Dan Read Online Free Page A

mother. “She encourages snails. Have you ever noticed the cucumber slices in the town hall? Every surface is covered with cucumber slices! That Ann Dump is feeding the snails! She’s lured every snail for miles around into the town hall with her cucumber slices.”
    Melba had looked around her mother’s kitchen. For years, snails had been wearing runnels in the floorboards, and in these runnels, Melba could see several dozen snails in transit. She identified at least three varieties of snail, including the Eastern Melampus, the snail for whom her younger sister, Melampus, had been named. Melba felt the urge to pick a snail from the wall. Surely, with one of these evidentiary beings in her hands, Melba could at last contradict her mother. How could Gigi Zuzzo claim that Ann Dump’s cucumber slices attracted every snail for miles around when the Zuzzo household was filled with snails, every day more snails than the day before? The town hall was very close to the Zuzzo’s, just across the gully, on Flop Street. Even for snails, the trip couldn’t take long. But maybe it hadn’t occurred to them yet? Gigi Zuzzo was a forward thinker. Her ideas were certainly more advanced than the ideas of snails. The pace of a snail exodus was bound to be slow, so slow that the signs could very easily be missed.
    Melba had hesitated, fingers hovering above the snail on the wall. What if she failed to contradict her mother, and instead only managed to provoke her? Gigi Zuzzo often said that Melba was a provoking daughter, quarrelsome, with habits befitting an earlier kind of person, a person from pre-history. In pointing out her mother’s incorrect assessment of Ann Dump’s cucumbers, Melba did not want to prove her mother correct in her assessment of Melba. Melba jerked her fingers away from the snail, but all at once the extensor muscles in her arm contracted. Her arm straightened and she slammed her palm against the wall. The wet pop made Melba grimace.
    Why couldn’t Melba master fine motor skills? Maybe she was like a pre-historical person. Melba imagined a pre-historical person. The pre-historical person was squatting in carnivorous ferns, using a rock to smash a mosquito against her own face. A modern person would deal with the mosquito differently. A modern person would react with dexterity and cunning, fabricating a short switch from the carnivorous ferns and flicking it against her face, concussing the mosquito while leaving the bridge of her nose and the facial skin intact. How had the pre-historical person developed into a modern person, a person with this capacity for mental sequencing and gestural precision? Through what course of study?
    In high school, Melba had taken both history and phrenology, but neither class had included a unit on pre-historical people. Mr. Sack, the history and phrenology teacher, did not believe in textbooks. Instead, he distributed modeling clay, which the students used to shape the noses of 19th century naval heroes. Melba enjoyed shaping noses, but she hoped for exposure to something more. She grew listless, each nose she produced more snoutish than one before, until finally she decided to visit Mr. Sack in his office after school.
    “Knock, knock,” said Melba, and the door swung open. For a moment, it looked and sounded to Melba like something large had just bounded behind Mr. Sack’s ficus tree, and Melba couldn’t help but conclude that Mr. Sack was secretly blind and keeping a guide animal hidden in his office. She began to back away from the door, but suddenly Mr. Sack was at her side, ushering her roughly to a low footstool.
    “Welcome to my solitary idyll, Melba Zuzzo,” said Mr. Sack with a broad smile. Melba looked away shyly, pretending to inspect his tall bookshelf. On every shelf, blocks of modeling clay had been carefully grouped according to color, whites with the whites, grays with the gray, taupes with the taupe.
    “If you’d like to borrow a block, I have a sign-out