An aside: Writing fiction is like slipping into a home and taking things— hushes, aromas, and laughter, for instance. Unless you’re good at it—like, acrobatic cat burglar good—you never quite know how to get in and you never escape unnoticed. Your presence is a loud and clanging reminder that you’ve inserted yourself into a space [...]
Archive for the ‘the Nine series (novel excerpts)’ Category
A Meta-Workshop.
Posted in the Nine series (novel excerpts), tagged fiction-writing, inner monologue, self-critique on January 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Collapse.
Posted in the Nine series (novel excerpts), tagged baking disasters, bitterness, Grand Rapids, overlong courtships on January 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Five years ago, Nine baked a rainbow cake to impress Ahmir, who she’d been seeing for three years by then. Three years was, by far, the longest she’d made a relationship last. There’d been 22-year-old Levi when she was eighteen; he stuck around for a year. And when she was 21, there was Damon, who [...]
Delusions and Candor.
Posted in the Nine series (novel excerpts) on December 6, 2008 | 1 Comment »
You are no flea in petrified amber, no exoskeleton for the world to fossilize. You are not the serendipitous cadaver whose arrival on a research slab will result in the healing of cancers. You are merely a woman of twenty-nine years. If you go, there are few who will mourn you. There will be Marcheline [...]
The Store.
Posted in the Nine series (novel excerpts), tagged afterlife, atrophy, eternity, Jesus, surveillance on November 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Jesus works a series of doubles at the only checkout counter that’s ever open, the one where the flickering globular light overhead seems ever in need of repair. Jesus is just over six feet tall, making the long, burgundy, pocketed smock he wears seem prominent and absurd. The smock is unmarked, as are the paper [...]
Do Disturb.
Posted in the Nine series (novel excerpts), tagged Coma, Convalescence, DNR orders, Hospital, Pulling the Plug on November 12, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Contrary to her family’s expectations, Nine had made herself at home in the sterile, freakish underworld of St. Mary’s Hospital. She liked the crinkle of the accordion tubing and sacks that wheezed and sighed as often as she did. The rubbery footfalls of the nurses and the snatches of their gossip and gripes she’d gathered [...]
Retracing.
Posted in the Nine series (novel excerpts), tagged Jamaican culture, marriage, patois, stepfathers on October 31, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Work backward. Think of the moment they married, between the 8 and 11 o’clock services at your church on that July Sunday when you were ten. Think of the accordion partition, cordoning off their nuptials from the simultaneous Youth, Singles, and General Sunday School classes being held in various other sections of the sanctuary. Think [...]
Dejame.
Posted in the Nine series (novel excerpts), tagged single parents, unwed mothers, mother-daughter angst on October 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Nine was born Ninah Jude Brown in a cold single-bed room at Sparrow Hospital. It was 1979 in Lansing, Michigan, which meant that the White nurses were merciless in their “care” for her unmarried mother, Marcheline, as she writhed and shook her legs at the sheets like they were puppies nipping her ankles. These angels [...]
