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

She didn't even look at most of it. That was something Simon couldn't believe, how his mother didn't pore over every page. As furious as he was with his father, he was furious with her too, for reasons he couldn't explain yet but that had something to do with how her reaction was not enough, not nearly enough. Though he didn't know what would be.

This is a letter about Jack. This is a letter Deb held against her lap, in case her hands wavered. I began sleeping with your husband last June, and Deb began feeling grateful her children could not see through to her stupid heart, how it lurched there. It's just that sometimes, he needed me.

You get migraines, right? He told me you do.

From Kay's bed, she lifted her face to where her son was standing, defiant with his arms crossed, defiantly not crying, and where her daughter was shrinking into the wall, trying to press through plaster.

"Okay, just." She stood. "Guys, I need. Just give me a minute." She picked up the box like it was furniture and considered it there, as if deciding where it should go, as if the whole idea wasn't to be with it somewhere her children weren't. "I'll be right back in a minute."

Simon and Kay watched her go, listened to her footsteps travel the hall, heard the bedroom door creak a little open, then closed. They waited like it was all Kay's room was for, waiting, like they should have had magazines. Each minute took all its time.



Above the bed, Deb weighed the box in her arms and tried to decide if the pages were a lot or a little, for all those months.



"Where'd she go," Kay moaned at the floor.

"She didn't go anywhere."

"But what's happening?"

"She's upset, dork. Be quiet."

Kay was and still Simon said, "Quiet."



Subject: about yesterday

somebody braver would do this on the phone, or in person.

Deb wanted to protect her children. She wanted to put shoes on their feet and coats over their shoulders, coats though the weather had warmed already.

yesterday might be something you do all the time. i've never been married—i don't know what that's like.

She wanted to carry her children someplace safe, her mother's or the movies, carry them though they were fifteen and eleven and too big for her to carry.

i've been thinking of how you pressed my hand against your neck. it seemed like such a kind thing to do, like you wanted to make yourself vulnerable to me too.

But her first impulse about the box had been to hide it. She was the victim, yes, but in front of her children, she understood at once what else she would become, which was a guilty party, and she began to notice her breathing.



Their mother's private sounds grew more and more frightening, the longer it seemed they'd never stop. Sometimes just a page turning, and they wondered which page. Or when something slammed—a lighter object colliding against a heavier one, a cascade—what was that? A hand, a fist, a stack of books.



The wound which Deb had tried to tourniquet had reopened, and she'd been so stupid for thinking she could tie it off there, and what were these words her kids had read, these awful words they'd seen? show me your cunt.

show me your cunt.

hi! i'm working

i can see your bald cunt.

haha no you can't

i close my eyes and i see it. you're wearing the white skirt and no underwear.

She imagined Simon reading it, and she could scream. Kay reading it, and she could hammer Jack's head into the ground. She pictured them together in some small, dark space, reading, and they were younger in her mind, both somehow three or four, before they even could read. The ages they'd been when she sat with them on the ugly old sofa they used to have to watch PBS and eat. When Jack came home, he'd ask what had happened to the buttons on the remote, the surface of everything shining from grilled-cheesy fingers. They were taller and tougher now, her children, more angled—Simon especially—but it was those kids she imagined the words hurting, growing them up in the worst way.

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.