craft note (salmon stage, coat count, interval placement).
6. Tote strap (line 93): delete "as if she had tied herself to it."

Nothing here requires restructuring; the scene architecture, both memories, and the restraint beat are inhabited. The defects are all moments where the prose stops trusting its own objects and starts telling the reader what they weigh.
