The History of Sound: Stories

In 2008, the unnamed first-person narrator is living in his grandmother’s house on Nantucket. He just finished college and told his father he’d like to clean out the house in his spare time. He doesn’t have a plan for his future but thinks being on the island alone will be nice. However, he immediately notices problems with the house: It’s freezing cold, poorly insulated, and the basement floods. The narrator spends his days drinking coffee and working on his painting.

One day, the narrator finds a small ceramic vial in the fireplace. Unsure what it is, he tries researching it online. Finding nothing, he visits the Nantucket Whaling Museum to see if someone might identify the vial for him. The exhibitions manager Mallory Dart explains that the vial is an old-fashioned dildo, and many women kept them on hand when their husbands were away on whaling expeditions. She suggests researching the house’s previous owners to see who it might have belonged to.

A few days later, the narrator runs into Mallory on the beach. She invites him to her house for tea, and they spend some hours chatting. Mallory is an elderly woman who has lived alone since her husband Tim’s passing.