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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—Roadkill Stork:
Kya sets the table as her mother taught her in the hopes that Pa will return home from his trip, but finds herself on tenterhooks worrying her dinner companion won't show up. In this passage the author uses visual imagery and simile to emphasize Kya’s loneliness and fear as she prepares dinner for Pa and worries she's been abandoned completely:
She didn’t know how to make gravy, so poured the backbone stock, floating with morsels of white fat, into an empty jelly jar. The plates were cracked and didn’t match, but she had the fork on the left, the knife on the right like Ma taught her. Then she waited, flattened up against the Frigidaire like a roadkill stork.
The simile “flattened up against the Frigidaire like a roadkill stork” compares Kya’s stiff, frightened body to the bony shape of a car-crushed bird. Although she’s not lying on the ground like a carcass might, she has “flattened” herself as though she's smashed against the fridge in order to make herself as small as possible. This image makes her feel exposed and out of place, like the carcass of a bird lying in the road. It also mirrors how she feels about both the possibility of Pa returning home and being drunk and violent, or of his not returning home and leaving her alone forever. She wants to please him, but she’s also frightened of what he’ll do if he comes back. She knows that he’ll be unhappy if the food she serves him isn’t up to par, but doesn’t know how to use the “backbone stock” in the way her mother would have if she were there.
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