The Shadow Year Read Online Free PDF

little yellow bubbles encased to live forever. Riding atop this troubled sea of strewn tools, seemingly abandoned in the middle of the greatest home-repair job ever attempted, was a long, curving Chinese junk carved from the horn of an ox, sporting sails the color of singed paper, created from thin sheets of animal bone, and manned by a little fellow, carved right out of the black horn, who wore a field worker’s hat and kept one hand on the tiller. Pop told me he had bought it in Singapore, when he traveled the world with the merchant marine, from a woman who showed him my mother as a little girl dancing, years before she was born, in a piece of crystal shaped like an egg.
    Leaning against the pipe that ran along the back wall and then out of the house to connect with the sewer line were my mother’s paintings: a self-portrait standing in a darkened hallway, holding me when I was a baby; the flowering bushes of the Bayard Cutting Arboretum; a seascape and view of Captree Bridge. All the colors were subdued, andthe images came into focus slowly, like wraiths approaching out of a fog.
    Crammed into and falling out of one tall bookcase that backed against the stair railing on the right-hand side were my father’s math books and used notebooks, every inch filled with numbers and weird signs, in his hand, in pencil, as if through many years he had been working the equation to end all equations. I remember a series of yellow journals, each displaying in a circle on the cover the bust of some famous, long-dead genius I would have liked to know more about, but when I pulled one journal off the shelf and opened it, that secret language inside told me nothing.
    In the middle of the floor to the right of the stairs sat an old school desk, with wooden chair attached, and a place to put your books underneath. Around this prop Mary created the school that her alter ego, Mickey, attended. Sometimes, when I knew she was playing this game, I would open the door in the hallway and listen to the strangely different voices of the teacher, Mrs. Harkmar, of her classmates, Sally O’Malley and Sandy Graham, and naturally of Mickey, who knew all the answers.
    Back in the shadows where the oil burner hummed stood a small platform holding the extreme-unction box, a religious artifact with hand-carved doors and a brass cross protruding from the top. We had no idea what unction was, but Jim told me it was “holy as hell” and that if you opened the door, the Holy Ghost would come out and strangle you, so that when they found your dead body it’d look like you just swallowed your tongue the wrong way.
    To the left of the stairs, beneath the single bare bulb like a sun, lay Jim’s creation, the sprawling burg of Botch Town. At one point my father was thinking of getting us an electric-train set. He went out and bought four sawhorses and the most enormous piece of plywood he could find. He set these up as a train table, but then the money troubles descended and it sat for quitea while, smooth and empty. One day Jim brought a bunch of cast-off items home with him, picked up along his early-morning paper route. It had been junk day, and he’d delivered his papers before the garbagemen had come. With coffee cans, old shoe boxes, pieces from broken appliances, Pez dispensers, buttons, Dixie cups, ice cream sticks, bottles, and assorted other discarded items, he began to build a facsimile of our neighborhood and the surrounding area. It became a project that he worked on a little here, a little there, continuously adding details.
    He’d started by painting the road (battleship gray) that came down straight from Hammond Lane and then curved around to the school, made from a shoe box with windows cut in it, a flagpole outside, the circular drive, basketball courts, and fields. Neatly written on the building in black Magic Marker above the front doors was RETARD FACTORY . The rest of the board he painted green for grass,