Summary

"The Man Who Sold Braces" – The narrator, a student studying French, describes everything that his uncle ever touched as breaking in the end. He explains her uncle was an alcoholic traveling hoarder who jumped around from job to job, doing everything from selling mail-order braces designed to make people taller to being a butler for two spinster sisters. The narrator reveals he was never very close to his uncle, but that he received a call from the police about his uncle’s death wherein he was crushed by the garbage accumulated in his apartment. The narrator recounts with horror how his uncle fitted him with very painful growth braces, and how his work as a butler was primarily to care for a Bengal Tiger.

In the present, the narrator attends his uncle’s...