A free story · Brazier House Publishing
A Tale Told in the Appalachian Tradition.
East Tennessee, July 1926. A folk horror story for grown readers, a FREE GIFT to our followers.
A stranger arrives who was never invited and stays longer than good company would warrant. People have been telling that story on these porches for two hundred years, mostly in summer, mostly to children old enough to be unsettled by it.
This one is set in July of 1926 and it happens entirely in the bright light of day. Nothing jumps out at anybody. There is no blood in it. There is a hayfield, a boy doing a grown man’s work by himself, and a conversation at a fence that runs a good while longer than it ought to.
Two people, one field, one afternoon. You will think you know them both by the end.
The mule was standing at the tree line.
It was white, which there was nothing wrong with, and it was standing broadside to him at the top of the field where the fescue ran into the trees, a young john, heavy through the chest, and it was not grazing.
A girl sat on it with both legs to one side and her hands in her lap. Her dress was thin cotton and the light came through the hem of it where it hung below the mule’s shoulder. She was not doing anything at all. She was not calling out, or riding on, or minding her seat.
Levi looked at the ground and then looked back, as a person does when he has seen something that was not there a minute ago.
She was still there, and she had been there long enough to have settled.
That is how she arrives. The rest runs about eight thousand words, and it is yours for an email address — ePub and PDF in the same message, so it opens on whatever you read on.
As for your email, it goes on a short list I write to a few times a year. New books before anybody else, which is not a figure of speech: the hundred and seventeen numbered copies of the Tidewrack Founders Edition was announced first to this list and nowhere else. Now and then something worth owning. And where I will be reading. That is the whole of it. One click takes you off, and the list is never sold or handed to anyone.
You will receive the full short story right away. After that I write a few letters a year, when there is a new book or when the research turns up something worth passing on. One click unsubscribes, and the list is never shared or sold.
DG Brashears writes from the hills above Jonesborough, Tennessee. His first novel, Tidewrack: The Unsettling at Roanoke, follows the colonists who vanished from the Outer Banks in 1587 and the mapmaker who spent three years trying to get back to them. Subscribers hear about it first.