Chris is working on his third novel, Hop Skip Jump, a paranormal mystery about channeling, second chances, and what might happen if a person were reborn to a place and time where she was needed the most.
Excerpt from Hop Skip Jump, a work-in-progress:
1952 - A Prologue
Three A.M. Sara Jane lay spent on the cement cellar floor, a nest of old newspapers cradling her, her winter coat opened flat beneath her legs, its gray lining wet with melted snow and milky-red birthing fluids. She worked her jaw from side to side, cramped from the cloth diaper she’d held between her teeth. She had awakened no one.
The things that mattered to her most and the faces they belonged to would not stay where she put them, instead came rushing at her in whatever fashion her disheveled mind could arrange them. Her eyelids closed as she pulled her new baby girl tightly to her chest. She weathered their intrusion:
A set of keys she’d pulled from a car door when someone wasn’t looking. Maybe she’d saved a life.
A scalloped photograph showing her in the driver’s seat of her father’s red Studebaker, her small hands at ten and two, her short black curls just above the car’s window ledge where her father leaned on his elbow. Her father smiling at her, she smiling at the camera, her two front teeth missing. A stabbing image from a year later, she sobbing wildly at the top of a Ferris wheel, her father dead from a coronary in the seat next to her.
A second photo, this one of her squirt brother in cowboy boots and her in a pink skirt and white bobby sox, her arm around his shoulder, the two of them in front of the Liberty Bell.
Her mother’s favorite shot glass, a sickening hint of whiskey in its amber-stained concavity. No photograph, yet one indelible memory: Cord-veined neck, seething face, roadmap eyes, curled upper lip, lower lip wet from a spray of sarcasm; her words like a noose. “Good riddance to you and your crazy voices. Don’t none of you come back.”
She felt for her tapestry satchel, an eggshell tan overgrown with embroidered roses, their ruby petals blooming through caked street soot, these keepsakes and others inside. She opened her eyes, retrieved the two photographs from the bag, brought them close to her daughter’s contented, suckling face. Introductions all around followed by a special prayer of thanks to Mrs. Yancy, asleep with her own child two floors above her, from one new mother to another.
This was a good block; clean, quiet, busy. Two-story brick row homes, most with nice couples living in them, the husbands back from the war.
Couples like the Yancys. Husband, wife, newborn girl; their first child. Sara Jane’s face flushed at this impression; the caring Mrs. Yancy always had a tenderness in her eyes. Living next door, their front stoop shared, were the Charmagnes: Mrs. Yancy’s pregnant older sister and her husband. Mrs. Charmagne’s look was different. Curious; interested. Like a child on a bench in the park with a trail of bread crumbs ending at her feet. The latest gift from Mrs. Charmagne had been a receiving blanket.
On colder nights the cellar doors to both sisters’ homes were left unlocked. Charity without recognition. Sara Jane accepted it by way of late night, quiet entrances from the alley and exits before dawn. Tonight she’d had a start, a dull square of light from next door at the Charmagnes, an upstairs bedroom lamp on then quickly off, the window’s curtains rustling, so far with no consequence.
Hers was a confused life made simpler two years ago when at age seventeen she left home. A life now contained in one soot-stained, lumpy tan and red fabric bag that followed her in a corroded brown wagon with rust-pocked white wheels as she walked the cluttered streets of north Philadelphia.
But things change. Simple had become complicated.
The bag was good for it. It could handle another life.
She was not sick, she was not crazy. She was burdened. Yesterday, today, always. It was only one voice that came to her, she’d told her mother. Always just one voice, and this voice was lovely, and musical, and real. And unlike her mother, it would never hurt her.
The Yancy’s coal furnace hatch was open; Sara Jane needed it for light as well as warmth. The furnace fire was almost out, the cellar chilly now, a rosy pre-dawn horizon brightening the dusty casement window above the coal bin, the bin’s planked door ajar at the edge of the coal pile.
Her head drooped then rose as she fought sleep and exhaustion, the pale palm and fingers of one hand black from stray lumps of coal she’d flicked into the furnace’s belly. Her head drooped again, came to rest temple-to-temple with her baby, stayed there as Sara Jane closed her motherly eyes. She would sleep now, would let her dreams take over. Would let them deal with the remnants of another bruising day, the taunts from the streets still ricocheting. Vagrant; beggar; pregnant whore; and the cruelest of them a play on her initials: ‘Straitjacket.’ All names that shamed her. One name that did not: the Songbird of Jackson Street.
But the beautiful voice that had earned her this label, the spirited soprano that often burst through her lips uninvited as she and her bag-laden wagon moved from street corner to street corner … this voice was not, and had never been, her own.
She and her songbird dreamed.
The furnace belched. Two tiny coal fireballs skidded onto the cellar floor, one settling on the lining of her coat, the other on a greasy rag left on the fringe of the coal bin overflow.
Her songbird took flight in their dream, reached the treetops and chattered in earnest, pleaded for Sara Jane and her baby to wake up, to flee the predator, to join her.
In the deadly carbon-monoxide-filled air, the new mother was too tired to fly.
