The art made out of my fourth novel, The Labyrinth House, is hanging up again at Genuine Joe’s. Hurray. If you want to read the first chapter, go here.

This is a bit more in the latest novel.

The Girl Who Grew Books–page four

Kell didn’t leave the house. She couldn’t. Or thought she couldn’t. She was afraid—and so were Liam and Faye if they told the truth—that if she left someone would take too much notice of her. That she’d be carted off. Studied. Asked questions.

Kell didn’t leave the house because she didn’t want to be looked at. Whenever anyone spoke to her, or rather, whenever she heard someone speak, their words appeared on her skin. They might appear under her clothes, and she’d feel a slight warmth curl where the letters rose up as if someone were using a calligraphy pen on her flesh. They words scratched sometimes. Some words scratched more than others. If that person talked on and on, her body would be covered in lines and it could take days to fade. Weeks if the person spoke with great emotion.

If many people spoke, then the words would overlap, forming elaborate designs. The worse was when they words appeared across her face. Then she’d hide in her room for days.

No TV and no radio. No songs. No voice of any kind. From time to time she let Liam or Faye speak to her, but mostly they gestured, and left her notes on paper. She didn’t like the sound of a pencil or pen. The sound of letters made her skin itch. She spent most of time in silence. She tried to listen to classical music, but she hadn’t liked classical music before the curse and afterwards was no different.

But Faye and Liam would search the music stalls at the flea market and find CDs of instrumental music, something that might engage her attention. She missed voices. She learned after a while that she could give someone something to read, something she liked, and end up with a favorite poem running down her back or a favorite saying up her arm. But the novelty of that wore off, and mostly she wanted clear skin. Unmarred. Empty. Blank.

Kell spent a lot of time in her room. She liked to sleep, but even that was no relief. If she was asleep and someone in the room spoke, or even whispered, she’d wake up to find the words on her legs. Or her arms. She could feel them on her back. Even if she wasn’t aware that someone was speaking, if her body sensed it, and the words would appear. Telling secrets too close to her was dangerous. They would show up around her stomach. Between her thighs. They made her cry.

And it was all because of the book.

Faye slept well every night. She slept soundly. Thunder storms, ringing phones, smoke alarms—nothing woke her. But every morning when she woke her hair had grown during the night. Grown inches. Sometimes ten inches. Sometimes twenty. The better she felt the longer it grew.

Once she woke up and it had grown from the base of her neck to the back of her knees. She didn’t cut it every morning, but that particular morning she was afraid of what would happen if she waited. What if it grew to twice her length? What if she became entangled in it while she slept? What if it strangled her?

She learned to sleep perfectly still, on her side, unmoving.

She read that the less you moved in your sleep the more vivid your dreams. This turned out to be true. When she learned to sleep unmoving, her dreams became wilder. Brighter.

Liam accused her once of stealing his dreams, taking his sleep. They had to go somewhere, right? And you have more than your share, he said.

She lifted her hair and waved the long ponytail at him. You want this instead?

It didn’t take long for her to have more hair than she could throw away. She was afraid to throw it away. She was afraid birds would steal strands and use it for nests. I’ll always have headaches, she said.

She was afraid someone would steal it and use it for something strange. She’d heard of people with hair fetishes. Obsessions. What if some strange man had her hair? Then maybe there was someone who didn’t like her. She couldn’t think of anyone, but supposing someone like that did get a hold of her hair. Think of the damage they could do.

But keeping the hair was becoming unruly. Bags and bags of it. Kell insisted something had to be done. They could not have an attic full of hair. They couldn’t have hallways lined with it. So Fay made ropes. She wove locks of hair together and made ropes and soon after she dreamed what each rope could do.

People began to hear about her hair and they came to buy it. People began to say that her hair held magic. They said her hair could cure illness, repair love affairs, and reunite owners with lost things. Faye took the pieces to the flea market and always they sold. People seemed unable to stop themselves.

