Excerpt from a potential Novel

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?

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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

John E. O'Brien
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