Gil Adamson, The Outlander

The world was huge, endless, and the widow in her body was not.

 

In the mornings heavy fog poured upward from the earth and drifted in ghostly forms through the trees. …She watched a gaggle of vaporous forms trouble the surface of a little forest slough, and it gave her a curious image of what her own mind endured. …Furies born and soon dead with a simple breath of sun; but potent while they lasted and terrible.

 

Jeffrey was in the stalls sorting through old bridles when the door went dim, as if a cloud had passed over. He looked up to see the silhouettes of two large men standing side by side. … He didn’t speak. He didn’t move. He waited. He was a man accustomed to waiting. And slowly, the men, who had been stiff and unmoving as statutes, began to shift and shuffle as doubt overtook and annoyed them, impelled them forward on their fine black boots into the gloom of the barn. Two horses watched them come, the animals’ long faces hanging over the stall doors with the guileless, expectant gaze common to all horses, even the hellraisers.

Visit the author site here

Book & purchase options are here

 

Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Yesterday’s Whales” Birds of a Lesser Paradise

There were unspoken routines and rituals, shoes underneath the bed and books on the nightstand that reminded us what kind of people we were, should we forget for a moment, or be tempted to change.

Access the author site here

Book & purchase options here

 

Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

…we wait at the bus stops, managing our intricate and tiny mental kingdoms…

 

“But what if,” I said, still gazing at her, with her sly sexy smile like a little dawn on her face, “what if the love we feel, what if it’s central, what if it’s what makes the world’s soul possible, what if it’s what made the world and keeps it running…”

 

She hadn’t thought she could love a man of my race, but once I showed up in her life, I turned to be the man she loved, what is the word, regardless. To this day I don’t know exactly what she loved about me and that’s because I don’t have to know. She just does. It was the entire menu of myself. She ordered all of it.

Access the author site here

Book & purchase options here