The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet – Sample Chapter
Extract from The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen
The phone call came late one August afternoon as my older sister Gracie and I sat out on the back porch shucking the sweet corn into the big tin buckets. The buckets were still peppered with little teeth-marks from this past spring, when Verywell, our ranch hound, became depressed and turned to eating metal.
Perhaps I should clarify. When I say that Gracie and I were shuck- ing the sweet corn, what I actually mean is that Gracie was shucking the corn and I was drawing a diagrammatic map in one of my little blue spiral notebooks of precisely how she was shucking the corn.
All of my notebooks were color-coded. The blue notebooks that neatly lined the south wall of my room were reserved for “Maps of People Doing Things,” as opposed to the green notebooks on the east wall, which contained zoological, geological, and topographical maps, or the red note- books on the west wall, which was where I mapped out insect anatomy in case my mother, Dr. Clair Linneaker Spivet, ever called upon my services.
I had once tried lining maps on the south wall of my room, but in my excitement to organize, I briefly forgot that this was where the en- trance to my room was located, and when Dr. Clair opened the door to announce that dinner was ready, the bookshelf fell on my head.
I sat on my Lewis and Clark carpet, covered in notebooks and shelving. “Am I dead?” I asked, knowing that she would not tell me, even if I was.
“Never let your work trap you into a corner,” Dr. Clair said through the door.
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