Free The Bigness of the World by Lori Ostlund

depressed.”
    I begin class each Monday morning with a vocabulary quiz, testing them on words that we have encountered over the semester and compiled into a list, adding to it daily and occasionally winnowing it down, letting drop those words and expressions that might have meant something to them back home, where they were pilots and geneticists and science teachers, but contribute nothing to their lives here. They are not lazy people, my students, but on Monday mornings, overwhelmed by the week ahead after a weekend spent delivering pizzas and cleaning houses, they become lazy. They become lazy, and in their laziness, they write things like “ Threaten is to make a threat” and “A shoplifter is someone who shoplifts,” knowing, of course, that I will mark their answers wrong, that I will write in the margins next to them: “A word cannot be used to define itself.”
    III. THE PHEASANT AS OVERT SYMBOL
    My father wants to FedEx me a pheasant.
    “A pheasant?” I say. “I doubt that FedEx delivers poultry.” “Pheasants aren’t poultry,” he corrects me. “English teachers should know such things. They’re fowl, but they are not poultry. Poultry is domestic. I shot this bird myself out near the pond on Lekander’s farm.”
    For the last year, according to my sister, my father has been using a broom as a cane, bristles up, leaning heavily as he goes frombedroom to kitchen, from kitchen to bathroom. I am fairly sure that this is the first broom he has ever held in his life. This is the same man, after all, whose mother washed his hair for him until he was forty, which is when he married my mother and she took over the task.
    “When?” I ask, keeping my voice casual. “When did you shoot it?”
    “How would I know when I shot it?” he replies impatiently.
    “Well, when was the last time that you hunted?” I ask, feigning ignorance. I know the answer to this, know that he has not hunted in five years because my brother-in-law Mike, who used to take my father hunting, stopped hunting five years ago after his brother, while looking up and tracking a flock of mallards with his eyes, tripped over a rock and discharged his gun into Mike’s buttocks. The doctors were able to extricate all of the shot, but for weeks sitting had been uncomfortable if not downright painful, which meant that Mike had also had to endure the embarrassment of explaining to his clients why he suddenly preferred to stand during sales calls.
    Mike is a fertilizer salesman in Fargo, North Dakota, a description that, here in San Francisco, sounds like the setup for a joke, but in Fargo, where he and my sister really do live and where he really does sell fertilizer, having a sister-in-law who lives in San Francisco with her girlfriend is considered just as funny. I like my brother-in-law, whom I have met only twice, both times during visits that Geraldine and I made to Fargo. The first time, we shook hands and he said that I was like a plague of locusts, visiting once every seven years. I laughed because it was funny and sort of true, wondering whether the allusion was inspired by religion or profession. I suspected the latter: locust plagues struck me as the sort of thing that a fertilizer salesman from North Dakota would know about.
    “Locusts are actually the only invertebrates considered kosher,” said Geraldine, addressing both of us, though she and Mike had not yet been introduced.
    “Really?” I said, and then, “Mike, this is Geraldine.” They nodded at each other in a decidedly midwestern way, though Geraldine is anything but midwestern.
    “Yes, not all species of course,” she continued, her tone turning cautionary. “Actually, I believe that only the Yemeni Jews still know how to determine which species are kosher.”
    “Are you Jewish?” Mike asked Geraldine, who, despite the deceptive first name, is Jewish, though Jewish strictly in the “isn’t it interesting that locusts are kosher?” sense.
    “Yes,” she