Among the Ten Thousand Things: A Novel by Pierpont Julia

Author:Pierpont, Julia [Pierpont, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780812995220
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-06T16:00:00+00:00

The Empire took up only a corner of the building, which was otherwise ambiguously corporate. At the door they passed a locked freezer and a poster board advertising ice cream cones. Inside, pictures of food hung backlit above the register—the Seafood Delight, the Happy Family Special—the same photographs as at cheaper places they’d been to in the city. “Want to take it out by the water?”

“I could eat here,” Simon said.

Kay nodded yes, here.

So they stayed in, though it was clearly more of a takeout spot, with just the one table, a yellow fiberboard that pallored everything. Red tassels dangled limply from a television mounted to the ceiling. The reception was poor and they tried to guess at the movie. The food was like anything they could have ordered at home, which was what Simon and Kay seemed to like about it.

They walked back in the darkening with Popsicles the shapes of comic book characters, gumballs for eyes. To Simon they were leaving the mother ship, lo mein and Coca-Cola, comforts of home. He carried with him two spare cans of soda, fearing there’d be nothing at the house but tap. One fell as they came around a bend near their street, detonating and spraying the sidewalk, the hedges, his shirt.

“Whoopsy-daisy,” his mother said, in a funny mood. “And then there was one.”

—

The house had only three bedrooms, so the kids would share the one with twin beds. The overhead light had gone out, but luck struck yet again when Deb dug a pair of flashlights out from the supply closet under the stairs, one with batteries that worked.

Simon and Kay had never shared a room before, and when they got back it seemed they were sharing it with yet another hulking someone, the mass of Simon’s clothes heaped on one of the beds. Before dinner he’d unzippered his bag and dumped everything out in one piece, sandcastle tight.

He heaved himself onto the other mattress, thinking how stupid it was that, before leaving, he’d sent Elena a message and that now, in this stupid house, his phone was out of network, and he could not get online. Let’s try to go without for a little while, his mother had said, like pioneers.

Kay shone the flashlight on the back of his head. “Where are you sleeping?”

“I don’t care.”

“You have to pick one.”

“I pick two.”

“Simonnnn.”

“Obviously I can’t sleep on both beds, Kay.” He bounced off the thin mattress and grabbed the flashlight from his sister, shining it onto his block of clothes, geological evidence of his packing order. An oak dresser in the corner waited to steep his clothes in its weird, rained-on smell. He wanted only to leave things as they were, to each morning excavate socks and underwear without ever upsetting the cube, sliding the empty case over it like a lid when this trip was finally over.

Instead he knocked the pile onto the floor. He flapped the sheets his mother had laid out over the mattress, not bothering with the corner parts, while his sister went out to change in the hall.

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