Excerpt from a potential Novel
A Story by John E. O'Brien
Say, if you had just picked up a novel off of a coffee table at a friends house, and you flipped to a random page, and this was the first paragraph you read, would you be interested in continuing?
A
weedwacker in the morning. The smell of plastics combining together; the hoses,
the lampposts, the gutters; flowers, an unseen brush fire, the warming late
morning air. Angela’s husband being driven up the road, past a neighbor using a
handheld leafblower to remove green dust of freshly cut grass expelled from his
lawn’s portion of the street; [redacted]--Angela’s
husband--waved, without any expectation of receiving a wave back. The neighbor
(a middle aged man wearing a cloth button up, jeans, and a black cloth hat with
curls of white hair shooting down) did return it, leaving his hand raised
longer than his gaze, which returned back down to the invisible jet of air as
it blew a long pillar of black back into the pavement. It wasn’t too early in
the morning, and Angela’s husband, being driven in a black sedan by a driver
that he didn’t remember the name of, pushed and rubbed against the dark circles
under his eyes. He felt the driver slow down while putting his turn signal on,
noticing the rest of the street was almost completely empty, with only a single
neighbor further down also doing some early Saturday morning gardening. As the
driver took the turn, Angela’s husband could finally see his house, and he
noticed that Angela’s car was not there. He felt drowsy, and he was still
unsure about the stability of the world around him, although even as much as he
relaxed and let his grip on this internal narrative loosen (this narrative
being almost entirely concerned with the testing of the plausibility of the
existence of each object or action that he observed around him, and then
concluding [hopefully very quickly] that the object or action either could or
could not exist in the known testable universe under its universal laws of
physics or laws of thermodynamics or general common sense) the feeling of a strange
detachment from the world around him--his feet against the carpeted car floor or
his hand against the shiny wax of the wood-lacquered door hold--remained. It was
almost as if every smooth linear movement across space was done in lurches. He
liked to imagine that the clean, manicured trees unfurled as he passed; that he
gained his own gravity, and that the whole of the world began to obey his
bodies movement through time as if he were a dense planet, as if everything was
his moon and the edges of the roofs would even begin to distend and spread
themselves until they were like crowns, and the fences would practically genuflect
with impeccable grace, and the windows with their plain, thin frames would curl
and frown or narrow and leer while they pointed towards and away from him as
the walls of the twisting houses would bulge and flex, and the flowers and
shrubs reeking of curiosity would pull from their roots just enough to follow without completely
unearthing themselves; this entire scene taking place
around him, eddying behind him out of sight, where he anxiously prayed it all
returned to complete normalcy once again. As they pulled up to his house, he
saw that there was no one else on the street. Hopefully she was inside, (Angela
was) and if she hopefully was, then he knew the first thing that he would
mention--
© 2016 John E. O'Brien
Author's Note
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Seriously, I'm interested to know if you're interested to read more. I'm trying to figure out if this novel idea is worth pursuing, since it's been pretty challenging and I have a lot of different projects I'm juggling. Thanks.
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Added on March 17, 2016
Last Updated on March 17, 2016
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