Audit written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_14.positive_prose.md`. Full audit text follows.

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# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 14: Catalogs

Source: `output/chapters/chapter_14.md` (cold read). Standard of comparison: `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` register rules (warm/precise/lightly comic; feelings through object/action/dialogue before naming; plain-speech floor; no narrator thesis captions; no characters watching themselves feel things) and the chapter card's felt experience: dread inside competence. Provenance draft, packet, voice cards, mechanical gate (63 WATCH, incl. `qscan-08-weight-of` and `llm-catalog-fiction-stock` at line 93), and Codex audits consulted.

## 1. Portable paragraphs

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "They looked like a couple. It was good." — The flyer-photo verdict is the stock fake-dating kicker; this couplet could close the photo beat in any fake-dating romance unchanged (any Emily-Henry-adjacent fake-dating novel with a group chat), and its irony (good = dangerous) is the genre's, not Theo's. — ORDER: replace the verdict couplet with Theo's flyer-logistics criterion — the professional fact that makes the photo unrefusable, e.g. that nobody will need to crop them apart this time, answering Mara's 8:24 line — so the dread arrives as work knowledge, which is his shelter and his wound.

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "Nobody in the thread asked whether it had been real. That was the point of the thread." — The second sentence is a narrator epigram, a portable thesis stamp on the lie that any fake-dating novel could host verbatim. — ORDER: cut "That was the point of the thread." and let the next action carry the proof: he answers a cardstock question instead of the real one. The *80lb matte* reply already does this work.

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "No one had to fill the quiet. Her pages turned. His pen moved." — The first sentence is the comfortable-silence trope in negative form; with it in place the trio could slot into any quiet-companionship romance. — ORDER: cut the first sentence; keep the two actions and add one more book-specific work fact (which cohort confirmation he is drafting, which catalog's back matter she is in) so the ease is shown in the specific labor, not asserted over it.

Strongest counter-candidate (passes): "Theo had the wrong date on the pickup sheet three lines down before he caught it. *November 17. November 17. November 17*... so that the next mistake would at least require a walk." — Looks like generic distracted-hero comedy, but November 17 is the kiss date intruding in his own handwriting under his own THURSDAY header, and exiling the clipboard is logistics-as-self-management. This is the kiss entering through failed competence exactly as the card orders; not portable.

## 2. Summarized pressure

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "Crossing the threshold, he knew how it would look if June were watching: a man who knew another woman's storage by feel." — Pressure being summarized: the stockroom dread of his hidden familiarity. It is delivered as a composed self-caption from an imagined camera — a watching-himself-feel move the guide bans — instead of being lived in the crossing itself. — ORDER: cut the formulated image; put the tell in the action — his hand is on the third shelf before the light is on, before he has decided anything — and let the prepared alibi ("He shelved for Odile sometimes. He could say that.") follow directly from that motor fact.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "He told himself the showcase had made Odile generous, and knew it was the wrong explanation even as he used it." — Pressure being summarized: his denial about why Odile is arming the handoff. The annotation reports the self-deception as completed analysis from managerial altitude; the reader should live the explanation failing inside the exchange that just contradicted it ("Does she do this?" / "No... She loans nothing."). — ORDER: cut "and knew it was the wrong explanation even as he used it"; show the failure instead — the told-himself sentence breaks off against June's "Huh," or he re-squares a stack he has already squared.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "He knew where every key in this building lived. He could not have listed what had just gone out the door." — Pressure being summarized: the final inventory failure. The failure is already dramatized one sentence earlier ("He got the first three and the faded one and then lost the thread"); these two sentences restate it as an antithesis epigram, importing the voice card's own summary line ("He knows where every key is") into narration. — ORDER: cut both sentences; complete the failure on the page — he starts to add the years to the log line and stops after three — which the existing entry (*Catalogs (9) - J. Park - out Thurs 11/19*, no years, blank returned column) then proves.

