The curator sits back in his chair and clasps his hands.

“Perhaps one day there will be such a book. Perhaps you, Henry Bower, will write that book. To answer your second question, as to how this stone came into my possession, I must share a tale of young Miles Morgan. Would you all be interested to hear it?” the curator asks us.

“Yes, we would,” I say, and Mom and Dad and Nana wait quietly for the curator to speak. Birdie swings on her swing, the red tie going up and down.

“Growing up in Nottingham, I was a sickly child; the doctor said I did not have a strong constitution. I was thin, not like I am now”—Dr. Morgan pats his round stomach and the tight belt over it—“and I coughed in the night. Consequently, I was kept out of school quite often, and left on my own during the day, whilst my parents worked. I occupied myself by reading and looking out the window onto our crowded street. One fateful morning I heard a loud rumble of noise overhead, and a small stone broke through our parlor window and landed on the floor in front of me.”

I feel the stone’s shape in my hand.

“A meteorite from a fireball?” I guess.

“You are absolutely correct. One and the same. I attribute the entire trajectory of my life to that moment.”

Dr. Morgan pauses and looks around the room. He enjoys telling his story a lot more than I liked telling my secret into the microphone.

“What happened after it came through your window?” I ask.

“For one, I could not convince my parents that it was not I who had broken that pane. Even showing them the culprit”—Dr. Morgan points to the stone in the bag—“did not persuade them. I was, after all, only a ten-year-old boy at the time, with no advanced degrees in geology.”

The curator gets up from his chair, as if his story is too big to be told sitting in one place.

“Then things happened, things that have still not been explained. Nottingham’s water supply doubled overnight. There was so much water pressure that it filled bathtubs and ran out of faucets on its own. It gushed out of fire hydrants onto the streets. The river Trent overflowed into parks and playgrounds. You can imagine how the children of Nottingham liked that! What eclipsed that event, for my parents, was that I got well. My cough vanished, I put on weight, and I was able to run and play without catching my breath.”

The curator holds his arms out to the sides, then pats his cheeks to show us how healthy he is now.

“No other pieces of my water rock were found. My guess is that a large fall, the mother of my fragment, embedded itself somewhere deep in Nottingham’s grassy heathland.”