Revisiting Yesterday Road

Last week I took you down memory lane and ran an excerpt from Occasional Soulmates. This week, because its fourth anniversary is coming up pretty soon, I thought I’d flaunt a bit of Yesterday Road.

In this segment, Jack Peckham is dreaming of the home he’s trying to get back to:

He was walking a lawnmower up and down a wide green lawn. On one side was a small wading pool, its blue rubber skin bulging through the white grid frame of it, and on the other side was a swingset, an elaborate collection of machines that let children swing back and forth, with a slide and rings and rails and part of it that was a blunt, stubby rocket ship built for two. He felt young and vigorous, walking that lawnmower in neat, straight rows, up and down the length of that yard, then circling a tree at the far end, whose branches were long blowing strands dangling down. Beyond the tree, the land spread out in a comforting series of gentle green waves, a farmscape of midsummer corn and rye. He turned back, toward a large white house with a screened sitting porch and a brick barbecue. Whose house is this, he wondered, and then saw a woman coming out the back door with two tall glasses on a tray. She was wearing a swimming outfit, with a breezy skirt, big sunglasses, a broad round straw hat. Her hair fell onto the skin of her pretty shoulders, but he couldn’t make out her face from the back of the yard where he was. Two children were in the pool, he saw now, a boy and a girl splashing with their palms on the surface of the water, bare-bellied and glistening in the sun. It was a beautiful scene, and it made his chest feel tingly. A wave of satisfaction swept over him as he pushed the lawnmower closer, aligning its wheels with the edge of his last pass out to the tree. The woman held one of the glasses up invitingly, the children cried out, Look look! Then, as he neared them, the children dissolved into nothing and the woman was gone. The house became a foggy mirage before it fell away, and he was left alone in a field of gray nowhere, surrounded by nothing.

You can buy Yesterday Road here for just $2.99. And if you do, please read and review.

 

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