“What is the difference,” Liam asked, “between allowing people to buy your hair and take it with them and them finding it and taking with them anyway? Aren’t you worried they could still work some evil on you?”

“No. I’ve given this hair a purpose. Now it can’t be used for anything else.”

“How do you know? They could pull it lose and do with it what they want.”

“They won’t.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I just know.”

He didn’t argue further. They needed the money her hair brought in.

excerpt from The Girl Who Grew Books…page 2…

The first few months he lost sleep, he hadn’t thought much about it. He didn’t connect it to the book. But his girlfriend at the time grew suspicious of his late night wanderings. Where was he going? Why couldn’t he stay with her? Most men rolled over and went to sleep, but he got out of bed and walked around in the dark. It made her nervous.

He’d tried staying in the room with her and watching her sleep. He hadn’t yet begun to miss his dreams and he just watched her, slightly bored at first, but after a while learning to appreciate the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed, the sound of her breath, the way she turned over in her sleep. He began to see patterns and he knew that once she turned to the left side she would soon roll over to her stomach. That she pulled her hair in her sleep. That eventually she’d roll over into his space.

But she started waking up in the middle of the night and he could tell that she was bothered by his watching her. It wasn’t right. It creeped her out, she said. Finally one night she got out of bed and threw her things in a bag and left. You’re too creepy, she said as her parting words.

He missed her, but he wasn’t heart broken. He’d not been in love with her though he had liked her. She was nice. Funny. Pretty. That was one of the joys of watching her sleep. Studying her curves under the sheet. He tried to wake her a few times, feel her under him, but she didn’t like be woken. She would push him away. She didn’t like to do anything half awake.

A while later he met another girl. They went out for a while. Then one night she let him stay with her in her apartment. It was worse away from home. At home although he didn’t sleep, he felt like himself and he craved sleep, but that was all.

In her bedroom he felt anxiety. Not only did he not sleep, he paced. He went to the blinds again and again and peered through them into the parking lot. He turned around and around in her tiny galley kitchen. His footsteps and the rattle of the blinds distracted the girl. She was a light sleeper. The first night she was willing to let go. No one sleeps well in a new place, she said.

She only wanted to make love in her place. I can’t do it knowing your sisters are in the house, she said. It’s a big house, he replied. Not that big, she said.

“They won’t know.”

“Of course they’ll know. Why else would we stay all night in your bedroom?”

“They don’t care. They’ve got their own problems and I’m their older brother. I’m expected to have a girlfriend.”

“My place or no place.”

He suspected that the fact that he lived with his sisters bothered her. Seemed odd. But where could they go? He’d happily let his sisters move out. Marry them off if he could. But they had problems, and husbands were unlikely unless the house could produce husbands for them.

His pacing drove the girl mad. But his leaving in the middle of the night made her feel worse. “Makes me feel cheap,” she said. “You come and do your thing and then off you go.”

“I don’t mean it like that,” he said. “And what’s so wrong about me leaving? This way you get to keep your space.”

“No.”

And that was the end of that. It took a lot longer to find the next girlfriend. By this time he realized he had a real problem. Maybe this insomnia wasn’t a phase. He went to a doctor.

He took pills. Tried therapy. Tried herbal tea. Warm milk. Ocean music. Recordings of waterfalls. He took a vacation. Gave up coffee and chocolate and anything with a hint of caffeine
or sugar. He gave up anything that anyone had ever suggested would ever keep a person awake.
One night he walked up and down the main stairs and counted the steps going up and counted backwards going down. It passed the time. Then the truth struck him. This wasn’t a medical problem. It wasn’t a psychological problem. It was a curse. He quit going to the doctor.

Liam considered looking for a witch. Surely Lake Belle had one somewhere. He’d heard of a group of women who lived together and told fortunes. But Faye made him promise not to go to them. “They’re in league with the devil,” she said. “They will only make you worse. They will take you away from us. They will ruin everything.”

