Floating Twigs by Charles Tabb

FIRST CHAPTER:
I had known the day would come when circumstances forced my return to Denton, Florida, where I grew up. My parents had died before I finished high school, but another funeral brought me here now.

The Denton of my childhood reminded me of an old man, settled and unchanging. However, on that sunny day back in 1990 as I drove across the bridge that spanned the inlet between Denton Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, I looked over the expance of emerald-green water to the harbor that lay protected by Sugar Isle, a long barrier island of sugar-white sand. Instead of a harbor filled with fishing boats lazily dotting the landscape, a waterfront teeming with jet-skis and noise greeted me. New boat dogs grew and twisted out of the adjoining land like cancerous groths. Beside the more expensive boats that had invaded the harbor, the older fishing oalts looked like improverished cousins. Seventeen years had scarred the town.

TEASER: 
The next day I spent time with Bones, sneaking leftovers out to him from the kitchen and letting him get to know me. I ended up giving him bread and some gravy that had been in the refrigerator for a few days, along with some baloney and stale rice. It wasn’t much of a meal, but he ate it the way he had everything else – in huge gulps.

Hosted by Yvonne 
It’s Tuesday! It’s time to share your excerpts and teasers from books we are currently reading, have read or are planning to read. So, feel free to join us by sharing the first paragraph or (a few) of a book you are reading or thinking about reading soon. This meme is guaranteed to increase your TBR

How the Penguins Saved Veronica by Hazel Prior

1
Veronica

The Ballahays
Ayrshire, Scotland
May 2012

I have told Eileen to get rid of all the mirrors. I used to like them, but I certainly don’t now. Mirrors are too honest. There is only so much truth a woman can take.

Hosted @ Socrates’ Book Reviews

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me by Bess Kalb

Prologue

I could tell this girl she’d marry the love of her life in a year. She’d leave the tenement in Brooklyn and see Cairo and Tuscany and China and Switzerland and Greese and Gaza and Paris- Paris more times than she could count. She’d visit her mother’s village in Belarus (the part of Russia), the village her mother fled when she was thirteen years old, and that night she’d order a Kir Royale at the hotel bar. She’d have two worshipful sons and one daughter.

Killer Cruise: A Humorous Cruise Ship Cozy Mystery by A.R. Winters
(Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries Book 1)

Chapter 1
It was with pride and barely concealed excitement that I walked down one of the below-deck hallways of the Swan Of The Seas after collecting the tools of my new trade: a smartphone and a notebook computer and a notebook computer.

Tucked under my arm were the two ugly blue bloused I’d been issued that make up the entirety of my uniform. Because of my unique role, which would see me scurrying back and forth across the entire ship, I was exempt from wearing dress pant or a skirt and was permitted to wear jeans.

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

Chapter One

A Door Opens

Melvin Butler, the personnel officer at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, had a problem, the scope and nature of which was made plain in a May 1943 telegram to the civil service’s chief of field operations. “This establishment has urgent need for approximately 100 Junior Physicists and Mathematicians, 100 Assistant Computers, 75 Minor Laboratory Apprentices, 125 Helper Trainees, 50 Stenographers and Typists,” exclaimed the missive. Every morning at 7:00 a.m., the bow-tied Butler and his staff sprang to life, dispatching the lab’s station wagon to the local rail depot, the bus station, and the ferry terminal to collect the men and woman-so many women now, each day more women-who had made their way to the lonely finger of land on the Virginia coast. The shuttle conveyed the recruits to the door of the laboratory’s service building on the campus of Langley Field. Upstairs, Butler’s staff whisked them through the first-day stations: forms, photos, and the oath of office: I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…so help me God.

Forever and Ever, Amen:
A Memoir of Music, Faith, and Braving the Storms of Life by Randy Travis

1: Pull The Plug

It was a sound I had become much too familiar with- the constant whirr of the machine that was keeping my collapsed lungs breathing, the incessant beep, beep, beep sound of the heart monitor. This was the soundtrack to the constant swirl of pensive doctors and nurses flitting in and out of my hospital room, poking one of my arms and then the other, taking more blood, running another test.

You should always be careful what you say in a hospital room when a patient is unconscious or in a come. Don’t ever utter a negative statement about his or her condition because the person in the coma might well be able to hear you.

I know this is true. Because when I was in that state someone said the unthinkable.

“He’s not going to make it.”
“Maybe it’s time to discontinue life support.”
“He can’t survive this.”
“It’s time to pull the plug.”