Thomas Pierce - Videos of People Falling Down

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When I first encountered Thomas Pierce’s writing, it set off quiet and powerful earthquakes in my brain. His stories have the power to bring you immediately into their world, and then turn you upside down, sideways, and transformed. Reading his manuscript for the first time, I felt the tension and anticipation (and greediness) that an editor feels when they know… this is one I must publish. This is a voice that needs to be delighted in, needs to be heard.

Everyone who has read Hall of Small Mammals —the collection which includes this story — has confided in me that, of course, this story or that story was the best one, the stand-out of the collection. And it would always be a different story. Every story in this collection is someone’s favorite, including this one, “Videos of People Falling Down.” I hadn’t ever seen this reaction before, and it speaks to the incredible diversity and brilliance of Thomas’ writing. The striking thing to me was this sense of intense ownership and kinship readers felt with Thomas’ work. They came into his world and felt like it was their own.

A powerhouse of inventiveness and imagination, “Videos of People Falling Down” is structured like a symphony that plays back on itself, building to a crescendo of emotion and experience. When Thomas and I were editing the story, we had charts and lists of characters and long discussions about who and what and why. We kept talking about it as a puzzle that needed to fit all together; that’s the technical stuff, but the stuff that sucks you right in is the humanity of this piece and Thomas’ artful storytelling.

This story is about the interplay of a group of people. Their connections are revealed, their personalities exposed. It’s also about our personal failings, our falls, and how they’re captured and replayed in modern society (and in our own minds) over and over, becoming a part of the cultural fabric. Searing and playful images and motifs run throughout: a woman who falls into a polar bear habitat at the zoo, a book about beekeepers, a murderous cellist, Brahms’ “Hungarian Dance No. 5.” I played that song on my violin as a young girl and when I saw it in this story, I could hear the melody in my mind. It was a personal, emotional link to the storytelling, something that Thomas has an uncanny way of bringing out for every reader, making his collection both universal and still very intimate.

Enjoy this story — perhaps it will be your favorite story — and to find out more about this wild and wooly world of Thomas’ writing, read his book, Hall of Small Mammals .

Laura Perciasepe

Editor, Riverhead Books

How NOT to Ride Down Stairs HUGE FALL

A boy with floppy brown hair and freckled arms pedals his mountain bike toward some concrete steps outside of a high school. There are twenty-five steps, and they lead down to the teacher’s lot. The boy’s friends are waiting at the bottom to see what happens. When he reaches the first step, he leans back in his seat to keep from toppling over the handlebars. His name is Davy, and he can draw a hand perfectly. Nobody draws a hand like Davy. His art teacher wants him to apply to art schools next year. She believes one day Davy will draw not only a perfect hand but also a perfect wrist and a perfect arm and, if he is diligent, a perfect shoulder too. Beyond that she dares not hope. Necks are the most beautiful part of the female body, and no one has ever captured one as it really is.

The art teacher possesses a neck more elegant than most. If it wasn’t indecent, she’d pose for Davy. At the moment of his stunt, she is locking up her room, a box of school-bought art supplies under her arm. She doesn’t see Davy fall, but she’s the first adult on the scene. Davy is conscious, on his back across the bottom three steps. She orders him not to move an inch. The bone has punctured the pale skin of his left arm. She calls the ambulance and follows it all the way to the hospital in her beat-up Acura. In the emergency room, she finds a seat beside a big man whose leg is wrapped in a bloody towel. The teenager to her right doesn’t cover his mouth when he coughs. She flips through a Golf Digest . The old woman across from her is reading a novel with bees on the cover. “What happens in it?” she asks the woman, and the woman says, “Two beekeepers fall in love but it’s impossible for them to be together.”

Old Woman FALLS into Polar Bear Habitat

The book about beekeepers is Now a Major Motion Picture starring Julia Roberts. “Swimming,” one of the songs on its sound track, has become very popular on the radio. The song was written and performed by Simon Punch, a whisper-voiced guitarist with a hip Rasputin beard and a long thumbnail painted black, and the lyrics are based on something that happened to him as a boy at the zoo with his grandmother.

They were watching two polar bears paddle around in a clear blue pool when she leaned too far over the concrete wall for a photograph and fell eight feet down into the water. Simon was too young to do anything but watch as she splashed and screamed, scraping at the wall like a lunatic. A crowd formed. A man dangled his jacket down to her and she grabbed hold of it. Because she wasn’t strong enough to hold on for very long she kept plunking back down into the water. A lady who worked for the zoo ran over with a bucket and tossed fish parts into the pit to keep the polar bears distracted, but one of the bears lunged and bit his grandmother’s leg. When she finally emerged over the concrete wall — dripping wet, bleeding, embarrassed — they ripped away her pants and discovered that the bite wound, thank God, wasn’t life-threatening. Still, all these years later, Simon sometimes dreams about polar bears. They come after him with impossibly large teeth and suffocative fur. They chase him down streets and up stairs — to the perimeter of his dreams. When he wakes he can feel their chilly wet breath on his neck.

Stupid People Falling Ouch Try Not to Laugh

A man is on his way to meet a friend for a late drink and stops at an ATM for some cash. His wallet is ridiculously fat — not with cash but with movie stubs, wads of receipts that he will never actually sort, a photo of his wife, a photo of his long-dead basset hound, and all his cards: the Anthem insurance card, the library card, the one-year pass to the contemporary art museum, and of course his many credit cards. The bank is closed for the night. The lights are off in the main lobby. The ATM is not directly on the street but in a small glass anteroom. Accessing it after hours requires that you slide your bank card into the slot by the door.

The man inserts his card, and a tiny light above it flashes red three times. He inserts his card again and pulls it back out more deliberately. The light blinks red again.

His name is Marshall, and he manages a nearby stationery shop. He is also an accomplished cellist. He is third chair in the city symphony. His favorite composer is Brahms. Sometimes when he hears “Hungarian Dance No. 5” he has a funny feeling that is difficult to explain to others. He’s told only one or two people about it. The feeling involves the possibility of a past life.

Through the thick bulletproof glass, faintly, Marshall can hear music playing — not Brahms but something else. It’s that Simon Punch song, he realizes, the one from the Julia Roberts movie about beekeepers. He consults the pictogram on the card reader to make sure his card was properly oriented. He rubs the magnetic strip back and forth across his pleated khakis to make sure it wasn’t dirty and then he inserts it again. The red light flashes. Maybe something is wrong with the reader or with the ATM behind the glass. Maybe it’s out of order and the bank forgot to hang up a sign. A woman with jangly gold earrings approaches with clacking cowboy boots.