Whirligig (14 page)

He put on his pack and walked down to the office. He paid, then backtracked toward the cove, squinted, and made out his whirligig, bright against the painter's white house. The breeze off the water ruffled his hair and made the whirligig flash in the distance. He'd interlocked some of the propeller blades so that one would pass its motion to the others. In his mind, his whirligigs were meshed the same way, parts of a single coast-to-coast creation. The world itself was a whirligig, its myriad parts invisibly linked, the hidden crankshafts and connecting rods carrying motion across the globe and over the centuries.

He took off his pack. A few nights before, he'd come to the end of
Two Years Before the Mast,
the author's ship finally returning safely to Boston Harbor. He pulled out the book, felt linked with the writer and Emil and the others he'd met on the trip, and walked back inside the office. He placed it on the book exchange shelf, aware he was nudging an invisible gear forward. He wondered who would read it next. He scanned the titles and decided on
The Strange Lives of Familiar Insects.
Outside, a warm breeze ran its fingers through the trees. He started reading while he walked down the road.

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Copyright © 1998 by Paul Fleischman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fleischman, Paul.

Whirligig / Paul Fleischman.

p. cm.

Summary: While traveling to each corner of the country to build a whirligig in memory of the girl whose death he causes, sixteen-year-old Brent finds forgiveness and atonement.

[1. Whirligigs—Fiction. 2. Voyages and travels—Fiction. 3. Forgiveness—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.F599233Wh   1998   [Fic]—dc21      97-24429

ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-5582-5 / ISBN-10: 0-8050-5582-7

First Edition—1998

eISBN 9781466860322

First eBook edition: November 2013