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3 aspects you enjoyed about the writing

• During the beginning of the story the dialogue seems rather odd and uncomfortable. Which makes it such an engaging read.

"Was I staring?" I say, and shake my head. The telephone rings. "Don’t answer it," he says. "It might be your mother," I say. "Watch and see," he says. I pick up the receiver and listen. My husband stops eating.

These simple lines of dialogue are regular sentences but as the reader, you have to question the normalcy of them. Why is the wife so defensive? Why is their relationship so passive aggressive at this moment?

“The next morning they cooked breakfast, drank coffee, and drank whiskey, and then split up to fish. That night they cooked fish, cooked potatoes, drank coffee, drank whiskey, then took their cooking things and eating things back down to the river and washed them where the girl was.”

• Claire begins to list the things her husband and his friend group did after discovering a dead body. As these were the words her husband had told her. You can sense Claire’s annoyance to Stuart’s insensitivity towards the issue. He did not acknowledge the body as if it were even a human. This character is interesting to witness

Back home, Stuart sits at the table with a drink of whiskey in front of him. For a crazy instant I think something’s happened to Dean.

• I personally enjoyed how the character of Claire knows that the killer had been caught yet she still is on guard. The woman talking about the dead girl when she was younger had woke Claire’s consciousness and had to check on her own son to make sure he didn’t meet the same fate, even though up until we know the husband has not confessed to a crime.

2 things that make this writing unique

• Carver’s style of writing is simple and to the point except when the tension begins to rise, that is when he starts to use complex sentences to convey Claire’s internal conflict.
• Carver ends his narrative unanswered and with a cliffhanger. We do not know what happens to either characters and whether Stuart is guilty for committing a crime and how affected Claire truly was by her childhood. He leaves many questions in the reader’s mind.

1 question you wish you could ask the author

When initially writing the short story, did you have any alternate endings in mind or were you sure that it was going to be a cliffhanger?