The Piano Man EXCERPT - Chapter One - September 2005
Claire O’Neal switched off the car radio with an impatient flick of her wrist. After two straight weeks of temperatures above a hundred degrees, the weatherman was heralding a cool front tomorrow. Don’t count on it, she thought. Nothing in this world is predictable. Not even San Antonio heat. She parked her SUV in the driveway of the Spanish-style four bedroom in Terrell Hills. It was 8:30 a.m. and the clients were due at nine. Claire gathered her clipboard and stepped out onto the driveway, her linen slacks sticking to her legs. Hotter than Hades, but at least it’s humid, Nathan joked. His voice was a constant presence in her head, frozen forever in the self-assurance of seventeen . . . Prologue Empress EXCERPT
Endless moons, an opaque universe, thunder, tornadoes, the quaking earth. Rare moments of peace; forehead up against my knees, arms around my head, I thought, I listened, I longed not to exist. But life was there, a transparent pearl, a star revolving slowly on its own axis. I was blind. My eyes stared into that other world, that other existence that dwindled a little every day. Its colors were extinguished, its images blurred. I was still left with cries of astonishment and feeble sobbing. I was oppressed by the impotence of these vague recollections, burned by their melancholy. Who am I? I asked Death as it crouched at my feet.
Death moaned and gave no reply.
Where am I? I could hear laughter, voices saying, "It will surely be a boy, my Lord. He is moving. He is full of life."
It mattered little who I would be. I was already weary of this vastness. I was weary of hoping, of waiting, of being myself-the center of the world.
I was soothed by the rustle of the wind. I listened to the trickle of rain. Across my sky in which the sun never rose, I could hear a little girl singing. I was lulled by her gentle, innocent voice. My sister, I foresaw great sorrow for her. A hand tried to caress me. But a wall lay between us. Oh Mother, the shadow outlined against the screen of my thoughts, do you realize I am already old, condemned to live within the prison of your flesh? . . . More A Slight Trick of the Mind EXCERPT - Chapter 1
Upon arriving from his travels abroad, he entered his stone-built farmhouse on a summer’s afternoon, leaving the luggage by the front door for his housekeeper to manage. He then retreated into the library, where he sat quietly, glad to be surrounded by his books and the familiarity of home. For almost two months, he had been away, traveling by military train across India, by Royal Navy ship to Australia, and then finally setting foot on the occupied shores of postwar Japan. Going and returning, the same interminable routes had been taken–usually in the company of rowdy enlisted men, few of whom acknowledged the elderly gentleman dining or sitting beside them (that slow-walking geriatric, searching his pockets for a match he’d never find, chewing relentlessly on an unlit Jamaican cigar). Only on the rare occasions when an informed officer might announce his identity would the ruddy faces gaze with amazement, assessing him in that moment: For while he used two canes, his body remained unbowed, and the passing of years hadn’t dimmed his keen gray eyes; his snow-white hair, thick and long, like his beard, was combed straight back in the English fashion.
“Is that true? Are you really him?”
“I am afraid I still hold that distinction.”
“You are Sherlock Holmes? No, I don’t believe it.”
“That is quite all right. I scarcely believe it myself.” . . . Continue The Good Earth EXCERPT - Chapter 1
It was Wang Lung's marriage day. At first, opening his eyes in the blackness of the curtains about his bed, he could not think why the dawn seemed different from any other. The house was still except for the faint, gasping cough of his old father, whose room was opposite to his own across the middle room. Every morning the old man's cough was the first sound to be heard. Wang Lung usually lay listening to it and moved only when he heard it approaching nearer and when he heard the door of his father's room squeak upon its wooden hinges.
But this morning he did not wait. He sprang up and pushed aside the curtains of his bed. It was a dark, ruddy dawn, and through a small square hole of a window, where the tattered paper fluttered, a glimpse of bronze sky gleamed. He went to the hole and tore the paper away.
"It is spring and I do not need this," he muttered . . . Continue A Summer of Faulkner: Three Novels: As I Lay Dying / The Sound and the Fury / Light in August EXCERPT - From As I Lay Dying
Darl
Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cotton house can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.
The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laid by cotton, to the cotton house in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cotton house at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision.
The cotton house is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long fallen. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite walls giving onto the approaches of the path. When we reach it I turn and follow the path which circles the house. Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around the corner. In single file and five feet apart and Jewel now in front, we go on up the path toward the foot of the bluff . . . Continue |
