Things That Fall From the Sky

by Kevin Brockmeier

  Allison collected glass snowstorm balls, which she kept in neat rows on the shelves of her bedroom. I remember shaking them with her and watching the water churn inside: what would it be like, we wondered, to live in such a place—a home that might stagger and right itself, a silver eruption of snow? She liked to walk through the revolving doors of shopping malls and multistory office buildings without touching the partitions, and she could do this with such casual grace that it seemed as if she were simply passing through an empty doorway, sheets of glass whirling around her. Once on Halloween she gave me a plastic ring crowned with a flared orange spider, and I wore it like a talisman until its band split in the laundry.

  Allison lived with her mother and small brother (her father was remarried). She was careful and muddled and dreaming and lovely. And though she would move with her family one winter to the forests and slate-blue skies of the Pacific Northwest, and I would not see her again, for a long time I believed in my sleep that I was still living in those months and years, awakening with the thought that she’d be waiting in the lunchroom.

  That afternoon, while we were waiting to hear about Coach Schramm, the wind carried the rain away over the mud-brown river. The air took on a glassiness that made each object seem sharp-edged and bright, wholly contained within itself. From my algebra and health classes, I watched trees and concrete parking stones glistening with daylight. An aluminum can rolled back and forth on the sidewalk, and a blackened tree limb lay in the grass. Cars and the reflections of cars passed down the highway in a jet of standing water.

  We were scheduled to have a pep rally at the end of the day, but whispers suggested that Coach Schramm had not pulled through, and the prospect of organized chants and the clapping of hands led Principal Raymer to cancel the event. Instead, when the bell rang for seventh period, we found ourselves congregating outside the gymnasium and cafeteria, waiting in the lobby for our parents or freely wandering the hallways: this was something that never happened in our school, but on that day it did. Allison and I decided to head for the bluff overlooking the highway. As we walked around the building she ran her hand along the brick wall, tracing the rise and fall of a line of mortar. “It’s like bobbing over the ocean,” she said, and I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the motion of her fingers along the brickwork or to some other, more interior current.

  The office secretary, Miss Vickery, was emptying a three-hole puncher into the trash can: she held it like a ketchup bottle, jiggling it back and forth, and punched holes drifted from her hands like snow. She said nothing to us. Mister Toothman, the school custodian, was collecting fragments of glass from beneath the window cleaner’s scaffold; a damp washrag trailed from the pocket of his slacks, flashing up and down in the breeze.

  We settled in together against the shank of a mossy stone.

  Allison began tearing at the flesh of a leaf, exposing the thin yellow delta of its veins. “What makes you think of me?” she asked, touching my side with her elbow.

  I thought for a moment and said, “I’m not sure.” In truth, I didn’t understand the question, and I could see that she heard this in my voice.

  “I think of you, for instance, when the phone rings on the hour, because you always call on the hour,” she said. “And I think of you when I ride on escalators, because you told me they scared you when you were a kid. I think of you when I go to that restaurant where I saw you with your parents or when I hear that ridiculous fish-heads song you always sing. When I look at my snowstorm globes, I think of you shining the flashlight through them, and the pattern of the snow against the wall.”

  She hiccuped and pressed a hand to her chest.

  “I think of you when I see ducks,” she said. “Or sign language. Or shadow puppets.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You do this thing with your hand sometimes.” She bent and swiveled her own hand like the head of a periscope. “You talk with it,” she said, flapping her fingers against the ball of her thumb.

  This was true, but I decided to deny it. “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes,” said Allison, “you do.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “You must be confusing me with someone else.”

  “You don’t recognize this?” The duckbill of Allison’s hand met my eyes with a steely gaze. “Hello,” it said. “My name’s Jeremy.” When I laughed, it dispersed into its constituent fingers.

  “So,” said Allison, “what makes you think of me?”

  I could hear the first of the afternoon buses rumbling into the parking lot on the far side of the building, and taking a small breath, I said something that caught me off guard: “I think of you when I fail.” The look that came into Allison’s eyes was sad and certain and unsurprised, and it gave me a plunging feeling inside.

