fwriction

It’s been incredibly enjoyable and wildly difficult to go through all the kick-ass story of the day entries and pick my favorites. I hope you go through and pick your own personal rock stars.

Today’s “Best of Story of the Day” pick comes from a fwriction fav: Matt Bell’s “A Certain Number of Bedrooms, A Certain Number of Baths.” After you read this story, do yourself a favor and check out Bell’s brilliantly-original collection, How They Were Found.

The boy reads the catalogs in the evening while his father naps in his recliner. His father rarely makes it to the bedroom anymore and so sometimes the boy sleeps on the couch just to be near him. More often he goes to his own room, where he reads the catalogs until he is too tired to keep his eyes open. Each night, before he sleeps, he chooses the home he thinks they need, his decisions changing quickly, like moods or Michigan weather. Sometimes he falls asleep with the light still on, and those nights are the ones he stays in his bed.

On other nights, the boy wakes up shaking, his bed or the couch soaked with sweat and sometimes, embarrassingly, urine. Then he walks into the living room where his father sleeps. Standing beside the recliner, the boy tries to will his father to wake up before starting to shake him. Neither tactic works. The father snores on, even when the boy begins at last to talk, begins to insist that his father talk back, that he take them away from this home which is no longer any such thing.