fwriction

After finishing up Matt Bell’s How They Were Found, I was, admittedly feeling a small hole in my literary life. How to fill this void? Oh, I know—share some of Bell’s brilliance with my readers. 

So, today’s stories of the day are two of my favorites from the collection: “The Receiving Tower,” from Willow Springs, and “A Certain Number of Bedrooms, A Certain Number of Baths,” from You Must Be This Tall To Ride. Please, enjoy:

from “A Certain Number…”:

“The boy has been in so few other houses that actually picturing the interior of any other home means simply reconfiguring the rooms of their own house into his conception of the new one. The floor plans he likes best are the ones that he can most easily shoehorn his own into, using the homes of his grandmother and of the neighbor boy his mother once forced him to play with to fill in the bigger houses. The father does not say much in return, but the boy has become used to this. To make up for his father’s reticence, the boy talks more and more now, more than he is comfortable with, not because he wants to but because he does not like the silence at the table, the reminder that there is something missing, that without her they are alone even when they are with each other.”

from “The Receiving Tower”:

“As I remember it—which is not well—young Kerr was the first to grow dim. We’d find him high in the tower’s listening room, cursing at the computers, locking up console after console by failing to enter his password correctly. At night, he wandered the barracks, holding a framed portrait of his son and daughter, asking us if we knew their names, if we remembered how old they were. This is when one of us would remove the photograph from its frame so that he could read the fading scrawl on the back, the inked lines he eventually wore off by tracing them over and over with his fingers, after which there was no proof to quiet his queries.

Later, after he had gotten much worse, we discovered him sleeping on the roof, half-frozen beneath the receiving dish, his arms wrapped partway around its thick stem, his mind faded, his body lean and starved and blackened with frostbite.

None of us realized he was missing until we found his body trapped in the ice just inside the compound’s gate. What pain he must have felt after he threw himself from atop the tower, after he tried to crawl forward on crushed bones, heading in the direction of a coast he must have known he would never live to see.”