The Sears catalog arrived in a brown paper wrapper, damp at the corners from the November air. It landed on the kitchen table with a thud that startled the dog. My father peeled off the twine and handed it to me. Inside, the pages smelled of newsprint and something faintly chemical, like the ink hadn’t quite dried before it left the plant.

I carried it to the living room, where the shag carpet swallowed sound. The catalog was heavy enough to leave an impression on your thighs if you sat with it too long. Each page crackled when turned. I used a Bic pen with a chewed cap to circle things: a plastic walkie-talkie set, a chemistry kit with test tubes that looked suspiciously like glass, a hockey jersey with a team I didn’t follow but liked the colors of. The ink bled slightly into the paper, blue halos around each wish.

My brother sat cross-legged on the floor, flipping to the toy section without ceremony. He didn’t circle anything. He just stared at the picture of a slot car track until his eyes went still. Our mother walked past, paused to smooth a dog-eared corner, then kept going. No one asked what we wanted. The catalog was its own language.

The toy section ran for maybe forty pages. Barbie had her own spread, always in that same pink background that never quite looked pink when it printed. The bikes were photographed against white nothing, like they were floating in space. Hot Wheels came in sets you could only dream about, orange track spiraling into loops that never kinked.

Sometimes I’d lie on my stomach, chin propped on the open pages, tracing the dotted lines around a remote-controlled boat. The boat never moved. The pages never warmed.

By December, the book looked like it had been through something. Dog-eared corners, pages that wanted to turn themselves to the good stuff. Circles in different colors of ink as priorities shifted. Sometimes you’d find your sister’s marks on the same item and have to negotiate, or hope there was enough Christmas to go around.

Later, after dinner, the catalog lay open on the floor beside the Zenith console. A page showed a girl in a corduroy jumper holding a doll with rooted hair and jointed limbs. The Bic pen rested on the shag, its blue tip pointing toward the doll’s face. Outside, a station wagon pulled into the driveway, tires crunching on salted pavement. Inside, the TV hummed to life with the sound of canned laughter.