A Paper Son by Jason Buchholz EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Jason Buchholz
- Genre: Asian American Literature, Asian American Literature & Fiction, Ghost Thrillers
- Publish Date: 4 December 2015
- Size: 2 MB
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Avail for Download
- Price: Free
First I saw him in a teacup.
***
It was the day before the storm hit, the storm we’d been watching on
newscast Doppler as it approached from Alaska, devouring the coast
like a carnivorous planet made of teeth and ice and smoke. The
weatherpersons pointed to it, their expressions mixes of glee and
trepidation, their predictions heavy with superlatives, italics,
underlining. The storm had formed in the Arctic over Siberia and had
lurched eastward, devastating docks, leveling marinas, sending
grapefruit-sized hailstones through windshields.
Bering Sea waves had
knocked some of the lesser islands in the Aleutian archipelago from
their moorings and sent them tumbling southeast through sea foam,
piling their igneous ruins on the British Columbian coast along with
uprooted trees, demolished fishing boats, polar bear carcasses.
This
same fury would soon be upon us—blotting out the sun, stealing whole
chunks of the peninsula out from under us—but not yet. That day, the
first day back in school after the winter break, it was still clear. An
unbroken blue stretch of sky filled my classroom windows; the only
indications of the coming maelstrom were the taut, horizontal flags
over the skyscrapers downtown.
My third graders were hard at work, their pencils scratching
unevenly across their papers. They were writing about all the things
they hadn’t done during their vacations. I’d introduced the assignment
the previous year, after nine years of reading the same excruciating
paragraphs about Santa preparations and skiing in Tahoe and trips to
Disneyland. Today I had received the usual panel of puzzled stares
when I’d written the topic on the whiteboard.
“Can you provide an example?” Eliza Low asked, looking bemused.
“Did you get eaten by a lion over the break?” I asked her.
Eliza was destined for a station in life where she would have people
twice as smart as I am working so far under her she’d never even know
their names, and from the look she gave me then I could tell she was a
little impatient for that day to arrive. “Actually I did,” she said. “We
kids heal up fast.”
“Well, then you’ll have to write about something else,” I said.
Kevin Hammerschmidt raised his hand. “I didn’t get eaten by a lion,
Mr. Long,” he said, and flashed me a grin short on teeth.
“You could have written about that, then,” I said, “but now you have
to come up with something else, because that was my idea. Fifteen
minutes. Go.”
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