by Youngbear Roth

Created on: April 12, 2010   Last Updated: November 17, 2010

Novel excerpt from, 'A Change of Seasons'

...SHE picked up her farm implements and gloves, for SHE was getting ready to plow the Great North Forty...

…Today, I watched Flora's light in the emergency room at Our Lady of All Saints Hospital in Los Angeles.  I watched it illuminate the ER, spread past automatic glass doors through the frantic lobby where a gentleman pleaded with an L.A. cop, while a bloody young man flew, wheeled screaming through large doors, and Flora's light struck the walkway, the ramp, the parking lot outside: radiant, insinuating itself deep into city foundations, the mummified forgotten roots and dank timber of a once small river town, causing long buried cellars of the twenties and thirties to shine, the little wooden houses of Boyle Heights leaning against one another to illuminate their cracked sidewalks, spreading like golden fingers across the city past dead rusty railroad yards, burning monolithic buildings, purifying gang graffiti, glaring up at the World Trade Center, engulfing the Bona Venture Hotel, electrifying the Pacific Stock Exchange, booting up computers, computers, computers, igniting freeway loops of steel girders, and humankind rushing they know not where with great determination: Flora's light leapt in flames spreading outwards on the wind, up onto cosmopolitan roof tops, to gardens, the helicopter landing pads, and finally like a warm supremely favored burst enveloping the universe, where we watched and SHE laughed.

"Imagine it," SHE said, "that they assumed this beautiful daughter was possessed by evil!"  SHE laughed so hard I thought SHE'd become hysterical, barely managing to say that every so often one special child of the compost heap rises above the putrescent dung, a child blazing with incandescence, lighting the breadth and width of the Great North Forty….

…Insulated from these goings on behind glass doors at the end of a long white hallway in the ER, Flora sat on the edge of an icy exam table.  She wanted to move her head and look up, but bright lights hurt her soft eyes, so she stared down at red knees and white spindly legs swinging freely back and forth.  Flora, occasionally checking her bruises, waited alone behind the curtain.  She felt the fleshy backs of her arms spring out in tiny goose bumps from the sterile cold hospital air.

"It's actually happening," she thought.  "How could I have missed that one-way sign?  And that couldn't have been a left

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>