The Caves in Oregon

gone out. He walks into the kitchen to find “the refrigerator bleeds.” Blood has oozed out, and onto the floor due to the excess amount of, now unfrozen, meat stored in it. At that moment, his wife, Becca, arrives home and immediately becomes angry at the scene she finds, crying out “I hate this house” and snapping at Kevin. The narrator goes on to explain that a “lava cave” runs under the town, and occasionally, the caves collapse, taking the electricity- and peaceful mind state of the characters- with it. The narration goes back a year ago, when the characters first got married, explaining their happy life together that has begun to deteriorate as their house does. Before, the couple loved the excitement of the wild life where they lived, but then they found out they were going to have a baby. One day, when Becca was four months pregnant, she and Kevin were sitting in the living room when they heard a scratching at the window. Kevin went to go see what it was, opening the door to a swarm of bats. They all flew into the house, creating a scene of chaos that lasted thirty seconds before they flew out once more, but the next day Becca woke up with cramps and lost the baby. The miscarriage had nothing to do with the bats, but they presented a bad omen and a turning point in Becca and Kevin’s relationship that began to be very cold.  

The description at the beginning of the story of the meat in the refrigerator was very graphic, describing the dripping blood as, “Little droplets gathering there, swelling fatly, and then, too heavy, they break from their purchase and race for the floor.” The description of this scene creates a juxtaposition to the more placid way he tells of the miscarriage, “she delivered, with a rush of blood, the baby that looked like a baby, a little girl, only too small,” simply stating what happened as opposed to going too in-depth as was done with the kitchen scene. This reversal of descriptions is an interesting technique. A miscarriage is thought to be more violent, but by already injecting a rudy scene into the readers head before any mention of it, the author is able to keep the emotionally lauded scene about the miscarriage more clean, not having to go into graphics, making it more bearable to read while still evoking the main ideas.