from The Church of Supernatural Science and Money Pursuit

this is an excerpt from the Project at hand.

To catch you up to speed, the girl has recently lost both her parents (heart attack, picnic accident) and is living in a house in the very small, antiquated town of her mother on the rugged coast of Maine. As an outsider to the town with plenty of money but little to no desire to do anything (at all), she spends her days in almost complete isolation until she gets sick during the winter with pnemonia.

Marlow is the young attorney who is dealing with her parents' wills and the finances of the estate she has recently aquired.

What follows is an OUTLINE of what happens. If you don't think the writing is very good that's because it's NOT, but it's the general idea and you really just have to start somewhere, don't you.


By the time Marlow visited, I had pneumonia. The winter outside was violent, but it was nothing compared to what was inside my house, inside my body. My fever bounced up and down like the flight path of a hawk over water and my ribs buckled under the gale force strength of wracking coughing fits. It was all I could do to lie in my bed, first burning, then ice, and drink from a glass of water on the nightstand, which, once empty, remained so until I could summon what felt like inhuman reserves of energy to walk to the bathroom sink to refill it.

It was this condition that Marlow found me in. At first he said nothing, but propped me up with an afghan and brought me a glass of near boiling water. Then he left, and returned a half hour later looking grim, and carrying with him a bottle of cough syrup, twelve cans of soup, a box of Tylenol, and six boxes of lemon tea. After heating up one of the cans, he sat next on the edge of the bed and fed me the broth, spoonful by spoonful. Any other time I would never have allowed such an activity to go on but now, barely aware of what was going on, I let him hover over me, as one would over a wounded animal.

“I’m going to tell you a story now,” he said, after some time. “Don’t interrupt me. Don’t speak. Just listen to me.” At that point I lay back down, exhausted to the point that even being fed was too much for me. I could feel the fever smoldering in my forehead, and I hard to grasp his words as they floated in and out of my head.

“When I was growing up, I went to school with a man named Edward Nolen. Since we were little kids. We never got along all that well, but you could say I knew him pretty good. As much as anyone could, anyway. Ed was a real Northerner, one of four sons from family that has been here forever. He was built like a tree, solid. It was like the man was made out of wood. He didn’t smile much, didn’t hardly say anything. He was blonde like his father, dark blonde, the kind that looks gray. He dropped out of school even before he was sixteen, but nobody bothered trying to change his mind because we’d all expected him to do it long before then. He started working with his father and some of his brothers as a boat detailer down at the docks. Apparently he had a real talent for it.
He was making a pretty decent living, and at a real young age, too. But then around the time he was twenty one or twenty two, he left town. He straight up disappeared. Nobody knew where to find him and we were pretty surprised, because nobody in his family had ever left the town like that. People talked, but nobody got the real story from his dad or his family, I geuss they figured it was a private affair, which it was.
Ed was gone a little more than a year, and I had stopped thinking about him completely. And then one day, in the middle of winter, he’s back. And the shocking thing is, he’s got a girl with him. Someone no one has ever met before. The two of them moved into a little house over on Jericho, and sort of hole up there for a week or so. And still no one’s talked to them. I remember I was at the post office and Mr. Nolen was in front of me, and the postlady behind the counter asked him about Ed’s return. She asked all brightly because it was good news, him coming home, and because she is always cheerful it seems. And I remember Mr. Nolen just nodded. I think he smiled, but he just nodded and took his mail and didn’t say anything, and then I stepped up and the post lady looked at me and raised her eyebrows, but I pretended that I hadn’t heard anything. Because I didn’t really care one way or another, why he was home. Like I told you, I had stopped thinking about Ed altogether.
But then, only a few days after that, Ed goes and gets married. They got married in the Congregationalist church and most of the town came out to see it. The whole church was packed with Ed’s people, his family and all of us, I don’t think his bride had one familiar face in the whole church. I mean besides Ed.
Caroline. That was her name. I still don’t know anything about her, but I remember what she looked like. Everybody does, I’m sure. She didn’t look a thing like the girls around here. She was somewhere far away and it showed. The woman looked just like a swan, I swear to heaven. I can’t describe it. She was beautiful though, in that wedding gown and her pale skin. She was very tall. She was nearly as tall as Ed.
Ed, he looked really happy at his wedding. Didn’t smile much, but you could tell anyway. Something had changed about him. He was gentle with her, the way he moved around her. He didn’t take his eye off her once. He was probably thinking, Jesus, how in hell did I manage to get this girl. That’s what we were all thinking.