Faye was prone to dramatic pronouncements, but he couldn’t blame her, and so he promised.

The Girl Who Grew Books

the beginning of a work in progress

Liam stayed in bed hoping this time would be different. The wind came in through his window, chilly. The moon was a perfect half in the sky over the trees. He got up. He hadn’t slept in years. Every night he got ready for bed and climbed under the covers thinking that this would be the night everything changed.

He looked for signs. He watched his sisters. If either one did anything different, broke the routine of the day, he thought this was the night. This one. But no. Another night and no sleep. No dreams. He missed dreams. He had never thought much about them before, dreams. Took them for granted. Didn’t like to listen to other people’s dreams. But now he knew what dreams really meant and when someone started a sentence—Oh, the other night I had this dream—he drank their dreams in. He could almost make himself believe that their dreams were his.

He closed his eyes at night, remembered other people’s dreams, and tried to imagine them, see them in the dark, but they weren’t nourishing. He colored them up a bit, added things to make them more interesting but they didn’t quite work as well as dreams personally made. Giving up on others’ dreams he’d wander through the house. It was really the only time he had the house to himself and he knew he ought to be glad for the time, appreciate the solitude. He ought to find a hobby perhaps. Make things in the dead of night.

His sisters, Faye and Kell, were sleeping. They had their own problems. They didn’t ask him about his sleeplessness and he didn’t ask them about their own curses. They could have asked each other anything. There was no rule. But they all preferred to keep their thoughts to themselves when it came to their curses and the book.

The book was hidden away somewhere in the house. They weren’t sure where anymore. They should have remembered but though they each tried, the image of it escaped them. They searched for the book a few times, but gave up. They gave in to the way their lives had changed. What would they do if they found the book anyway? They certainly would never read it. Reading it was what had cursed them in the first place. Seemed a great risk to read the thing again.

Liam tried to remember how they’d come to have the book. He was always buying books. Shelves sagged under the weight of unread books that were all over the house. Stacks tumbled over. Perhaps that book had always been mixed in with the others. Perhaps it had come with the house and it had simply taken years for it to make itself known. You didn’t just find a book like that. It made itself known. Appeared on a table one day waiting for someone to pick it up and turn a page.

Then the book had you.

Liam sighed and went down the stairs. In the light of day he pushed the book from his thoughts. Maybe on a gloomy day, a day without sun, his fingers would tingle as if the pages were in his hand and the smell of old paper would drift over him. But he lived in the Sunshine State and luckily long spells of gloom were few.

But of course every state had the night. There wasn’t enough sunshine anywhere to wipe out all of the
dark. Except for at the poles. But then you’d have night for months and the mere idea of that made his stomach churn.

Liam didn’t know why he was alive. He thought that if you went too long sleep deprived that you were sure to die. He’d read about a family in Italy with a sleeping sickness. Once afflicted, the person died. But Liam hadn’t lost weight or changed color. At night it was true his skin cast a gray hue, but in the light of day no one ever thought he looked he tired. He had no bags under his eyes. He didn’t yawn excessively. He never felt tired, but he always wanted sleep. Sleep. Like he’d been addicted to sleep before and not even known it. Now he was going through withdrawal.

On the front porch he sat in a wicker chair. The house was in the woods. It was a strange place to build a house, and in fact a housing development had been planned for the area. Or so he’d been told. This was the first house or the third. He could never remember, but it was the only house left. The development had been forgotten. Given up on. Either because of misfortunes in the economy and poor money management by the developers or because of a curse on the land. It depended on who you asked. Liam thought maybe the book had been there even then. Maybe it had sprung from the earth and grown into the house.

Not that it mattered. What did he care where the other houses were or how the book had found him? The thing was that the book was gone again and he couldn’t sleep. Three years was a long time to go without sleep. He discovered that going without sleep meant going without many other things as well. Not just dreams. Women.

