Simple Simon Read Online Free PDF Page A

Bye now.”
    Simon turned without acknowledging her farewell and stepped carefully off the bus, hand on the silvery rail. This was the part where he’d hurt himself some time ago. ‘When’ wasn’t in the myriad of thoughts as his foot touched the slushy ground, but ‘hurt’ was. His foot had gone out from beneath his body because the ground was slippery once and he’d bumped his head hard on the step of the bus. He cried then, and he had cried when the other doctors—not Dr. Chas—stuck him with needles when Mommy took him to them. That hurt. He didn’t like to hurt.
    “Get going, sweetie,” the driver prodded from her seat, as she had every day since that first one when he’d slipped and cracked his noggin real good. Boy, the tears this one had cried then! Now, each and every day he stepped off her bus, he froze at the bottom like a statue until being urged on with gentle words. “Mama’s waiting.”
    Hot chocolate . Simon liked hot chocolate. He shuffle stepped up the damp walkway and onto the porch. At the top step the inner door opened. “Hello, honey!”
    Simon smiled giddily as the storm door swung out. “Honey is sweet!”
    “Just like my Simon,” Jean Lynch said. She pulled her son into a sidearm hug as she waved at the driver and led him inside. “Daddy had to work a little late tonight, so he won’t be home for a wh—” She saw the magazine under his arm. “What’s this?”
    Simon held it out with both hands. “It has puzzles.”
    “That’s right,” Jean Lynch said. “Dr. Ohlmeyer said he was going to give you something with puzzles in it.” When she said ‘puzzles’ she playfully pinched his nose. “That’s wonderful. Tell you what: you take that into the living room and look at the puzzles. I put your hot chocolate on the table next to Daddy’s chair.”
    “I can sit in Daddy’s chair,” Simon said as a statement of fact. There was almost emotion in his voice, his mother thought. But then why not? Others might not be able to recognize it as well as she, but her son revered his father. Maybe in his own way, but equal to what other sons might feel.
    “You’re right, honey.” Oops .
    “Honey is sweet!” Simon responded.
    Jean Lynch smiled. “And so is my Simon. Now go drink your hot chocolate and look at your magazine. I’ll be in the kitchen. Go on.” She sent him on his way with a gentle touch on his back.
    Simon walked into the big living room that was at the front of the house and went directly to his father’s chair, a brown upholstered rocker with green towels draping the arms and the headrest. When he sat down, his head twisted until his nose was against the top towel. His nostrils flared and his face lightened. It smelled of his daddy.
    His body began to rock easily. His daddy’s chair followed the motion in a delayed repetition.
    He smelled something else. The hot chocolate, in his favorite blue mug, barely steamed where it sat. Simon laid the magazine on his lap and took the cup two handed and put it to his lips. He drank with a loud slurping sound in beats of three— sssooooooop… sssooooooop… sssooooooop —then pulled the cup away and sighed with satisfaction, “Aaaaaahhhh.” Just the way his daddy did.
    He set the cup back on the coaster on the lamp table and cast his eyes to The Tinkery . They danced over the cover, unwilling to remain still. There were too many colors, and they bled together so that one color was not itself anymore, and then it was another color. In his mind’s eye, Simon saw pictures as unbalanced, imprecise, and unsettling. A picture of a chair was not like looking at a real chair. The world reduced to two dimensions disturbed him.
    Simon flipped quickly past the cover and to the pages of words and letters and numbers. He liked words and letters and numbers. Sometimes they were puzzles, and sometimes they were just words and letters and numbers. When they were just words and letters and numbers he could look at all of them and