This isn't the opening to the novel I'm currently working on. It's a novella I started a few years ago and shelved to work on The Dead Sheriff, The Dead Earth books and some other stuff. I like the story and hope to finish it in 2016. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments section. This is the first page and a half of what is a 45 page manuscript. So far.
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Dale Hewitt heard the sounds the
first night he lived in the house.
This
was after the moving men left in the truck that spewed vile blue smoke like a
rolling factory, and after his old friend Brody had finished the last slice of
pizza before hitting the road. Brody gave him a man hug, patting Dale on the
back and bumping shoulders. Brody belched, then departed, trailing the odor of
pepperoni and banana peppers as he went out the door.
Dale
cleaned up in the kitchen (actually, he tossed the pizza box and the paper
plates and the empty cans of Mountain Dew;
cleaning the kitchen would commence after
he unpacked the kitchen) and stood for a long time staring out of the small
window above the sink. The unfamiliar backyard was barely visible through
Dale’s reflection. In the twilight shadows, he made out the shape of a big
maple tree and the beginning of the hill that climbed to the sky.
He
felt like crying.
He
wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t have to search far for reasons: the impending
divorce, the events that led to the end of his marriage, moving back to his father’s
house. Okay, technically he hadn’t moved back
anywhere. Dale didn’t grow up in the house and had only visited a handful of
times since his dad sold the old place and moved here a couple of years back.
The house sat empty for almost six months after his father passed away and now
Dale stood in his father’s kitchen, looking at his father’s backyard and
feeling untethered from everyone and everything.
It
was a notion he would have embraced when he was 18. At 38, it produced tightness
in his chest and the early tickle of a panic attack. His doctor had given him a
prescription for Alprazolam, but the bottle was stowed away in a suitcase or
his duffle. Dale leaned on the sink and closed his eyes. Taking deep, slow
breaths, he tried to break down the reasons for his anxiety.
That’s easy. You’ve never been alone.
It
was true. He had moved from his parents’ house—the one he actually grew up
in—to the dorm at WVU. He met Renee in his sophomore year and they became
inseparable. The marriage was the day after graduation, and they moved into a
crappy little apartment in Morgantown, while he snapped up all the substitute
teaching gigs he could find and she started part-time as a dental hygienist. After he got on full-time at the elementary
school, they saved up the down payment and moved into a small two bedroom home
in an old and quiet neighborhood. It was a great time in their lives. Dale had
never been happier than in those early years, struggling to meet the mortgage
and having candlelight dinners of cheeseburgers from Dairy Queen. Life was so
good then that Dale even half-joked to Renee one night about waiting for the
other shoe to drop. She wasn’t amused.
2 comments:
Excellent as always, Mark. I like the set up and want to know what it is he's hearing in the house and what happened to end his marriage. There are hints that the theme of someone dealing with loneliness for the first will play a big part. Perhaps learning secrets in the house of a father he rarely spent time with, as we'll. There's a lot of different ways it can go, and I'd love to read the whole thing when it's ready.
Thanks again, Matt. As I said in the post, I really hope to get back to this soon. I like the story and it also introduces a character that may be recurring.
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