I seem to have finished three novels. That sounds ridiculous, but it is true. Now, I’ve got to decide what to work on next. One of the unfinished novels listed in the sidebar or something new?

the first book

I’ve turned my novel’s pages into art. Why not do the same for the entire book? I’m going to make my own books. Some books will be available as PDF files and others will come handmade with original art. And who knows what else I might come up with. We’ll see where this goes. And if you are interested in reading the entirety of my novels, please let me know.

mapelba at gmail dot com

Thank you.

Novel number three begins here.

Chapter One

When Deva turned nine, a package from her dead grandmother arrived. Deva’s mother, Maryl, reminded her that nothing came by accident, especially from the dead. Everything was fate. An omen or a symbol was ignored at one’s own risk.

Of course, her father, Jay, said that one cousin or another must have found it hidden away in the old lady’s house and put in the mail as a final gesture of reconciliation. But when he made the effort to call the cousins whose numbers he could dig up, each and every one of them hung up on him.

“You never did understand where I came from,” his wife said.

“You never wanted to explain it to me,” he replied.

So Deva was given the package and the adults didn’t ask her anymore about it for some time.

Inside the package was a box of watercolor paints. Perfect ovals of color slipped out onto the table. Deva knew something about talismans, and she knew that one way to give meaning to the meaningless was to keep hold of it. Time bestowed value on many useless things. Her mother taught her that.

She put the flat, plastic case in her purse and resolved to say nothing else about it. “Well,” Maryl said, “at least you don’t have to send a thank you note.”

Deva carried the watercolors with her everywhere, but didn’t use them. Until one fall day, sitting the backseat of the car, she pulled it from her purse, popped open the lid, and lifted out the paintbrush. Twirling the brush between her fingers, she pointed it out the window at a decrepit house, and she imagined a beautiful and welcoming home filled with warm colors and soft light. A moment later the car reached the next block.

*
Mrs. Montrose woke up late that morning. She did her best to wake up late every morning to put off living the rest of her life. The house, ugly and neglected, was the one thing her late husband left her. She didn’t keep it because she loved him, but because of a land developer who talked about community development and urban decay. As much as she hated the house, she hated anyone who bothered her about words like community. Her house and her pension allowed her to ignore community.

But on this morning, the morning when on her way to school Deva Martin pointed her cheap, plastic paint brush at her front door, Mrs. Montrose didn’t wake up to the same house. Everything was as it was meant to be when a young man first laid out blueprint paper and began drawing plans. No cracks went up walls. No paint peeled away. No floor sagged. No windowpane was gray and chipped from BB pellets.

Furniture stood straight. Frayed edges mended. Cabinet doors covered shelves the way cabinet doors should.

“Where am I?” She grabbed her glasses and pulled the sheets close to here chin. I’ve been kidnapped, she thought. “Well, you’ll get nothing out of me. I got nothing and now you got more of the same!” She shouted through her house that she didn’t recognize. She could tell the silence that met her back was of nothingness, of no one there to listen, not the silence of being rebuffed or unheard by someone really there. This made her brave. It also cleared her head.

A photo of her son sat on her bedside table. Her comb. Her alarm clock. All of it dusted. All of it like new. Now she took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes, and knew she had to be dreaming.

When she got to the front yard, she learned she wasn’t hallucinating.

“Why, Mrs. Montrose,” called her neighbor Betsy Worthington. “What’ve you gone and done to your house?” She looked like a woman who wasn’t only seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time, but who’d never known canyons even existed. Her newspaper hung in its plastic sack from the tips of her fingers. “I mean…”

Mrs. Montrose didn’t like Betsy. The sight of her clenched her guts with guilt, but the woman insisted on forgiveness, and so Mrs. Montrose gave in as much as she could stand, and pretending the past didn’t exist made accepting forgiveness easier. “I don’t know. I was hoping somebody’d explain it to me. This ain’t your idea of a joke, is it?”

“No, ma’am. I mean, sure it might be a good joke, but I don’t got no way to pull off something like this. You know that, Mrs. Montrose, sure as I’m standing here.”