  “No,” I said. I wanted to explain. “Sometimes I panic. I’ll blow a test, or ruin something important, or say something wrong, and suddenly I’ll think that it’s too late—it’s all over. I’ll really believe this. And then I think of you and it slows me down: I think, if Allison’s here, there’s probably still time.”

  A smile evanesced across her face, and we fell into a silence.

  From the field below us came a flicker of blue. A man in nightclothes emerged from a spinney of trees, looked around furtively, and stole away toward the interstate. I watched him linger by a pool of rainwater, its surface bristling with onion grass. Then he vanished behind an adjacent slope. Our school was separated from a hospital for troubled youth by a mile of woodland and brambles. Often, escaped patients would appear on our parking lot, their pants and slippers black with mud, and through the window we would see them taking cover in the bushes or roaming between the faculty cars. They wore dreamy expressions and light blue pajamas, as if some fragment of the sky had suddenly found itself alive, and human, and in our parking lot.

  Sitting on the hillside, I watched the man in his nightclothes reappear, cross the gravel skirting of the highway, and thumb a ride from a passing truck.

  Allison was fashioning a hummock of leaves on my right thigh. She shaped it carefully with the cushions of her palms, piercing it with an occasional green twig to brace it up and pin it together. I could feel her fingers darting and skimming over my leg. “There,” she said, crowning the stack with a snug little pine cone. She flicked the dirt from her hands as if testing the temperature of a stove.

  “Above,” she said. This was one of the words we had been asked to practice for our preposition exam. “The pine cone,” she said, “is above the leaves.”

  “Are you ready for that?” I asked.

  “I think so,” said Allison. “I’ll study some more tonight.”

  The sun slipped briefly behind a cloud, and a blackbird shot past us with a sudden vabap of its wings.

  I aimed my finger at the leaf arrangement. “Beneath,” I said. “The leaves are beneath the pine cone.”

  Allison nodded.

  “On,” she said. “The leaves and the pine cone are on your leg.”

  “Off,” I said. I took the stack in my hands—it was the size and weight of a cupcake—and gingerly set it aside. “Not any more.”

  Allison tugged at her skirt. “Through,” she said. She leaned to one side. “The ground is soaking through my clothes.”

  I had been planning to offer the same preposition, and before I could think of another, she interrupted me: “Before,” she grinned. “I got to the next one before you.”

  “And I got there after you.”

  “Next to,” she said, and she edged closer to me, slipping over the bell nuts and the fallen leaves until her leg touched my own. My throat went dry and I swallowed. “Allison is next to Jeremy,” she said.

  I raised my hand, signaling her to pay attention, then demonstrated my next preposition by watching her in pantomime—I began at her shoes and her ankles, and laddered from there to her knees and waist and neck. “Well?” I asked.

  A sheltering oak began to rustle in the breeze. She shook he
r head. “I have no idea.”

  “Regarding,” I said.

  “Aaah—” Her voice gave a trill. “Pretty clever.” She folded her arms around me, clasping her hands at my shoulder.

  “And this,” she said, “is around.”

  A little hm of surprise escaped my throat. “About,” I said—and holding tight, I repeated her gesture.

  “Toward,” she said.

  “Beside,” I said.

  “Across.”

  “Near.”

  “Against.”

  The far side of the school hummed with the voices of parents and idling cars. My temple was pressed to Allison’s, my arm to her back, the turn of my face to the turn of her own. She shifted her weight, and her jacket rucked together at my side. She brought her teeth together, and I felt the motion of them against the pad of her cheek. When she blinked and drew toward me, parting her lips, my heart tumbled over inside me like an hourglass.

  “Betwixt,” she said.

