Read the opening pages of the novel I'm presently working on. 

Feel free to e-mail your thoughts after you've read.

Seasons   by Anjuelle Floyd

Chapter I

Sahel breathed in the September night air of Indian summer as Titus helped her out of the car. Again coached herself, “Hang in there.”  Within minutes they’d be inside the ballroom and she sitting to their table.
Titus closed her car door, and pressed the button on his key chain engaging the lock. While parking valets up ahead received late arrivals. Titus had found an open space on Porter. “The temple’s just up this way,” he placed her hand to his upper arm and they started forward.
Sahel nodded, ‘okay,’ stomach churning,
Carefully she followed his lead into the flow of others attending the event at the Masonic Ballroom at the corner of Porter and Fourth. 
“Are you alright?” he asked as they walked along, and from
Honestly? This was no time for truths. “I’m fine.”
“No you’re not.”  A voice emerged rose against the muffled sound of ladies’ heels and platforms accompanied by men in what Sahel knew were black tuxedos same as Titus.
Sahel again tried to smile. You’re not fine.” The voice remained.  “You don’t want to be here. 
Sahel brushed aside the thoughts as she and Titus continued amid the line of couples up Porter and toward the ballroom.


    Minutes later and sitting to the table Titus had reserved for them, and their six
guests, Sahel clasped her hands. “What had she heard?  Her thoughts had never been that loud, that resounding and adamant.
     A myriad of sounds swirled about her—people discussing their lives, those of their children, husbands, mothers and sons.  Sahel had heard endless bits of conversations on the way inside.  A long journey, it had reminded her of how stunted her life had become since the accident. And then there was the voice, so close and honest.
She had heard voices after taking the pills. Spirits, Sahel had called them—hers and her mother’s then deceased.  There had been another.  Faint memories of their presence sometimes came to her—when she was scared or angry—but never with any words. Why now? Why this evening.
A psychologist who at one time held a vigorous practice of eclectic clients from over the globe, Sahel pondered what lay in her future. What would become of her life, now that she had lost her sight, had closed her practice. The accident had occurred two years ago and Sahel remained stuck. Except for the whispers of self-recriminations familiar since childhood, Sahel lingered in a purgatorial state of ambivalence. Accept her blindness and move forward. Or undergo the surgery that might return her sight.  But that came with risks.  The surgery might fail. Sahel could die. Worse yet, she could be rendered brain dead. The stakes were high, the consequences even more so.
Carried away in the infinite ruminations of the moment she wondered why she’d ever come back after taking the pills.  A year ago on a sunny afternoon, Sahel had lost her way; she had drifted across the great divide unsure if she’d wanted to return.  Titus and Carl had pulled her home.  In the minutes during which she lingered—between life and death—Sahel had felt a presence. The spirit of her mother had been there. And another.  She had felt its warmth, received its courage and strength.  The presence had nurtured and stoked her decision to go home, return to life.
For what? Sahel now wondered again.   Sahel cringed at the thought of her weakness and vulnerabilities. Unable to live, unable to die. A dark, brown burden, like her life, and all she had been to her mother.
Reaching across her chest she gripped each of her arms, and tried imagining Titus receiving his award. Sahel then willed herself to remain present and afloat within the river of anxieties concerning what she’d do when the food came and people at their table spoke to, or around her. She hadn’t been to anything similar to this since before the accident two and half years earlier.  Sahel now rarely left home.  For obligatory events, Titus always went alone, paid his respects, and returned home as soon as he could.
But tonight was different.  He was being feted.
I’ve got to get through the evening.  I owe him that much. 
    A hand lightly touched her shoulder.
    “Sahel.  It’s Clarissa Murdoch.  I don’t know if you remember me, but…”
    The pendulum of Sahel’s heart swung back and forth. The dialogue in her head edged toward silence.  Carefully, she turned towards the voice, extended her hand into the darkness, and formed a smile.  She remembered. ...