In 2010, I had a lot of free time in my hands. I had no kids, was newly engaged, and worked a slightly more than part-time job. So, in November of that year, I took an half-baked idea and turned it into a half-baked novel. That’s right folks. I did NaNoWriMo. And I won. If, by won, you mean I hit the fifty-thousand word mark. I never finished the novel (and never will). Reading back over it, there are parts that don’t suck, so I’m going to polish them up and post them here. This is the second excerpt. You can find them all, as they are posted, by searching the tag #NANO2010 and each will be individually tagged by order, so this one will be tagged #2010ExcerptTwo, and the next will be tagged #2010Excerpt Three and so on and so forth.
It had been a back and forth summer, the kind where one day the air was dry and static and so crackly it made the hair on her arm stand on end. Then, the next day, violent gray clouds would roll up out of the hills on a hot wind so quickly that she’d barely get the last window shut before fat raindrops would begin to rattle and sizzle their way across the roof and rumble down the spouts.
Just before lunch on an August Monday, another of these storms sped in hard, and Adrienne had a feeling it would end by mid-afternoon the way they always did, with a cool mist creeping out of the woods and the temperature of the whole house dropping a few degrees, making a perfect afternoon for working in her attic studio. With a few hours to wait before that, she decided a BLT and a book in the corner of the library was a good way to waste a few hours. Taking her sandwich and a glass of milk, she curled up in her favorite spot, an old wing chair with cracked brown leather and an ottoman to match. It had it’s back to the room and it’s face to the front of the house,
so Adrienne could read and watch as the storm crept back down the hills much moreslowly than it had come. With a hardcover edition of a giant Tad Willimas tome open on her lap, she fell into the story like it was the first time she’d read it, rather than the seventh. Within moments, nothing but crumbs of the sandwich remained and engulfed by familiar words, a fully belly and the sound of the rain,
Adrienne started to drowse as Yogurt crept on to the open pages of the book and settled himself in, a warm, purring mass.
* * *
Schhhhppppt. Adrienne startled awake to the familiar sound of one sheet of paper sliding against another, just behind her. She jumped up from the chair, letting the book slide from the lap to the ground with a solid thump. She hoped it would be worth it to catch Yogurt messing around on the bookshelves, a place the cat knew he wasn’t supposed to be. However, when she stood and turned, there was nothing, not a
movement, not a breath, not a whisper. She had expected to see the cat flying downfrom one of the tall library shelves, to at least see his pitch-black tail darting out the library door like a shadow, but there was not even the sound of paws beating a fast retreat down the hall. There was nothing but the stillness of an empty house. Adrienne realized she must have been dreaming of paper as she had so many times before and immediately felt a bit silly that her mind had automatically jumped to the cat, who’d never bothered with the library shelves before.
Still, as she picked up and closed the book, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the library was just a millimeter different than it had been before. When you lived alone for a long time and nothing ever moved without your guidance, you became familiar with rooms like they were parts of your body. Adrienne knew something had changed, something subtle, like a single hair going gray overnight. She put the book down on the table beside her plate and half-empty glass and began to pace around the room, glancing over the bookshelves and all the paper sculptures upon them.
Nothing jumped out at her. Every book was on the shelf exactly where itshould be and so was every paper creation. She’d hoped for a trail of cat fur or telltale paw prints in the thin layer of dust on every shelf, but there were no such clues. Finishing a lap of the room, Adrienne picked up the dirty dishes and, smiling a little at her own silliness, she made her way toward the door. Stopping to pull it open with her
foot, she paused, something catching the corner of her eye.
On the last shelf beside the door sat the entirety of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and there was that brown paper wardrobe she had made a few years before, but the legs were no longer visible beneath the wardrobe’s door. It was as though, after standing still and
silent for so long, the little paper Lucy had finally decided to crawl over to the land oof the lamppost.