Good morning, it's 8:54 a.m., and I think this is going to be the last post I write in the style of A Box of Matches
For me, most of the charm in this book comes from Baker's powers of description. When I burn wood, like the contractor's scraps mentioned above, I do it out of the need for warmth and saving money. My thoughts are usually occupied with making the fire grow and spreading the heat throughout the house. Until I read A Box of Matches, I hadn't thought much about "little explosions and whistling sighs." I do, however, know that I like the scraps with nails in them the best. Most of them are mistakes because the nails either bent or went in the wrong direction and I like the idea of freeing the misguided nail by eliminating the wood. When I clean out the ashes every few days, the nails at the bottom of the firebox clink happily as the shovel scoops them up.
Not only does Baker describe normal things in curious ways, he also turns normal things into curiosities. Making morning coffee is something many of us do every day. But have you ever thought about it like this?
First you pull out the old filter, with its layer of coffee sludge, and pin its sides together like a soft taco so that you can get it safely into the garbage can without spilling, and then you rinse out the filter basket and the carafe, taking special care to clean the little hole in the plastic top of the carafe, which is like the hole in the top of a baby's head, where the coffee tinkles down from the basket and into the baby's brain (pp. 16-17).
Uh, coffee tinkling into a baby's brain? Or how about Emmett's suicide fantasies?
If you kill yourself, you are being inconsiderate, because others must deal with the distasteful mess of your corpse. The self-filling grave solved that. You dig for a long time, mounding all the dirt on a sheet of plywood by the hole, and when you've gotten the grave just the way you want it, with the roots neatly trimmed off and a layer of soft, cool, fertile dirt in the bottom and no stones, you put a chair in the grave—not one of any value—and you clamp a revolver to the back of the chair pointing diagonally out and fitted with a remote-control trigger; and then you arrange a complicated system of pulleys and weights so that when you shoot yourself fatally and fall into the soft cool fertile earth, your fall will cross a tripwire that pulls away a prop and allows the load of dirt to slide in after you (pp. 120-121).
Nearly everyone, I'm confident, has thought about suicide at least once in their lives. When I was a moody teenager, ideas about my own death usually followed a family drama and ended with, "That'll show them." However, I never devised ways of hiding the corpse because guts and gore was the guarantee that they'd be sorry for whatever stupid thing they did to wrong me.
Did Emmett's curiouser ideas keep you interested in the story? Do you ever have unusual thoughts? Would you be willing to share them in the comments? If not, why?
