The story begins when a little boy, Jerome is called into his housemaster’s room for a conversation with Mr Wordsworth. Mr Wordsworth tells Jerome that his father has died in a street accident in Naples, so of course Jerome asks whether his father was shot. Mr Wordsworth tells him that he died inexplicably when too a fat pig fell on him from a house’s balcony.
After telling about the accident Mr Wordsworth turns his back on Jerome because he smiles to Jerome’s father’s death’s circumstances which he obviously found funny. Jerome also told the story to some of her friends but before that, he practiced telling it so as not to make it sound ridiculous.
After his studies, Jerome got engaged to be married with Sally who loved kids. When she sees the old picture of Jerome’s father she wants to know what really happened to him. While telling her, his aunt kind of says unintentionally that the pig fell on him. Sally was the one and only who didn’t laugh, which was surprising and this was the moment when Jerome started to love her more and more.
I found the story very odd partially because the subject matter but also because of its constrained humor. I had to read the text many times to totally understand it but I don’t think I still know exactly what it was about. I prefer reading books or magazines instead of this kind of short stories with strange plots but a positive thing is that I didn’t have to read longer text with this topic, so there was something positive in this exercise too.