An excerpt from my novel, Heather Girl.  If you’re new, here’s the backstory.  Heather’s elderly father has been paroled from prison in Texas where he’s been serving a sentence for the murder of her mother. He’s suffering from Alzheimer’s, and through a series of unexpected events, he’s staying with Heather until she can make other arrangements. Her brother has died and a friend of her father’s from prison, Darnell, aka Booger, has come to visit.  In this scene, about two-thirds through the novel, Heather, who has her own serious health issues, has taken a nasty fall in the garage of her home, where she found one of her mother’s private journals.

She stood, lightheaded at first, but quickly steadied herself. She tried to move her right arm, but again the pain was unbearable. She knew it was broken. She reached behind her head and felt the knot, then traced the trail of blood down her neck and onto her shirt. The bleeding had stopped, but there had been so much. She would likely need stitches.

She picked up the journal, made her way to the garage door and headed back to the house. The kitchen light was still on. Through the window she saw her father and Booger sitting at the kitchen table, Booger talking, always talking, her father listening but not likely hearing a word he was saying, lost in a room of his own imagination, where the past is the present and the present is whatever he wants it to be and the future is not something to be considered. Booger’s cowboy hat sat on the back of his head as he leaned away from the table, lost in a room of his own imagination, where the past is the past and the present is the prelude to a future of grand possibilities. At that moment, with her very real pain of the present and the haunting anguish of the past and a future dark and bleak, she envied the childlike simplicity of their existence and couldn’t quell the contempt that was borne of jealousy and self-pity.

“Idiots.”

She opened the door and went inside.

copyright 2017, joseph e bird, from the novel Heather Girl.