Read Online Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce - Free Book Online

back. The smoke hovers around his head like an apparition. “Ryan,” Flynn says, rising from the car with a huff, “I thought we’d put this fire business behind us.”
    His son’s eyes are like his wife’s eyes, which are like an owl’s eyes, hardly blinking and gigantic. Nothing else about his wife is very owl-like. She is skinny as a ferret and not at all nocturnal. She’s in bed by eight, or seven-thirty if
Jeopardy!
’s a repeat.
    â€œWhatever you used, give it here,” Flynn says, and Ryan forfeits a small yellow matchbook. Flynn shoves the matches deep into his pocket and grabs the stick out of the hedge. The dark ash smears his hand, and with his index finger he smudges his son’snose. When he opens the front door, the boy darts under his arm and runs ahead down the carpeted hall to his room.
    By the time Flynn gets there Ryan is already under the covers with the stuffed blue bear, Mookie. His wife used to call her older sister Mookie, but that was years ago, before cancer killed Mookie at the nearly young age of fifty-one. His wife doesn’t like to talk about her sister’s death. “Why Mookie?” his wife is always asking. Meaning, why, of all names in the world for a bear, why
that
one? Ryan and Mookie (the bear) share many common interests: kites, Erector Sets, matches, magnifying glasses, flaming sticks, aerosol sprays. Ryan and Mookie (the aunt) never met unless you count the birth, and Flynn doesn’t, as his son was not then a real, thinking human animal.
    Watching his son sleep—or rather, pretend to sleep—he swishes a toothpick back and forth across his lower lip. The toothpick is a sorry substitute for a cigarette. He rations out his pack across the week as a means of quitting, and he smoked the last of the day’s allowance at work.
    Flynn is the activity director at an upscale drug and alcohol treatment center in the mountains, and as such, he arranges outings and adventures for patients—nature walks, movie screenings, theater performances, and so on. Today he drove a van full of recovering addicts to a chain bookstore, which would have been a pleasant excursion if not for the fact that one of the patients hadn’t shown up at the appointed time. The missing man—Small Paul with the needle marks between his toes, “Small” because you really could just about fold him into a shoebox—had checked himself in to the center voluntarily, but Flynn had still feared the worst. Along with a nurse he’d spent the rest of the afternoongoing from store to store before finding Paul in a Sharper Image at the mall, testing out back massagers. “Already time to go back?” he asked when he saw them.
    Flynn sits down on the end of the bed, and the boy’s eyes flicker open, then close again. His brown hair is wild and messy, the small snub nose just above the covers. He’s short for his age, just over four feet, but then again so was Flynn at nine.
    â€œI don’t need to tell you I’m disappointed,” Flynn says. “Because you already know that.”
    The closet door is decorated with Ryan’s old school paintings, and on the other side of that door, Flynn knows, there’s a black ring burned into the beige carpet, hidden by a doormat. Ryan is not a pyromaniac, or not yet, anyway. The doctor calls him a “fire-starter.” He’s more curious than compulsive.
    â€œI’m sorry,” the boy says.
    He wonders if it is because of his smoking. If the boy has seen him light too many matches. Does Flynn work too much? Does he not pay the boy enough attention? Should they be playing more catch? Does the boy need hobbies? Flynn’s father used to take him fishing and made him gut the fish in the sink behind the house, and at the time he’d hated it but looking back on it makes Flynn smile. Should he take Ryan fishing? Would he like to learn how to weight the line and