The Shell Collector: Stories
Anthony Doerr
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 1439190054
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The "perilously beautiful" (Boston Globe) first story collection by the author of the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning #1 New York Times bestseller All The Light We Cannot See.
The exquisitely crafted stories in Anthony Doerr’s debut collection take readers from the African Coast to the pine forests of Montana to the damp moors of Lapland, charting a vast physical and emotional landscape. Doerr explores the human condition in all its varieties—metamorphosis, grief, fractured relationships, and slowly mending hearts—conjuring nature in both its beautiful abundance and crushing power. Some of the characters in these stories contend with hardships; some discover unique gifts; all are united by their ultimate deference to the ravishing universe outside themselves.
dream about wolves. But that elk’s been dead at least a day. It doesn’t go anywhere. It goes into the crops of those ravens. How could she tell him? How could she ask him to understand such a thing? How could anyone understand? The books she read never told her that. More clearly than ever she could see that there was a fine line between dreams and wakefulness, between living and dying, a line so tenuous it sometimes didn’t exist. It was always clearest for her in winter. In winter, in that
the bubble canopy of his helicopter in cutting sleet to cull sick caribou with a scoped carbine. But then there was choroideremia and degeneration of the retina; in a year his eyesight was tunneled, spattered with rainbow-colored halos. By twelve, when his father took him four thousand miles south, to Florida to see a specialist, his vision had dwindled into darkness. The ophthalmologist knew the boy was blind as soon as he walked through the door, one hand clinging to his father’s belt, the
catatonic on his cot. Her forehead was cold and damp. He rapped his knuckles on her sternum and she did not reflex. Her pulse measured at twenty, then eighteen. He radioed Dr. Kabiru, who motored his launch over the reef and knelt beside her and spoke in her ear. “Bizarre reaction to malaria,” the doctor mumbled. “Her heart hardly beats.” The shell collector paced his kibanda, blundered into chairs and tables that had been unmoved for ten years. Finally he knelt on the kitchen floor, not praying
Come and get me, Joseph wants to yell at them, at their tinted windows and chrome tailpipes. Just you try. But he does not; he keeps his head down and pretends to busy himself among the rosebushes. In October of 1994 Joseph’s mother goes to the market in the morning with three baskets of sweet potatoes and does not return. He paces the rows of her garden, listening to the far-off thump-thump of artillery, the keening of sirens, the interminable silences between. When finally the last hem of
all around him, hoping for a glimpse of white, the river of her body swinging in the night. But she was nowhere. He had lost her: it was a dead end—had he, despite all his confidence, taken the wrong trail? He pivoted, retreated, reapproached the cliff’s edge. He was certain he’d seen her dress flit between the boulders on which his hands now rested. And there were her tracks in the mud. Behind was the way he had come. Ahead waited what looked like nothing, space, a spiral of constellations