Big Giant Floating Head by Christopher Boucher

Author:Christopher Boucher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2019-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

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I tried not to think back on my days in novels, but sometimes I couldn’t help it. I was born in a book, after all, and I spent my childhood in words: hiding under them, hopping from one to the next, stealing one now and again for fun. Books were my playground, and they still are. Most of my childhood friends were characters, or children of the bookers who worked with my father. Remember the talking star in Finish Your Breakfast? That star lived on the next page over from us for a year—I went to the Page 31 Middle School with her kids. Then my dad moved to another novel called Cartilage!, and I switched schools and became friends with new characters. I had friends in every style: In high school I hung out mainly with Ixentialists. In college I dated a Physicata.

I can’t remember a time, either, when I wasn’t working with my dad. I could route a page at twelve, paint a backdrop at fourteen, manage an entire scene by sixteen. I majored in set design in college and went to work with my dad soon afterward. From then on he and I were essentially partners.

Try as I might not to think about those days now, I’d occasionally catch myself going back to the sets we were most proud of—the Montreal facade in Catapult, the Mars scene in The Living Room. Or I’d go back to those moments after the stories, when our workday was done, all the characters gone home, the entire novel quiet. Like the night when, after six months of work, we finally finished the set for Annabel Trivulex’s Moon-tree. My dad went out and brought back grinders and beers to the empty set, and we sat on the edge of the fake eddy, swigging beer and talking as the sun fell over the back of the page. “Look at that sunset,” I said.

“And you built that sun,” my dad said.

“Only the facade,” I said. “You wired it.”

“Still,” he said. “That’s good work. Great work, in fact.” Then we finished our food, swept up the crumbs, turned off the novel’s lights and closed the cover behind us.

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