Hall of Small Mammals (29 page)

He looks over at Mary, her finger poised on the Stop button. But she doesn't press Stop. She doesn't pull the cable from the camera or gather the tapes back into the crinkling bag either. She is watching the boy, on screen, as he holds up a perfect egg and then runs out of the frame. The little girl crashes into her mother's lap and cries into her shoulder. The scene ends and cuts to another. The kids are off searching for the eggs—in tree limbs, desk drawers, mulch beds, and, improbably, under a doormat. “Not there,” Mary says aloud. “I mean, really.”

When that video ends, the room is dark, and they are quiet.
Brooks waits a few seconds before sliding another tape to her across the floor under his hand. Mary's eyes dart up his arm and to his face, his ears and nose and forehead and scalp, her expression so serious he wonders if she's really allowing herself to see him for the first time since the accident. He mushrooms out his upper lip, imitating her pity smile, and she rolls her eyes.

Then she loads the next tape.

Thank you to all the editors and staffs at the magazines and journals who gave many of these stories a first home: Ralph Eubanks, Roger Hodge, Laura Isaacman, David Leavitt, Cressida Leyshon, Paul Reyes, Evelyn Rogers, Randy Rosenthal, Deborah Treisman, Allison Wright, and more. A special thanks to Mike Curtis for many years of encouragement and advice.

To my teachers. At Wofford College: John Lane, Deno Trakas, Mark and Kerry Ferguson, Mark Byrnes, Ellen Goldey, Bernie Dunlap, Paige West (by way of Columbia University), Larry McGehee, and so many others. To the MFA faculty at UVA—Chris Tilghman, John Casey, and Ann Beattie—for every bit of guidance, for every note, for letting us invade your homes. Thank you to my fellow workshoppers: I've included you here with my teachers for a reason.

For her enthusiasm and ideas and patience, a big thanks to my editor, Laura Perciasepe. Also to Jynne Martin, Katie Freeman, Geoffrey Kloske, and all the other wonderful folks at Riverhead.

To my agent, Jin Auh, whom I should really be naming here twelve or thirteen times, thank you for everything that you do. Also to her assistants, Jessica Friedman and Nina Ellis, and everyone else at the Wylie Agency.

Thank you to my early readers. To my friends, new and especially old. Thank you to my family: Jesse, Corinne, Lily, and River Luckett; Charles Thomas and Leslie Cayce; Meg and Richard White; and my parents, Mickey and Nancy Pierce. And finally, a huge thanks to the two most important ladies in my life: my wife, Catherine, and daughter, Eleanor.

•   •   •

A note/confession: The line “Let the mind enter itself” in “Grasshopper Kings” was lifted, more or less, from Theodore Roethke's “In a Dark Time,” a poem that could have served as an epigraph to this collection.

Thomas Pierce was born and raised in South Carolina. His stories have appeared in
The New Yorker
,
The Atlantic Monthly
,
Oxford American
, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Virginia creative writing program, he lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and
daughter.