news | Tuesday December 20, 2022

A Christmassy Snippet from M.A.C. Farrant

We’re happy to be sharing our traditional tale from M.A.C. Farrant this almost-Christmas! Talonbooks’ offices will be closed from December 23rd until the morning of January 4th. Happy Holidays, everyone! This piece is a sneak peek from Farrant’s next book, forthcoming fall 2023:



This is a picture of a puzzle piece looking wan and harshly alone amid a quantity of dust and broken cardboard. It is a dark brown piece and was recently rescued by my cousin Sue from a slashed-open vacuum bag. Besides the puzzle piece, she also removed cat hair, dirt, and needles from last year’s Christmas tree. The scene presents as one of devastation, and the aftermath of rescue—relief and solace. She had moved her dining room table to vacuum the rug beneath it when the “mishap” occurred. Her husband Dave’s current jigsaw— “Iris” by van Gogh—lay across the table in pieces and when Sue heard a “clunk” while she vacuumed, she sucked in her breath.

Sue is another jigsaw drop-out. “I enjoyed the Christmas puzzle in 2020 (1 piece missing). I was over it in 2021 (2 pieces missing)”.

Annoyed by this pair of imperfect puzzles, she looked at the puzzle maker’s website to contact them about her “industrial sabotage suspicions”. It came to nothing. She said, “Their contact page said do not ‘contact them about missing pieces. . . nothing they can do about it’.”

The rescued piece, it turns out, was from her 2021 Christmas jigsaw of a train, and not the current puzzle on the dining room table. Sue now blames the cat for hiding the piece.

The question remains, what will she do with the rescued piece? Return it to its box and its fellow pieces so that there will now be only one piece missing instead of two?

Sue always ends her emails to me with “Peace out”, so I’m guessing it will be “piece out” from the vacuum bag and into the garbage.

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