Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) Read Online Free PDF Page A

up from her purse. “Alex ander, ” she exclaimed. She stomped to the sandbox in counterfeit anger. “ What did you do?” The boy glowered, his mouth pinching shut like the spiracle of a balloon. He threw the small pink shovel at a litter bin and began punching his left arm. “ That settles it,” said his mother, pointing. “No more fits today from you, mister. To the car.”
    “Your bucket,” said Lewis—it was dangling from his right hand, fingers splayed against Caroline’s back.
    “Thanks,” said the woman, hooking it into her purse. She waved as she left with her son.
    Caroline was nuzzling against his neck, her arm folded onto her stomach. Her chest rose and fell against his own, and Lewis relaxed his breathing until they were moving in concert. He walked to a wooden picnic table and sat on its top, brushing a few pine needles to the ground. The wind sighed through the trees, and the creek rippled past beneath a ridge of grass. Silver minnows paused and darted through its shallows, kinks of sunlight agitating atop the water like a sort of camouflage for their movements. Lewis tossed a pine cone into the current and watched it sail, scales flared and glistening, through a tiny cataract. An older couple, arms intertwined, passed by with their adolescent daughter. “I’m not sure I even believe in peace of mind,” the girl was saying, her hands fluttering at her face as if to fend off a fly.
    He could hear Caroline slurping on her thumb. “You awake?” he asked, and she mumbled in affirmation. “Do you want to go home or do you want to stay here and play for a while?”
    “Play,” said Caroline.
    Lewis planted her on her feet and, taking her by the hand, walked with her to the playground. A framework of chutes and tiered platforms sat in a bed of sand and gravel, and they climbed a net of ropes into its gallery. A steering wheel was bolted to a crossbeam at the forward deck, and when Caroline spun it, they beeped like horns and whoa ed from side to side. They snapped clots of sand from a handrail. They ran across a step-bridge swaying on its chains. A broad gleaming slide descended from a wooden shelf, its ramp speckled with dents and abrasions, and ascending a ladder to its peak, they swooped to the earth. They jumped from a bench onto an old brown stump and climbed a hill of painted rubber tires. They wheeled in slow circles on a merry-go-round, watching the world drift away and return—slide tree parking lot, slide tree parking lot—until their heads felt dizzy and buoyant, like the hollow metal globes that quiver atop radio antennas. Beside a bike rack and a fire hydrant, they discovered the calm blue mirror of a puddle; when Lewis breached it with a stone, they watched themselves pulse across the surface, wavering into pure geometry. A spray of white clouds hovered against the sky, and an airplane drifted through them with a respiratory hush. “Look,” said Lewis, and Caroline followed the line of his finger. Behind the airplane were two sharp white condensation trails, cloven with blue sky, that flared and dwindled like the afterlight of a sparkler. Watching, Lewis was seized with a sudden and inexplicable sense of presence, as if weeks and miles of surrounding time and space had contracted around this place, this moment. “My God,” he said, and filled his lungs with the rusty autumn air. “Look what we can do.”
    A man with a stout black camera was taking pictures of the playground equipment. He drew carefully toward the slide and the seesaw, the monkey bars and tire swings, altering his focus and releasing the shutter. Each print emerged from a vent at the base of the camera, humming into sight on a square of white paper. Lewis approached the man and, nodding to Caroline, asked if he might borrow the device for a moment. “Just one picture?” he asked, his head cocked eagerly. “Well,” said the man, and he shrugged, giving a little flutter with his index finger. “Okay. One.”