Big Fish Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ashland passed through this place unharmed, but those who weren’t stayed there forever, unable to go forward or move back. And so they said good-bye to their son knowing they might never see him again, and he the same.
    The morning of the day he left was a bright one, but as he made his way toward the place that had no name the day grew dark, and the skies lowered, and a thick fog embraced him. Soon he arrived at a place much like Ashland itself, though different in important ways. On Main Street there was a bank, Cole’s Pharmacy, the Christian Bookstore, Talbot’s Five and Dime, Prickett’s Place, Fine Jewels and Watches, the Good Food Cafe, a pool hall, a movie theater, an empty lot, a hardware store, and a grocery store, too, shelves stocked with items predating his birth. Some of the same stores were on Main Street in Ashland, but here they were empty and dark, and the windows were cracked, and the owners stared dully from the empty doorways. But they smiled when they saw my father. They smiled and waved. A customer! they thought. There was also a whorehouse on Main Street, right at the end there, but it wasn’t like a whorehouse in the city. It was just a house where a whore lived.
    As he wandered into town the people there ran to meet him, and they stared at his handsome hands.
    Leaving? they asked him. Leaving Ashland?
    They were a strange lot. One man had a shrunken arm. His right hand hung from his elbow, and the arm above the elbow was withered. His hand just peeked out of his sleeve, like a cat’s head peeking out of a paper bag. One summer years ago he had been riding in a car with his arm stretched out the window, feeling the wind. But the car was running too close to the side of the road, and instead of the wind he felt the sudden sting of a telephone pole. Every bone in his lower arm was broken. His hand hung there now, useless, getting smaller and smaller with time. He welcomed my father with a smile.
    Then there was a woman, in her mid-fifties about, who in almost every respect was perfectly normal. But this was the way with these people: in so many respects they were normal, there was just that one thing, that one terrible thing. Several years ago she’d come home from work to find her husband hanging from a water pipe in the basement. Suffered a stroke seeing him there, and as a consequence the left side of her face had been forever frozen: her lips sloped downward in the exaggerated form of a frown, the flesh around her eye sagging. She couldn’t move that side of her face at all, and so when she spoke only one side of her mouth opened, and her voice sounded trapped deep inside her throat. Words climbed her throat painfully in order to escape. She had tried to leave Ashland after these things happened, but this was as far as she got.
    And there were still others simply born the way they were, whose births had been the first, and worst, accidents. There was a hydrocephalic named Bert; he worked as a sweeper. Everywhere he went he carried a broom. He was the whore’s son, and a problem to the men of this place: most of them had been to see the whore, and any one of them could have been the boy’s father. As far as she was concerned, they all were. She had never wanted to be a whore. The town had needed one, she had been forced into the position, and over the years she became bitter. Especially after the birth of her son, she began to hate her customers. He was a great joy but a greater burden. He had no memory to speak of. He would often ask her, “Where’s my daddy?” and she would aimlessly point out the window at the first man she saw. “There’s your daddy,” she’d tell him. He’d run outside and throw his arms around the man’s neck. The next day he’d remember nothing about it, though, and he’d ask her, “Where’s my daddy?” and he’d get another one, just like that.
    Finally, my father met a man