  Though some prefer the spring, with its split cocoons and dandelion meadows; or the lazy, boundless days of summer, with a sun that drifts past like a great open eye; or the winter, harsh and deep and pure, with its living room trees and its husk of white snow—though some prefer the newer months, I’ve always been drawn to the fall. In the fall, we step outside and everything comes toward us. Early morning lawns are silver with frost, and breezes sweep past tree trunks with a robust whistle. Flocks of birds segment and join in the sky. Grassant snakes slither on their bellies through the leaves. People wear jackets and huddle together. The summer belongs to the sky, I think, and the winter belongs to the ground. The spring belongs to nature and the physical world. The fall, though—it belongs to us: the fall belongs to women and men.

  That afternoon, as the school bus hurried me past the bluff and the river, I bent my head to the window and let the glass shiver against my forehead. The sunlight was slanting through the clouds in visible bands, and a manhole cover shone from the sidewalk like a new coin. Leaves went eddying into the air from beneath our tires. I was thinking of Allison. A line of sparrows perched on a telephone wire and I envisioned them rising and settling in position, bird by bird like a row of dominoes, as my voice buzzed past them that evening on the hour.

  Martha Newton jabbed me with her elbow. “What are you beaming about?” she asked.

  We eased to a stop at a traffic light. I answered, “Basic grammar.”

  Across the aisle, Kelly Schramm, Coach Schramm’s eldest daughter, was pressing her hand to the window. Behind her the Goosen brothers, Mark and Simon, were laughing mutedly at some secret joke. Every time their voices barked, Kelly started. She searched the sky with small worried glances.

  I buttoned my jacket as we approached the bus stop and hoisted my backpack onto my shoulder. I walked home kicking a small gray chunk of asphalt. House keys in hand, I stepped through the front door.

  On my way to the bedroom, I stopped in the kitchen. The white linoleum floor was glistening with water, laces and streaks of it drying in the yellow sun. A mop and bucket stood alongside the refrigerator, and a torn-open trash bag lay on the counter. Beside the trash bag, between the bread box and the toaster, sat six dented apples. They were as red and luminous and distinct as signal buoys.

  I heard the voice of my father walking down the hallway.

  “Is that you, Jeremy?” he called. “We need to have a talk.”

  A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin

  7:45 a.m. He showers and dresses.

  Half of Rumpelstiltskin awakens from a dream in which his body is a filament of straw, coiled and twined about itself so as to mimic the presence of flesh and entrails, of hands and ribs and muscles and a knotty, throbbing heart. In his dream, Half of Rumpelstiltskin is seated at a spinning wheel, his foot pumping furiously at the treadle, his body winding into gold around the spindle. He unravels top down—from the crown of his head to the unclipped edge of his big toenail—loosing a fog of dust and a moist, vegetal drizzle. When the last of him whisks from the treadle and into the air, he is gold, through and through. He lies there perfect, glinting, and altogether gone. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is the whole of the picture and nowhere in it. He is beautiful, and remunerative, and he isn’t even there to see it. Half of Rumpelstiltskin has spun himself empty. There is nothing of him left.

  When Half of Rumpelstiltskin awakens, there is nothing of him right. He is like a pentagram folded across its center or a tree split by lightning. He is like the left half of a slumberous manikin, yawning and shuddering, rising from within the netlike architecture of his dreams. He is like that exactly. Half of Rumpelstiltskin sleeps in a child’s trundle bed. He turns down his linens and his thick, abrasive woolen blanket and hops to the bathroom.

  Half of Rumpelstiltskin moves from point to point—bed to bathroom, a to b—in one of two ways. Either he hops on one foot, his left, or he arches his body to walk from toe to palm and palm to toe. When he hops, Half of Rumpelstiltskin lands on the flat of his foot, leaning backward to counter his momentum, which for many years pitched him straight to the floor. When he walks, Half of Rumpelstiltskin looks as might a banana with feet at both ends. Through the years, he has learned to plod and pace and shuffle, to shamble and saunter and stride. Half of Rumpelstiltskin doesn’t own a car, and there’s never been anyone to carry him.

  In the shower, Half of Rumpelstiltskin scours himself with a bar of marbled green soap, a washcloth, and—for the skin at his extremities, as stubborn and scabrous as bark—a horsehair scrub brush. He lathers. He rinses. He dries himself with a plush cotton towel, sousing the water from his pancreas and his ligaments and the spongy marrow in the cavity of his sternum. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is the only man he knows whose forearm is a hard-to-reach place.

