Excerpt from A Box of Matches
by Nicholson Baker
Good moming, it's 4:45 am, and today after I made the fire I just sat for ten minutes doing nothing. Every so often I yawned, leaning
forward in chair with my elbows on my knees and my hands clasped. Sometimes a yawn will take on a life of its own, becoming
larger and more extensive than I could have foretold, forcing me to bow my head and gape until several drops of saliva, fed by streams
sides of my cheeks, collect at the comers of my mouth and fall to the floor. After a few large down-yawns like these, my eyes
are lubricated and I can think more clearly. I don't know whether scientific studies of the human yawn have taken into account the way it
helps to lubricate the eyeballs
worry about the duck in the cold. She's probably awake. We have a duck that lives in a doghouse outside. At night we drape a
blanket over the doghouse and put a portable window screen over its front entrance. The screen is there to keep out foxes and coyotes
There is
fox that lives on the hill with a bushy horizontal tail that is almost as big as he is, and at night sometimes you can hear the
coyotes hooting from the fields on the other side of the river
The duck's blue dish freezes overnight. Every morning, before I leave for work (dropping Phoebe at school on the way), I hit the bowl
upside down against a snow-pille and a disk of ice plops out: the bowl is self-cleaning in this weather. There are several other ice disks
lying around in the snow, and these are pecked at by crows in the daytime. They look like UFOs, or maybe more like corneas-the layer
half-dissolved duck food frozen at the upturned bottom is the ins. The duck emerges, making her tiny rapid cheeps, excited over the
prospect of the warm water, which steams when I pour it in the bowl. She makes long scoops of water with her under-beak and then
straighters her neck to let the warmth slide down. I hold out a handful of feed, and she goes at it with her beak, very fast, with much
faster movements than humans can make, moving like the typing ball on an old IBM Selectric. Some of the feed falls in the water, and
that gets her crazy: she roots around t the swampy warmth, rapping at the bottom and finding all the nuggets that swirl there, making
the water cloudy with the outflow from her throat. After a last burst of eating she looks up and is still, working her neck twice to settle
her breakfast, and she walks out with me down the driveway. Sometimes here she will flap her wings hand, high-stepping in place
without becoming airbome, Ike a jogger at a stoplight; sometimes she takes fight, although she hasn't completely refined her landings
Her eyes are on the sides of her head: she has to tum away from me to look up at me, then out at the world, then up at me again.
Last night lying
heard a terribly sad sound, as c a cat in distress or an infant keening in the cold: long, slow, heart-
half rose and held my breath and listened intently-was it the duck?-but the sound had stopped. I almost woke Claire to
what I should do. And then, as I resumed breathing. I realized that I was hearing a whistling coming from some minor
obstruction in own nose as I breathed.
At times, when I sit here, a long series of daytime thoughts will pass through me-thoughts connected with work or say, with town
politics. That's all right-let those thoughts pass through you. You hear them coming, like a freight train with the whistle and the dinging;
they take several minutes to go by, and then they're gone. Remember that it's very early the morning-early, early, early, early
the stars are thrillingly sharp when I first get and stand at the window on the landing of the stairs: private needle-holes of
exactitude in the stygian diorama Orion's belt the only constellation that I recognize easily. The apportioning of stars into
unnecessary: their anonymity enhances the sense of infinitude. This morning I saw a long pale mark like a scar across
the heavens. It was the trail of a high jet, a night fight from somewhere to somewhere, it from the underside by the setting moon. "A
moonit contraill, I whispered to myself, and then I came downstairs and felt for the coffeemaker
Drag and drop the events into the empty boxes to show the order in which they occur in the
excerpt
Order of Events
The duck comes out
of the doghouse
The duck walks with
the narrato
The narrator hears
a strange sound
The duck fuses at
the food in the water
The narrator cleans
out the bowl
Select
tygian dioram
ackgr
model of electric typewriter introduced in 1961
used by the author to suggest a dark
mythical River Styx, the river in Hades
dead are ferried
what is the correct order of eventd