Look! A Challenge!

My writer buddy  Greta van der Rol  has tagged me in one of those blog challenge thingies. The idea is to find the first instance of the word ‘look’ in your current WIP and post the surrounding paragraphs.

So here it is, the opening scene from
  Saints and Sinners: Roman.

It’s sodden, without a bottom, like my heart.

Father Anthony murmured false promises. Better places. Just rewards. Charon without oars, floating soft. Going somewhere … nowhere.

My dad stood back, hardly part of this, uncertain. Looking way older than his due. It wasn’t his fault. At least not much, though I laid blame easy enough. I had to. Eleanore didn’t give choices back then.

I snickered at that thought. Choices. My mother would be at the devil’s gate right now giving him whatfor, dripping with spite and quid pro quos, making an offer he’d find hard to refuse. I wondered what the do-good Father would think about that, if he even cared. How could he, never being a party to her life … or mine.

Eleanore Delancie’d been a lawyer, milking misery and her percentage from victims of society’s failings. How fitting the same ugliness that inflicted those who paved her road to glory would lay her low.

Pillar… Saddened… Suffering. Temporary.

The tap dance continued. It’d be my turn next.

The bubble of fake sad expanded, breathing like some living thing. In, out, out, in. I’d gotten used to the sound at the end, before they’d pulled the plug. Sucking all the air out of the room, out of me. Suffering’s not pretty, even when you hate the carcass and all she left behind.

She hadn’t been much of a mother, not much at all, but she was all I had.

Her and Anton. They’d been the ones who counted, who were … there, like a physical presence when the thing inside me went walkabout. When I zoned, not exactly running, more like a shuffle in place.

The bubble pushed me close to the pit yawning at my feet.

“She’s at peace, girl.” He unclenched the fist, the one not mine, never mine, peeling, prying each finger loose. Breath hissing, not expecting slick, slippery, iron sweet blood. “Let it go. What’s done is done.”

When had he grown so wise?

“Throw the dirt.” Anton. Angry Anton.

Sound dulled. Dirt, sloppy with the ooze of my soul, pinged and echoed and the mass of mourners bowed respectfully and pressed back.

The air sighed with relief.

The good Father patted my shoulder, shook dad’s hand and gave Anton a wide berth.

“Let’s go home, TJ.”

Home.

Yes, let’s do that little thing.

Anton gripped my elbow, palms sweaty, guiding me with uneasy steps. I risked a look at his eyes but they shifted down and away, that same uncertainty afflicting him.

I pulled haughty and a sneer out of the shallows where I stored emotion.

“Don’t…” he sounded coarser than I remembered, tougher, roughened. Two tours would do that. He wasn’t the kid I knew anymore. “He needs you.”

Oh, news flash, bro. Let me explain need…

Manicured lawn turned to uneven gravel and the hood of a generic SUV blocking my path. Somehow Anton had levitated me to the conveyance of my doom. Dad held the door, patient. He opened his mouth, then shut it, opened it again like a parody of a fish gulping air.

The reflection in the window magnified the slash of distaste. Anton, my dear precious Anton, towering at more than six feet of solid muscle, bent my head and eased a body stiff with the little deaths that plagued me into the back seat. I allowed him the tiny victory of strapping me in, the whispered, “See you back at the house,” and the steady pressure of the bubble collapsing about me.

I was going home.

To Pennsylvania. To modest and hard-working. To a life with a man I barely knew and a brother who would escape back to a war and the kills that marked his soul. I envied him.

Follow the story as it unfolds HERE