“Have I been sick? I been in a coma and nobody’s done anything about it?”

“Well, I think they’ve done something.”

“To my house, but not to me.”

Betsy shook her head. “We talked yesterday, if you recall. I told you about my Sean making us proud by getting himself put in one of those gifted classes and all. Can you imagine? It’s more than I hoped for from any youngun of mine, but Harold, he don’t hold much to such la-di-da classes, and he said—”

“And I said I didn’t want to hear about that boy of yours, didn’t I?”

“I know you don’t mean nothing by that, Mrs. Montrose. You ain’t gone and forgotten our agreement now, have you?”

Mrs. Montrose had tried to forget. “Course not, Betsy. How’s your daughter?”

“Hard to control as ever. Don’t know how she’s gonna end up—don’t want to know if I’m honest. And your son? Any news?”

Mrs. Montrose turned around to get a better look at her house in the late morning sun. It gleamed and shone and she was possibly more surprised by the tears that came to her eyes than by the house itself. “Ain’t nobody ask me about…well, ain’t no matter.” She said, not really to Betsy, and not in a voice much more than a whisper.

“They’s lots of things none of us want answers to,” Betsy answered. “You and I got that in common, don’t we now?”

Mrs. Montrose shook herself. She didn’t want to talk about Daniel. They didn’t talk about too much or too honestly about Betsy’s daughter or her son. Vague references were as close as either got. “I meant to say I was thinking about this house.” She avoided Betsy’s eyes. “I don’t understand it. I’m almost frightened of it. If I go back into that house, it’ll not be mine and it’ll not be good.”

Betsy rubbed an eye with the palm of her hand. “Don’t be silly Mrs. Montrose. Look at it. It’ll be grand. And where else you gonna go?”

“Why don’t…” Mrs. Montrose focused on Betsy’s collar, the frayed and yellowed lace. She tried not to remember how she felt responsible for Betsy giving up on her looks. Years ago Betsy had been a beautiful woman. “Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea?”

Betsy was too shocked at this invitation to say no. She had long ago promised herself not to hold onto her anger and to treat Mrs. Montrose better than she deserved. She’d never said she’d be the old woman’s friend, and her husband would like as kill her if she set foot in that house. All the same, Betsy also believed people were judged by how well they treated the people who didn’t deserve to be treated well. So easy to be kind to babies, kittens, and children holding tight to soft animals. Too easy. And too easy never got anybody into heaven.

The entire neighborhood took note of Mrs. Montrose’s house. Everyone on the street walked over to see, to stand on her front walk and gawk. Before they knew it, they found themselves going up Mrs. Montrose’s front walk and knocking on her front door. Soon more people crowded into her house than had ever been in the forty years she’d lived there. There were as many people in the house as that young architect had envisioned when he first imagined the house for him and his new wife. They were going to be that popular and grand and hold soirees, teas, and dances, and everyone would clamor to come. But none of that had happened and Mr. Montrose had bought the house for a criminally low price, and the neighbors all agreed that the decline of the house and the neighborhood began on the day he signed the papers.

Now the rooms were full, and when Mrs. Montrose and Betsy opened the fridge and the cabinets, food was there, always the certain something somebody wanted, just the right thing. The feeling stirring in Mrs. Montrose was so foreign to her that for a moment, she thought she was having a heart attack. Of course, a few people pilfered and stole, thinking anything easily and magically given could be taken, too. Mrs. Montrose didn’t care.

Read Chapter Two.

Mercie put on a bright red lipstick. Red was, after all, the best color for lying and that night she had three lies she’d promised to tell. Her mother didn’t think she kept her promises, but she always did.

Josie Winters didn’t think much of her adopted daughter—the salvage project that went wrong. Tonight was Mercie’s chance to make up for her sins to Josie and the rest of the family. The sin was only one, but to Josie one sin was as good as hundred.