Strongest counter-candidate (passes): "He ran the math on the way back out. Public documents. Sold at the front desk for fifteen dollars... There was nothing in a public document that wasn't public. June wanted label language. The catalogs had it. He was helping." — Reads like summarized rationalization, but the clipped syllogism IS the inhabitation: the tautology ("nothing in a public document that wasn't public") and the three-beat self-clearance are the audible sound of Theo closing a case too fast, and "lender lines" walks the back-matter list one item short of the acknowledgments without naming them. The pressure lives in the rhythm and the near-miss; the packet forbids surfacing the exact danger. Passes.

## 3. Polished dialogue

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "So now the label's going to be a refusal with my name under it" — June is too articulate about her own avoidance: she allegorizes her psyche with workshop-clean fluency, and the line would survive unchanged in another art-world romance heroine's mouth. Her card says she compresses when exposed and goes visual, not diagnostic; the under-pressure version withholds the "refusal" formulation entirely. — ORDER: keep the facts ("She wrote down *The room after class* because I refused to") and keep the re-aim, but stop her before the epigram — the swerve to "I want to see how it's done" must be the visible escape from a sentence she won't finish, not a landing she sticks.

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "The bad ones show you where the edge is." — A portable workshop maxim (study the bad work to find the boundary) arriving at the precise moment she is asking to carry off all nine of another painter's catalogs; the want under the ask is larger than label language, and a polished justification resolves what should stay exposed. — ORDER: cut the maxim; let the ask sit slightly over-asked and unquotable — "I want the bad examples too," plus a functional reason or none — so Theo and the reader both register that she is asking for more than she names.

Strongest counter-candidates (pass): Odile's "Labels are not apologies." — aphorism, but Odile is the only character licensed for it, it is one of two short true lines in a visit of under forty words, and it silently picks up June's "apologizing" — consistent with her knowing more than she shows. Theo's "Twelve-by-sixteen reads like a room you actually left at nine forty... Nobody gets to sprawl." — crit-speak polish, but the chapter shows the rehearsal that produced it (the torn nine-option card, the midnight promise to arrive with an opinion), and June's flat "You're right about the sprawl" prices it correctly. "*Untitled (Stove)* is a title wearing a fake mustache." — quotable, but a single comic zinger in June's register whose image (a disguise that fools no one) does covert thematic work on the fake-couple premise.

## 4. Figurative where literal

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "and stood there for a second with the weight of them." — Significance pose: "the weight of" is stock portent (both `qscan-08-weight-of` and `llm-catalog-fiction-stock` fired on this line) standing in for an emotion the scene has not yet earned. — ORDER: replace with the literal handling fact — what nine clothbound catalogs actually do to a grip: the stack tall enough to steady with his chin, the spines shifting as he turns — and then let him just walk.

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "The subject sat on the table between them, titled and unsolved." — An abstraction seated as an object, captioning what the pencil action one sentence earlier already showed; also brushes the room-personification family Ch13 repaired to zero. — ORDER: cut the sentence; extend the literal observation instead — the pencil stays exactly where she set it, and neither of them picks it up.

Strongest counter-candidates (pass): "the oldest one's top edge gone the color of weak tea where fifteen summers of window had reached it" — a comparison, but literal-exact about sun-fading, and the fifteen summers time-stamp the closed gallery; this is the smallness test passing. "faint as a watermark" — paper-true for the eighty-nine-cent chicken-thigh ghost and anchored to Ch13 canon. "His hand went to the third one the way it went to light switches in his own apartment" — recognitional simile, but it renders the secret as motor memory; it is the most economical incrimination in the chapter and earns its figure.

## Chapter verdict

`LLM-CLEAN-FOUND` — 10 orders: 3 PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH (flyer-photo verdict couplet; "That was the point of the thread"; "No one had to fill the quiet"), 3 SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE (stockroom self-caption; annotated Odile-generosity denial; keys/inventory antithesis), 2 POLISHED-DIALOGUE ("a refusal with my name under it"; "The bad ones show you where the edge is"), 2 FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL ("the weight of them"; "The subject sat on the table"). All orders are line-level; scene order, story states (nine catalogs out once, log line, unseen acknowledgment), and the ending's triple-measure action are sound and must be preserved through repair.
