Pre-Order ‘The Way You Are’ Today!
Art by Christine Griffin
It’s nearly here. I’m going over the final galleys now and the novella should release on the 2nd of January 2013 (well, the 3rd for us Aussies given Dreamspinner works on American time). You can Pre-Order the eBook now for $3.99, or $2.99 if you catch the Christmas sale. And because it’s Christmas, here’s an excerpt from the story–the very first time our friend Leon (that’s him in the blue hoodie), meets Warrick the student nurse, AKA the guy in the green box on the cover. Not the footnotes start at seven because this section is already six footnotes in.
The room wasn’t what Leon had been expecting. For starters, it was mostly bare, with two ward beds empty and the third containing the limp figure of an aging matron, a thin, white cotton sheet doing little to conceal her bulk. Leon focused his gaze on the furthest corner of the room, where a yellow privacy curtain had been drawn back, allowing sunlight from the nearby window to play over the unmoving figure in the fourth hospital bed. The bed was large to Leon’s eyes, and the patient it contained looked a bit like a child in comparison, even though Leon knew Rook to be at least six inches taller than himself. The bedsheets were tucked around the recumbent figure, still neat and crisp, as if they had just been fitted around his body. Obviously, coma patients didn’t move much. An unused tray table and a soft chair—upholstered in the poo brown that had been ever so popular in the 1950s or some other decade before Leon’s time—sat off slightly to one side, a bunch of wilted flowers on the bedside table, and a small stack of get well cards the only personal touches in the otherwise institutional space. Leon would have expected a scrunched tissue or indented cushion or something—anything—to indicate the presence of parents, but apparently they lived far out in the middle of Woop Woop7. The last few days hadn’t been kind to Rook—or as he was known on his patient chart, Travis Rookford. The left side of his face was still swollen and bruised, the skin lacerated with a myriad of cuts that, according to newspaper sources, had been inflicted by a smashed bottle. One source8 said Rook was lucky to not have lost an eye. His right leg was elevated and in a heavy cast, and Leon knew that somewhere under the chest bandages were a number of broken ribs and a lot of internal bruising, and a significant amount of internal bleeding. “H-hi,” Leon said. The only response was a triple-fluted snore from the lady in bed three and the steady beep-beep-beep of Rook’s heart monitor. “You probably don’t remember me. Actually, I’d be surprised if you did,” Leon said, eyes wandering over the tubes that led from Rook’s muscled arm to the bag of intravenous . . . → Read More: Pre-Order ‘The Way You Are’ Today!