  Outside his window, the sky is a startled blue, from horizon to horizon interrupted only by a dissipating jet trail and a bespotment of soaring birds. The jet trail is of uniform thickness all along its length, and try as he might, Half of Rumpelstiltskin can spot a jet at neither end. He runs his forefinger along the window sash, then flattens his palm against the pane. Both are warm and dry. Although it’s only the beginning of March, Half of Rumpelstiltskin decides to dress lightly—skullcap and a tawny brown slacks leg, a button-up shirt and a red canvas sneaker.

  Before leaving for work, Half of Rumpelstiltskin brews a pot of coffee. He drinks it with a lump of sugar and a dash of half-and-half. The coffee bores through him like a colony of chittering termites— gnawing down the trunk of him, devouring the wood of his dreams. As he drinks, Half of Rumpelstiltskin watches a children’s variety show on public television. The monster puppets are his favorite, with their blue fur, their ravenous appetites, and their whirling eyes. The children laugh at the monsters’ jokes and ask them about the alphabet, and the monsters hug the children with their two pendent arms.

  9:05 a.m. He goes to work.

  Half of Rumpelstiltskin works three hours every morning, until noon, standing in for missing or vandalized mannequins at a department store in a nearby strip mall. Until recently he worked in the warehouse, processing orders, cataloging merchandise, and inspecting enormous cardboard boxes with rusted staples the size of his pinkie finger. Lately, however, a spate of mannequin thefts—the result, police suspect, of a gang initiation ritual—has left local shopping centers dispossessed of display models, and Half of Rumpelstiltskin has been transferred in to fill the void. He considers this ironic.

  —You’re five minutes late, his boss tells him when he arrives. Don’t let it happen again.

  Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s boss smells of cigar smoke and seafood.

  —And from now on, I expect to see you clean-shaven when you come in, he says gruffly. Nobody likes a hairy mannequin. Now get changed and get to work.

  Half of Rumpelstiltskin nods in reply. Cod, he thinks.

  Half of Rumpelstiltskin soon emerges from the wardrobe wearing a junior-size vinyl jumpsuit with a zippered front and a designer label.
Around his head is swathed a stocking cap several sizes too large for him. It rests heavy on his eyebrow and plunges to the small of his back in broad, rambling folds. His jumpsuit, on its right side, is as flaccid as the inner tube of a flat tire. Half of Rumpelstiltskin takes his place between two cold, trendy mannequins—one slate gray with both arms halved at the elbow, its head severed as if by a huntsman’s ax from right ear to left jawbone, and the other a metal figure composed of flat geometric shapes with a polished black sheen, jointed together with transparent rods to resemble the human form. Half of Rumpelstiltskin feels himself a true and vital part of the society of mannequins. With them, he fits right in.

  An adolescent with close-cropped hair, a pierced eyebrow, and a scar extending like a smile from the corner of his lip to the prominence of his cheek approaches Half of Rumpelstiltskin near the end of his shift. Half of Rumpelstiltskin stands as still as a tree in the hope that the boy will walk past, but instead he circles and draws closer, like a dog bound to him by a chain. Upon reaching the platform where Half of Rumpelstiltskin stands, the boy threads his arm through the jumpsuit’s empty leg and takes hold of Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s spleen. He appears surprised. He removes his hand—spleenless—and sniffs it. Shrugging, he reaches again for the jumpsuit’s empty cuff.

  I wouldn’t do that if I were you, says Half of Rumpelstiltskin, and the boy backs calmly away. He stops, crooks his neck, and looks quizzically into Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s eye. Then he brushes his fingers along the underside of his jaw and flicks them past the nub of his chin. His eyes glare scornfully at Half of Rumpelstiltskin. He strides confidently away, as if nothing at all has happened. Half of Rumpelstiltskin watches him exit the building through a pair of sliding glass doors. His boss steps out from behind a carousel hung with heavy flannel shirts.