On a Family

Jim had been thinking for a long while before he gave up. He had been asking himself why it was that the best books were always the ones read out of boredom and found on an aunt’s ancient bookcase. At first, Jim proposed to himself that words simply tasted better if one had an appetite for them, but then he decided that this could not be. Indeed, the books that Jim had read in the assorted homes of his assorted aunts invariably proved to be well regarded by critics and readers the world over, and Jim had trouble believing that all of these men had read these well-regarded books while they were bored at their aunts’ houses. Then, Jim ventured for a moment that his aunts all had outstanding taste in literature, but after considering the various flaws of his aunts, coupled with the copious amounts of dust that usually covered the best books on their bookshelves, Jim decided that this was not the case. After exhausting every possible explanation (all two of them), Jim became convinced that he was simply a superior selector of books, and that he was doomed to learn from, and enjoy, everything that he would ever read.

11-year-old Jim replaced his aunt’s copy of Extreme Weather Patterns on the shelf, and scuttled away to find another pursuit in the cavernous house. Jim was tall for his age, or so his relatives and their acquaintances told him. He was also an especially beautiful boy, with a brain as sharp as any child these same adults had ever met. This he knew for a fact, as they had all told him so at least once, and if everybody said something like that, then they couldn’t all be lying. That was how Jim saw it in any case. Jim was spending the summer at his aunt Melisandra’s home in Ontario. According to Jim’s family lore, Melisandra was originally supposed to have been named Melissa, but when it was discovered that she was actually a pair of twins (the other fetus being Jim’s mother), the name was quickly bastardized to accommodate the volume of expected Melissa’s. So it happened that the first born twin-though it was only by a margin of about 7 minutes-would be called Melissa, and the younger girl be cursed with Melissandra