Motif · Book 2, Carl's Doomsday Scenario

Carl's family

'After a stint in the US Coast Guard, I ended up working as a marine tech.' What Carl says of himself in the first chapter, and what leaks out after: a mother who locked him in the basement with his father's Frogger machine whenever his father's friends came over, and who left; a heavily tattooed father who laughed at him, broke his slingshot and never replaced it, and drove on past a wrecked moving truck saying it was a shame.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 4 — Knives from a window
• Chapter 5 — Boxes at the Pug
• Chapter 6 — Signet
• Chapter 7 — The lion's heart
• Chapter 8 — Water Lily
• Chapter 9 — Heather the Bear
• Chapter 10 — The big top
• Chapter 11 — The pitch
• Chapter 12 — Mongo holds the pyramid
• Chapter 17 — GumGum
• Chapter 19 — Danger Zone
• Chapter 23 — Ten sticks of dynamite

Progression

The circus on his fourth birthday, when his mother had briefly left his father and run to her parents' in southern Texas — peanuts and cotton candy and hay, a memory recovered years later from a shoebox of photographs hidden under his parents' bed (ch. 10); a father with a shelf of Louis L'Amour westerns Carl read in secret (ch. 5).