Their agreement seemed simple. Mercie would help Josie win back a denied inheritance, and Josie would finally reveal the name of Mercie’s real father.

Her bedroom door opened, and Lin, her hair piled high and held up with chewed up pencils, poked her head in. “They just pulled up. You ready?”

Mercie dropped the lipstick in her purse. “Who wouldn’t be ready for a night of deception?”

“I told you not to go along with this.”

“She’s never going to tell me his name if I don’t.”

“Cora said—”

“I did exactly what Cora told me to do, but, you know, it might not work.” The night before, Mercie had written her wish on a scrap of paper, burned it outside under the stars, and held it up for the wind to scatter.

“Or it might.”

“I don’t want to wait. It could take an age.”

Lin pulled a pencil out of her hair and absentmindedly pressed it to her neck. “I see you’re wearing the lipstick.”

“Well, yeah. Wouldn’t you?”

“Knowing what your mom thinks about lipstick? I thought you weren’t trying to make your mom mad.”

“Suddenly you’re worried that my mom will disown me?”

“I wish she would and get it over it with. No. I’m worried that you want to go through with this.”

Mercie walked by Lin and into the narrow hallway of their tiny house, a rental that creaked in the wind and sagged in summer heat. “Unless you’ve found his name scratched under the floorboards, I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“No you won’t.”

“Try me.”

“How do you know she can really tell you? She only met your birth mother, right?”

“She promised.” There came a knock on the door.

“I can’t believe you’re letting your mother turn you into a liar.”

“Yeah, like it took her to do that.”

“But isn’t there something in Bible about, oh, I don’t know, lying be kind of, like, wrong? And doesn’t your mom go to church, let’s see, is it twice a week?”

“Twice.” Mercie tugged at the waistline of her sweater. “How do I look?”

“You look like a night out with me, not like a nice time with the family. Isn’t that sweater a bit red for playing saved?”

“Matches the lipstick.”

“But not your story.”

Mercie put her hand on the doorknob. “But it’s just so dreary. I need the color, all right?” She flung open the door to the gray November light. “Mom!” she said cheerfully. “So glad to see you!”

Her mother tilted her head to one side. “A cold front’s moving in. Don’t forget your jacket. Why hello, Lin. How are you? Your bra strap’s showing, dear.”

“I’m just grand, Mrs. Winters–thank you for asking.” Lin left the strap where it was. “And how are you?”

“Lovely, dear. You’re still working with Mercie, is that right?”

Mercie looked down at the shoes. The girls both knew how much her mother hated her working at a grocery store.

“That’s right,” said Lin. “Paul hasn’t fired me yet.”

“Well, that’s wonderful. Good for you, dear.”

They all smiled awkwardly. “Did you want to come in for a minute?” Lin asked. “Have a cup of coffee before the fun begins?”

Mercie coughed. Her mother avoided coming into their place as much as she politely could. “No thank you, Robert’s waiting in the car. Oh. Do you know that we saw gypsies on the way over here–gypsies!–just a few blocks away. What’s this neighborhood coming to? It used to be so nice.”

Mercie and Lin exchanged glances. The neighborhood had never been nice. “Gypsies, Mrs. Winters?” Lin asked. “Really?”

“That’s right. A ghastly wagon pulled by a horse–a horse!—trotting down the street as pretty as you please as if we’d all be happy to see them. I bet those people don’t even have a license for the thing.”

“Do you need a license for a horse?” Lin asked.

Mercie looked up and down the street, which was wiped clean of everyone. “I’d love to see some gypsies.”

Mrs. Winters shook her head. “Of course you do. Now then, are you ready to go?”

“Completely prepared,” Mercie said.

Lin snorted. Picking up her jacket from the chair by the door, Mercie gave her friend a peck on the cheek. “See you later.”

Mrs. Winters stepped back and tripped over a cat, and the girls had to catch her arm to keep her from falling. “Good heavens,” she said, straightening her scarf. “You got a cat?”

