As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth Read Online Free PDF

Ry padded around the room wrapped in the afghan he had slept under. The furniture seemed old-fashioned, but not as old as really antique furniture. Not carved wood or velvety. Just mismatched and out of style, like yard sale stuff.
    A pile of photographs crowded together on top of a low bookshelf, some in frames and some loose. Severalwere of groups of people smiling at the camera while mountains or sand dunes or glaciers or jungle-entwined Mayan ruins loomed around them. A few were of Del and other people dangling on ropes, from a tree or from a face of rugged rock into space. Ry looked at the group photos again, and found Del in each of them, at the edge or in the background, a little apart. There was one of Del sitting on a couch laughing as children crawled all over him.
    A black-and-white photo of a woman, unframed and curling, sat tucked among the others. Ry picked it up and uncurled it to look at it more closely. The woman wore a costume, a Three Musketeers sort of costume, with high boots and poufy pants, poufy sleeves, and a laced vest. She must have been acting in a play; it was the kind of posed photograph with a blank background that would be in a newspaper or on a poster. In one hand she held a fencing sword. Her body was turned to the side, ready for action, but she looked over her shoulder into the camera, and her stance and her face somehow showed high drama and, at the same time, that it was all a big joke.
    She was pretty. Her eyebrows had something to do with it. Her eyes almost seemed to be two differentcolors, but in a black-and-white photo it was hard to tell. It might have been the lighting. Ry turned the photo over. A felt-tip scrawl said, “Del—yours forever. Just kidding. No, really. Yulia.”
    He looked at the front again and said the name aloud, but softly, trying it out. Yulia. It was a funny name. Not funny funny, but unusual. He went to put the photo back where he had found it, but he couldn’t quite remember now where that had been. He hesitated, photo in hand, trying to recall it, until he noticed a shape stenciled out of the light film of dust that lay over the shelf and everything on it. That was the spot.
    Still in investigative mode, he tiptoed over to the table with the typewriter and sat in the chair. He had never used this old-timey kind. Experimentally, he touched one of the keys. You could push it down pretty far without anything actually happening, and then, suddenly, it made that metallic punching sound and the whole thing jumped slightly and Ry pulled his hand back as if he had been stung and realized with dismay that he had typed a j onto the paper, just below what looked like a poem. He froze, listening, but after a short pause, the snoring started up again. He noticed a small plastic bottle of correction fluid beside the typewriter. He read the directions, gave the littlebottle a shake, and carefully applied a little blob of the white stuff over the j . It didn’t dry immediately. While he waited, he looked at what was typed onto the top part of the paper.
     
    Try as I might
    I can’t escape gravity.
    My orbit is elliptical:
    I fling myself far and think I’m free.
    Who am I kidding?
    Invisible forces, and visible ones,
    Pull me back.
    j
     
    It looked like a poem, but it was about gravity and elliptical orbits. Okay.
    Even when the Wite-Out was dry, Ry saw that it didn’t match. There it was, a grayer patch over a still visible j . He put on another coat. He considered typing the whole thing over, but that would definitely make too much noise.
    You could still see it. Oh, well. He rolled the paper back down a few notches. Maybe Del would think he did it himself, in the middle of the night. Maybe he wouldn’t even notice it.

DEL’S KITCHEN
    L eaving the scene of the crime, Ry rose from the chair and went into the kitchen. Brown-and-white-checkered curtains hung neatly in front of the window over the sink, where dishes soaked in cloudy water.
    The counter held a