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Quote by Marcia Breece

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The Last Bottle

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Marcia Breece

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“Were you backing it up on the fridge?” [Jet] “I was…uh…was…removing smudges with my butt. Did you forget something?” [Shawna] “My laptop. I have a paper due Monday for English. I’ll just go get that now,” Jet said, still looking disconcerted as she left the room. “I saw a smudge, and I rubbed my butt on it. That’s perfectly normal,” Shawna called after her.”

HumorMother Daughter Interactions
Book:Patty's Potent Potion
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“This brisket must have taken you hours," Hudson says, sitting next to me. "A brisket like this takes all night, son," Shawn says, not even looking at Hudson. All of the guards laugh. "Then you'd better walk me through how to serve this before I embarrass myself further," Hudson says. "Definitely," I say, passing the brisket to Shawn, at the head of the table. "You didn't have to agree so quickly," Hudson says. "You can do it a couple of ways. The white bread and the barbecue sauce plus the brisket make a nice sandwich, like Jace is doing," I say, pointing to the now silenced doubting Thomas. I continue, "Or you can just have the brisket with or without barbecue sauce and with or without the ranch beans and slaw, kind of blending in, like turkey, cranberries, and mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving," I say. "Isn't brisket supposed to be served with biscuits?" Hudson asks, serving himself some ranch beans. The conversation at the table screeches to a halt. The guards and Warden Dale just shake their heads and continue talking and eating. "I think from here on out, you just need to start actively censoring your thoughts and opinions. For your own safety," I say, laughing.”

SandwichSouthern FoodFood CombiningBrisketHow To Eat
Book:Nowhere But Home
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“At the state park, they hiked up to a meadow covered with soft grass and golden poppies. Jerome spread out a blanket, and they lazed in the sunshine and had their lunch. The sliders and sheet cake were a hit, as she had known they would be. The sandwiches had been a food truck staple---thin slices of house-cured pastrami, garlic dill kraut, Swiss cheese, and Russian dressing, the rolls slathered with herb butter and crunchy seeds and salt.”

SandwichesSouthern FoodPicnic
Book:Sugar and Salt
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“It was the kind of feast she loved to fix. She made her falling-apart-tender ribs, smoked on the way-too-fancy patio barbecue and finished in a slow oven. She prepared three kinds of sauce and her very best sides---homemade cornbread with pepper jelly, plates of slow-simmered greens in pot liquor, and a salad of heirloom tomatoes and grilled peaches and herbs from the local farmers’ market, topped with a scoop of burrata cheese. Hummingbird cake for dessert, because who didn't like a hummingbird cake?”

Food PreparationSouthern Food
Book:Sugar and Salt
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“Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress... Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind!”

WritingHumorWorkEditing
Book:The Polysyllabic Spree
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