“More like he got us,” said Lin, shivering from the cold coming in. “But we’re calling him Piwacket.”

“Pi-what?” Mrs. Winters stood stiffly as the cat brushed against her legs, leaving black hairs clinging to her gray slacks.

“Come on, Mom. Dad’s waiting for us in the car, and temperature’s dropping already.” The wind hurried and miserable clouds lowered above them. “Don’t worry about the cat.”

Mrs. Winters almost fell off the top step again, but steadied herself and gave Lin a stern look. “Yes, well, I shouldn’t let him in the house if I were you, dear.”

Lin scooped the cat into her arms. “A little late for that since he’s taken to sleeping in Mercie’s bed.”

Mrs. Winters sighed. “Yes, well, lovely to see you, Linnette.”

“And to see you too, Mrs. Winters—as always.” With that she waved the cat’s paw at them before she shut the door.

“She’s always been a silly girl.”

“Very silly,” Mercie said, walking to the car. “But I like her that way.”

“Of course you do.”

*

The northerly wind cartwheeled the brown leaves over the grass and mud until they caught in the azalea bushes along the side of the house. Mercie’s heels crunched in the gravel of the drive, and before she got into the car, she darted to the mailbox. Her relief to find it empty ended when she saw the mailman at the apartments across the street. He hadn’t gotten to their house yet. Well, at least her mother wouldn’t get to ask about the bills.

“Mercie, please hurry yourself.” Her mother stood at the car, tapping the roof of her Lumina.

Hanging back, she glanced down the street to The Sunlight Grocery where she worked. She wished Paul had been less accommodating about giving her the day off.

“Mercie, honestly. What are you waiting for out there?”

Magic and a knight in shining armor—maybe several good-looking knights to choose from.
Putting her head down, she walked back to the car. “Sorry.”

“You’re ready for your grandmother, aren’t you?”

“I said I was.” Mercie jerked open the car’s back door.

“You promised.”

“Yes, I know. Look, I’m getting in the car already. See? Here’s me. Here’s the car. Here’s me getting ready to lie to grandmother.” She pitched herself into the backseat. Her father sat in the front passenger seat and she paused to catch her breath before leaning over to the front and kiss him on the cheek.

Her mother got in on the driver’s side and made a show of fussing with her hair in the rearview mirror.

“Hi sweetie,” he said, and went back to his fishing magazine.

“You’ve done something with your hair?” Her mother sniffed.

Mercie buckled her seatbelt. “No. Same as ever.”

“You didn’t want to get a little trim?” Mrs. Winters backed out onto the street, barely missed the already well-dented trashcans and hit the pothole. “I told you I’d pay for a nice cut.” Her mother sped down the street as if to keep from seeing this part of the world she didn’t care for. Most of the world struck her that way.

“I like my hair the way it is right now.”

“But all those split ends, dear.” She patted her own hair and took the turn onto the highway too quickly and gripped the door handle.

“Josie, there’s no need to bother the girl now. Far as I know there aren’t any salons out on this here highway. Um, you might slow down, dear,” her father said. “I never have known where that fire is.” He went back to his magazine.

They passed the giant red sign advertising The Red Moon—palm readings, Tarot cards, and glimpses into the infinite, and it was just five miles down the road, past an orange grove and ratty field, this side of the flea market. The oranges would be good soon, and they glowed bright in the overcast shadows of the late afternoon. “Could always stop at The Moon. Cora cuts my hair, you know.”

Her father cleared his throat and her mother frowned. Mercie leaned back in her seat in satisfaction. Her mother would leave her alone for a while. Mentioning The Red Moon was a sure way of ending any conversation because they all knew fortunes were not the only things sold in the back rooms. Josie didn’t like to talk about anything that risked reminding her that Mercie’s birth mother had worked there twenty-two years before.

Mercie put her head against the window and watched the wind bend the trees. Lightning startled the sky and she looked forward to rain and the end of the night.

*
Go on to Chapter Two>.