Excerpt

To All the Horses I Have Loved Before is available for free on Kindle July 4th through the 8th. This is the unedited, unproofed version, likely to be the first edition. But if you want to read the book for FREE, check out Amazon Kindle: To All the Horses I Have Loved Before.

While waiting for my proofs to arrive next Monday, which is forever, I am working on another book of short stories, tentatively called Me and Tubby. Here is a brief excerpt of what I have so far:

The pipe bowl holds a lot more tobacco than I would think.  Tubby is taking forever to pack it tightly and fully.  Looks like it takes more effort too, but he’s not a regular pipe smoker, so he doesn’t have the moves down yet.  A quarter of an inch at a time, the tobacco is packed tightly into the bowl.

            Tubby picks up the pipe and puts the stem in his mouth.  He lights a match and holds it over the tobacco.  It sure takes a lot of suction to get a pipe started.  No wonder Mom and Dad smoke cigarettes.  Tubby is using up half the book of matches to keep it lit, and he’s starting to get out of breath sucking on the stem.  Finally, it looks like the pipe is lit.

            cough gasp cough Tubby holds the pipe towards me as he enjoys the lungful of tobacco smoke.  “Here,” he says, holding the pipe and shaking his arm at me.  Tubby’s voice sounds odd, slightly higher pitched.  But he did have to put in a lot of effort to light the pipe.

            I take the pipe, wiping the stem off with the bottom of my dirty T-shirt. Germs are germs. Yuck.  My entire lifetime up to this moment has been around smokers.  I have at least five years of studying how to smoke properly.  I put the pipe in my mouth and suck in with all my effort.

            The smoke hits my lungs like the icy winds of hell, and with ice picks it begins to chisel holes.  IT BURNS.  I feel my soul leaving my body to escape the waves of nausea incoming to possess me.  Tears are running down my cheeks as I manage to gag and cough simultaneously.

Fortunately, I am one drag of the pipe short of loosening my bowels. 

            “Are you okay?”  Tubby appears genuinely concerned.  Of course he is concerned; the traitor.  Now that he has succeeded in killing me off, he forgot to think of an alibi.  

            The nicotine hits my nervous system like a sledgehammer.  My fingertips are numb yet aching.  I can feel the burn from the smoke choking each individual hair on my head.  My brain is spinning in circles faster than a Tilt-A-Whirl.