Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) by Brockmeier Kevin

Author:Brockmeier, Kevin [Brockmeier, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Small Degrees

for margie

s a small boy he was always sitting cross-legged in the grass, gazing for long hours at this thing or another, an igloo-shape of water in the soil or the brown joints of a stick insect. “A dreamer,” his parents said, and they flopped about in their beds at night, for they knew that this would never do. One winter month the whiteness of a blizzard climbed to the second pane of their front window, bottling the world away until spring. He began to study the family books in the glow of the fire. “A scholar,” said his father, nodding proudly; and envisioning a desk and leather armchair at the Academy, he went to find his wife. A hopeful few hours later, the boy’s mother was dusting in the living room. She asked him a question: “What are you reading now, dear?” and he surprised her by answering, “The letter n.” It was then that she noticed him holding his book to the light, staring with perfect emptiness at the blank side of each page. She came to an unpleasant realization. That night she told his father what she had seen. “A fool,” she concluded, and his father damply concurred: “A fool.”

So when the first adult hairs began to sprout on his chin, they sent him into the city, apprenticing him to the metal founder. A man with a trade, they thought, fool though he may be, was better off than one without. But the boy was not as simple as he seemed. He learned his craft quickly, casting foundry type for printers, raising and reversing each metal word and letter; he had seen such things in shadow before, and he knew their faces and how to distinguish them. He spent his youth and manhood and middle age watching the alphabet roll between paper and plate: sometimes the individual characters became lost, disappearing into swiftness like the leaves of a pinwheel, but occasionally in the turbulence they seemed to distill to a center, boiling apart until he saw the essential glowing wire of their shapes. He met a woman one winter and married her and fathered children, and in time those children grew up, and in time they went away. He worked each day in the orange heat of the foundry and the drumbeat of the presses, walked by the river each evening with his wife, undressed each nightfall, extinguished the lantern, slept by her side, and in this way grew old.

A day came when the type founder was no longer able to cast without pain the copper and lead and antimony of his trade, nor to walk so easily between the foundry and the printing house. Those hands which all his life had been as springy as grasshoppers now trembled after only a few hours’ work. The back that had supported him through the many liftings of his children now knew thistles of pain when he rose from a chair. His knees suffered in the cold and rain, and sometimes in the flawless blue days of summer.

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