Two frames in Sabrina perplexes me. Overall, Drnaso’s delivery reads as attentively cautious–the constructed world extends and only extends to horizons required by the story. Yet the reporter and the pet shelter manager sitting at their desks are granted an abundance of details. Post-it notes of varying colors fill up pegboard behind them. Their little corners are clustered with indoor plants and idiosyncratic objects. For persons that can be easily written off as “a journalist” or “the manager”, who exist less like characters and more as conditions to the lives of protagonists, why provide such intimate portraits? Why do they summon moments of illustrative completeness, when Sabrina is often remembered against a backdrop of some solid color?

It would be dishonest to pick out these two frames alone. They jolted my eyes so I began to register that canned beans in the supermarket have more shading than most characters’ faces. Emails and news articles are transcribed/written in indexical entirety, even though the narrative integrity wavers (Calvin’s basement conversation with his colleague) and slurps into fractured flashes (Sandra remembering Sabrina as she falls asleep).

Like cici’s favorite book, which asks you to look at the picture closely and carefully, the fullness of the two woman’s office corners almost hits me like a sudden moment of clarity. Sometimes we remember viscerally the details for no reason. In this story so entrenched in the separated, personal glooms, these moments just present a view in of the world devoid of internal turbulence or fog. Perhaps it’s saying that we just “see” the world when we behold with more indifference.

I am reminded of Calvino’s interwinding strands of the abstract and the concrete. He urges us to at once paint the describable qualities and distill useful abstractions. We think of the people we love in the abstract.  The image their name evokes comes as a composite smile. Our fears haunt us in dreams of vague backgrounds. The abstract, simplified image can still bring visceral pain. Other times, the moments of “thick description” doesn’t quite match with “importance”. Perhaps what we notice isn’t quite understood, like when Teddy opens the book for a second time.