Excerpt from Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And she hadn't done anything, but that was the problem. Stupid, idiot woman.



A shrill sound pierced the air, making them jump, what both hoped, horribly, wasn't their mother's voice, what turned out to be the smoke detector singing.

Deb came running out to the kitchen, and Simon and Kay found her at the stove saying, "Shit shit stop it stop," bullying the pot of pasta that gurgled hot foam onto the range. She flapped a dish towel at the little white disk mounted near the ceiling. "Could someone please open a window please!"

Simon leaned over the sink to push out the pane of glass, which got the air to where it was almost circulating. Deb
went on flapping. Within their panic it was a relief to have a small, solvable problem, something actionable. When the alarm stopped, the other problems were still there.

She got them both to the table. Simon sucked down glass after glass of soda, so that Deb eventually brought the two-liter bottle out from the fridge and left it to sweat on the wood. Kay wound pasta into a mass on her fork, her face intermittently crumpling into the mask of tragedy. Deb wished she could hear what words rang in her daughter's ears, what thoughts kept breaking through, breaking her pink, round moon face. She began to doubt even this decision, dinner, a sad stab at order where it did not exist, and got out of her chair to crouch between them. She touched the backs of their necks, which felt hot, or maybe she was cold.

Simon was watching the bubbles cling and lose their grip inside his glass. "You're going to get a divorce."

Deb could feel all the insides of her throat, saying, "When Dad gets home—"

"I don't want to talk to him. I hate him." So Simon wouldn't talk and Kay couldn't, could make only a wet whistling sound with her breathing.

"Don't cry. We—" And here Deb looked at Simon too, stressing the word. "We didn't do anything wrong." The sharp eyes her son made back at her made her wonder if he disagreed, if maybe he thought she had done a few things wrong.



They gave up on dinner. Kay cried in the mirror, watching herself brush her teeth. Deb gave her two Tylenol PMs and sat with her as she fell asleep. She touched her daughter's face with a bent finger. The girl's skin felt like a wettish peach.

In the living room, Simon splayed out on the floor with his videogames, the buzz of his hair silhouetted against the light of the screen. Deb stood over him. The time glared on the cable box: 9:28. Jack, so near an opening, would not be home for another several hours. "Which game is this?"

"Battlefield."

"How does it work?" On-screen it was a gray day, and the camera bobbed through torched forests, past patches of fire and ember. There was the sound of footsteps and a helicopter overhead. Deb flinched at gunfire.

"You kill people." He pressed so many buttons. "It's the Vietnam War." There was shouting in a hard, alien language (real Vietnamese?) and more shooting. A hand that was Simon's reloaded his gun. An American shouted Grenade, get down! The color washed out, and the point of view fell to the ground, on its side. "Fuck."

Deb looked at her son in a way he could feel.

"What? I died." Already he was alive again. KILL ASSIST +10 flashed on the screen.

"Who are you playing against?"

"Uh." His words came from far away. "It's live, so. Just anybody."

"Strangers?"

"Uh. Yeah. I mean, I don't know them."


. . .

 

Later he went to bed, or at least to his room, where, from the hall, Deb could see the strip of white light underscoring his door. Probably he was online again. Probably had never been off.

The box she'd left in their bedroom, under a blanket on the rocking chair by Jack's closet. That was where it greeted her now, tipping a little forward in the current the window conspired with the open door to make.

Excerpted from Among the Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont. Copyright © 2015 by Julia Pierpont. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.