# Read the first page of Big Fish by Daniel Wallace Read the opening of Big Fish by Daniel Wallace free, no signup. A son unravels his dying father's tall tales. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/big-fish-daniel-wallace - Genre: Fantasy - Year: 1998 - ISBN: 9781616201654 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781616201654&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781616201654 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781616201654 ## The opening On one of our last car trips, near the end of my father's life as a man, we stopped by a river, and we took a walk to its banks, where we sat in the shade of an old oak tree. After a couple of minutes my father took off his shoes and his socks and placed his feet in the clear-running water, and he looked at them there. Then he closed his eyes and smiled. I hadn't seen him smile like that in a while. Suddenly he took a deep breath and said, "This reminds me." And then he stopped, and thought some more. Things came slow for him then if they ever came at all, and I guessed he was thinking of some joke to tell, because he always had some joke to tell. Or he might tell me a story that would celebrate his adventurous and heroic life. And I wondered, What does this remind him of? Does it remind him of the duck in the hardware store? The horse in the bar? The boy who was knee-high to a grasshopper? Did it remind him of the dinosaur egg he found one day, then lost, or the country he once ruled for the better part of a week? “This reminds me,” he said, “of when I was a boy.” I looked at this old man, my old man with his old white feet in this clear-running stream, these moments among the very last in his life, and I thought of him suddenly, and simply, as a boy, a child, a youth, with his whole life ahead of him, much as mine was ahead of me. I’d never done that before. And these images—the now and then of my father—converged, and at that moment he turned into a weird creature, wild, concurrently young and old, dying and newborn. My father became a myth. @@CHAP@@ THE DAY HE WAS BORN He was born during the driest summer in forty years. The sun baked the fine red Alabama clay to a grainy dust, and there was no water for miles. Food was scarce, too. No corn or tomatoes or even squash that summer, all of it withered beneath the hazy white sky. Everything died, seemed like: chickens first, then cats, then pigs, and then dogs. Went into the stew, though, the lot, bones and all. One man went crazy, ate rocks, and died. It took ten men to carry him to his grave he was so heavy, ten more to dig it, it was so dry. Looking east people said, Remember that rolling river? Looking west, Remember Talbert’s Pond? The day he was born began as just another day. The sun rose, peered down on the little wooden house where a wife, her belly as big as the country, scrambled up the last egg they had for her husband’s breakfast. The husband was already out in the field, turning the dust with his plow round the black and twisted roots of some mysterious vegetable. The sun shone hard and bright. When he came in for his egg he wiped the sweat from his brow with a ragged blue bandanna. Then he wrung the sweat from it and let it drip into an old tin cup. For something to drink, later on. The day he was born the wife’s heart stopped, briefly, and she died. Then she came back to life. She’d seen her self suspended above herself. She saw her son, too—said he glowed. When her self rejoined with herself she said she felt a warmth there. Said, “Soon. He’ll be here soon.” She was right. The day he was born someone spotted a cloud over thataway, with something of a darkness to it. People gathered to watch. One, two, two times two, suddenly fifty people and more, all looking skyward, at this rather small cloud moving close to their parched and frazzled home place. The husband came out to look, too. And there it was: a cloud. First real cloud in weeks. The only person in that whole town not cloud-watching was the wife. She had fallen to the floor, breathless with pain. So breathless she couldn’t scream. She thought she was screaming—she had her mouth open that way—but nothing was coming out. Of her mouth. Elsewhere, though, she was busy. With him. He was coming. And where was her husband? Out looking at a cloud. That was some cloud, too. Not small at all, really, a respectable cloud, looming large and gray over all the dried-up acres. The husband took off his hat and squinted, taking a step down off the porch for a better look. The cloud brought a little wind with it, too. It felt good. A little wind brushing gently across their faces felt good. And then the husband heard thunder—boom!—or so he thought. But what he heard was his wife kicking over a table with her legs. Sure sounded like thunder, though. That’s what it sounded like. ## Books with a similar feel - [Black Swan, White Raven by Ellen Datlow](https://uncovered.ink/read/black-swan-white-raven-ellen-datlow.md) - [What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher](https://uncovered.ink/read/what-moves-the-dead-t-kingfisher.md) - [Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman](https://uncovered.ink/read/anansi-boys-neil-gaiman.md) - [In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune](https://uncovered.ink/read/in-the-lives-of-puppets-tj-klune.md) - [Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold](https://uncovered.ink/read/paladin-of-souls-lois-mcmaster-bujold.md) - [A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab](https://uncovered.ink/read/a-darker-shade-of-magic-v-e-schwab.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. 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