Read an Excerpt
light beneath ferns
By anne spollen
Flux
Copyright © 2010 Anne Spollen
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7387-1542-1
Chapter One
This story does not teach a lesson. It does not explain gravity or the pack rituals of wolves or how the sun will explode one day and leave us all inside a gray welt of ice and famine. It will not make you popular or get you invitations to parties, if you are after that sort of thing. If death and the dead make you afraid, you better just stop reading and go take a nap. If bones scare you, you cannot read this book. At all. Because really, things started happening just a little after I found that bone.
You should also know that this story doesn't begin at the beginning. Really, nothing does. And don't believe people who tell you that's how the world works. My story goes sideways, like all stories. I pick the parts that I want to be the beginning, the middle, and the end because nothing ever happens in order; we just pretend it does. Everything happens more like a rainstorm with wind and lightning and confusion all happening at once, and none of it is divided into sections.
I am not going to tell you a lot about me in the beginning like other girl narrators because I am nothing like other girl narrators. If you were smart enough to find this book, and find me, you can figure out how I am without being told. But I will tell you what I am not.
I don't live on a prairie or in the American West or before, during, or after any war that you would find in a history book. I don't like flowers, or save small animals; I don't have whimsical adventures that end neatly with a moral. I don't locate lost children. In fact, I'm not even fond of small children. I don't solve mysteries or fix what's broken. I don't scare easily, but I am not noble in the least. Usually, when stuff scares me, I avoid it. I also don't believe in courage. I think it is a radically misunderstood, applauded form of suicide. And I don't wish I lived anywhere else, even though we live on the edge of a graveyard.
The graveyard, Wenspaugh Rural Cemetery, is in my mother's hometown in upstate New York (or at least, in the town she moved to when she was about nine years old). When we moved back, she got a job as the cemetery caretaker. Some people live on the edge of a lake or a town or a meadow. We live on the edge of a cemetery.
You're thinking, "Oh, she lives on the edge of a cemetery and that's how and why she found the bone." And I already warned you that stories do not go in order like that. The graveyard, in the end, had nothing to do with me finding the bone.
Not a thing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from light beneath ferns by anne spollen Copyright © 2010 by Anne Spollen. Excerpted by permission.
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