Documents of Tabat: An Instructive and Useful Listing of the Chal Shops of Tabat

Work goes forward on the novel. 1500 words so far, a little chunk that fits into the book early on, just after (sort of during) the riot at the gallery. Once the Redmond lunch-time traffic has died down, I’ll go reward myself with an Italian soda.

Here’s a teaser, still very rough:

She was a tall woman with gleaming gold hair, obscured beneath a dark cloak. She tried to shrug the woolen fabric more securely around her shoulders, but it caught on obstructions beneath, and half swung away to reveal feathers the same color as her hair.

“Lookie, lookie, look,” said a voice from behind her. She swung, almost dizzy with panic to see several figures step out towards her from the deeper darkness between two refuse heaps.

She stood between the dull red bricks of two enormous warehouses. Chalked scrawls, melting in the misty rain in luminous trails, marked the lower walls ““ political slogans rendered illegible by moisture. A strip of moonlight marked the middle, a narrow path barely large enough to contain Glyndia. Midnight edged the sides of her cloak.

Summer wound down, and we entered heat-mad August, days of sweat and sunshine, so hot you didn’t really want to move. But somehow, when evening started falling and the air cooled off a little, your energy would return.

And sometimes one of the places to burn some of that off was by driving up to the Michigan dunes, building a fire and getting drunk on the beach. I went up one evening with Anna, and a bunch of other friends from high school. I didn’t particularly like them or want to hang around with them, but Anna wanted it, and she made me promise to come.

It was what I had expected. A lot of beer and a couple of bottles of Jaeger getting passed around. We knew a spot that was technically private property, but the owners of the house far above were rarely there to disturb us. We sat on the soft sand around a fire made from the wood we’d brought and I watched the stars far out over the lake, wondering when I could gracefully excuse myself and slip away.

That was why I was the first person to see them. Somet, out in the water, coming towards our fire. At first I thought they were fish, or seals, or something, not people. But as the heads came up out of the water, I realize they were human. Women, three of them.