After my nonfiction primary science reader, 'Firenadoes', and my short novel for international students, 'Caught in the Fire', my full-length Young Adult novel is out with agents and publishers. As I write, wildfires burn out of control in California. My novel, 'The Storm-chasers' Daughter' begins just after the Paradise fire in 2018. Here's the opening....
If you're an agent or publisher, who is interested - please get in touch.
The Storm-chasers' Daughter
CHAPTER 1 PARADISE
There was nothing left. Nothing living at least. Ahead of her, the road snaked up into the town. Her nostrils were pinched by the acrid smell of smoke that still curled and hovered above the charred and melted tarmac.
13 Lilac Drive. She remembered the address even though the phone it had been stored on was at the bottom of the lake. '13' had stuck because, well, it’s plain unlucky, and by any stretch of the imagination luck - good or bad - had been a factor in the last 24 hours. And lilac. That was her mother's thing, knowing stuff about plants and herbs and flowers. Hippy stuff, you could say. She remembered a teacher at one of the many schools she'd attended asked her once to draw a still life - some flowers in a jug of dirty water. Leila had shown it to her mother (it wasn't bad, all things considered) but she just gave it a casual glance and asked her if she knew what the flowers were. Did this mean her mother thought it was a bad illustration? Or had she been testing her in some way, with that tendency her mother had to correct or probe for weakness? 'Lilacs, I think,' she'd replied, shyly.
'Lilacs, huh? I guess they kinda look like them, Leila.' Her mother shrugged. 'Not bad. Lilacs by Leila. Hey – sounds like a perfume.’ Her mother pushed the paper to one side and rolled another cigarette. Was she going to say anything else, Leila wondered? Leila loitered and then reached to pick the paper up. Her mother turned and dragged on the cigarette. ‘But you know what those pretty little petals represent, don’t you?' Leila didn't. 'They mean death, honey. Victorian widows held them at funerals - for memory’s sake. If you ever catch me with one it means daddy's dead!'
Her mother had given her habitual crackle of a laugh, then turned away. Leila was left to stare at the back of her head and her wild, slightly greying hair, like the wisps of smoke that curled around the trailer they’d been living in at the time.
There had been no offer to stick her picture to a cupboard door or on the portable fridge. Isn’t that what parents were meant to do? Later, Leila had done her own check: her mother had been right in her own way. But the flowers were also a symbol of Spring – and of love, old or new. Now, as she stood facing the dead town, something occurred to her for the first time. Her mother could have told her the lilacs represented love, but she hadn’t. She’d chosen death.
Leila still had to find it - 13 Lilac Drive. Ahead, about fifty feet away, a pick-up truck just like her parents’ own, sat sprawled across the tarmac. Its metal was twisted into a grotesque black monster, its windscreen caved in. Beyond it, other cars and trucks were scattered in zigzag lines up the road or had been flung off at angles into the narrow ditches. They were blackened shells, their drivers and passengers long gone.
Then, from behind her she heard the sudden squeal of a police siren. She turned to see a car lurch up the hill and come to a halt. A door was flung open and a burly man got out.
‘Hey, missy – you need to come away from there!’
Sweat prickled on his forehead, and he wiped one side of it with the sleeve of his shirt.
Leila ignored him and turned back towards the line of cars. She began to walk steadily up the road, sticking to the centre of it as if it would provide a fixed point to anchor the churning in her stomach. Her clothes were lacquered with sweat and the grime of the lake, but she paid them no attention.
‘Hey!’ the police-officer shouted again. Leila glanced back. He seemed to hesitate, reluctant to leave his patrol-car. Then she saw him reach inside and pull out a walkie-talkie. He began to bark words into it. Leila turned away, and by the time she heard his door slam and his heavy steps slogging up the road, she had already reached the pick-up truck. Now, for the moment of truth. Was it her parents'?
Copyright Mike Gould, 2024
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