Below is an excerpt from the new novel The Danbury Chronicles, available for purchase by clicking here. Meet the author this Saturday, November 1 at 5 p.m. at Books & Books in Coral Gables at 265 Aragon Ave.
Three weeks of cold clear weather denied Danbury Avenue the blanket of snow needed to mask its flaws. (Polar air from artic Canada occupied the neighborhood and ignored all pleas to withdraw.) Dog turds, frozen hard as coal, peppered the sidewalk’s edge tracking the routes of the street’s free-range canines. Frosted lawns, pocked by ice coated weed-stalk (gnarls thick with burrs, frozen, thawed, and frozen again), bent earthward with the lurid curves of hand-blown glass. Tarnished leaves, dropped months before, gathered in icy clusters at the base of old maple trees occupying narrow swales between sidewalk and street. Their harried trunks (scarred by car bumpers, wayward mowers, and children’s knives) encouraged arthritic branches skyward, straining as if to pull up out of that place. Water frozen slick in sidewalk cracks and crevasses (where the maples’ roots heaved the walkways ajar) awaited an ambler’s misstep, sending them, as the denizens said, ass over teakettle to great pain and grand hilarity.
Adjacent and across the street’s asphalt strip, three story wood frame houses lined the block. Driveway house. Driveway house. Except 73 Danbury. The site of a decade earlier midsummer fire, the empty lot served as a reminder to the Danbury crowd of life’s vagaries – as if they needed another. The houses, most clad in cracked, peeling, and faded paints of gray and brown and blue, all had matching flats upstairs and down: two bedrooms, one bath, living room, dining room, kitchen. Some bore effusions of earlier owners’ optimism: gingerbread trim, faux fieldstone cladding, roof top dormers, and one widow’s walk. At the back end of narrow driveways, some had garages and some tiny, single-story cottages. The cottages weren’t bad for a lone man or woman, maybe a couple – possibly a family if money was a fantasy known only to others.
Patrick Barry and his reflection studied each other in the storm door’s window at 49 Danbury’s side entrance. Hands gathering warmth in his pea coat’s lined pockets, Patrick stood in the driveway, his exhales steaming where warm breath met glacial air. His reflection lingered in the glass. Frost edged the window, framing a fun house mirror. The visual echo revealed a distorted twin. In the pane, Patrick’s red wool cap, its brim rolled once over his ears, widened and swelled outside the window’s frame. The tiny pom-pom topping the cap appeared the size of a softball. In the middle of his forehead, a thick tongue of brown hair escaped the cap and curled up toward the brim. His eyes narrowed to slits; snot-slick nostrils shrank to tiny dots. His mouth and cheeks disappeared in a needle-pointed chin. If he lifted his chin, the window rendered his red cap miniscule. His eyes emerged as depthless brown ponds; his nose, speckled with reddish freckles above runny nostrils, rivaled Rushmore in scope; his mouth, with its gapped front teeth and offset incisors, grew large enough to swallow a world. He grinned at his reflection. It grinned back. They shared a secret: the world could be seen in more ways than one, maybe more than two.
“Cold again today,” Patrick exhaled a long cloud of warm breath into the air.
“No shit Sherlock.” replied his reflection. “See that frost around the window. That’s a fucking clue.”
“I was just saying…”
“Yeah, like usual, you were ‘just saying’ THE FUCKING OBVIOUS.”
“I say it because you don’t feel cold.”
“Shut up. I feel cold.”
“Bet you don’t feel anything.”
“I feel. Just like you.”
“You don’t.”
“I do, SPAZZ BOY.”
“Prove it.”
“Take our hands out of our pockets.”
“It’s too cold.”
“Wouldn’t be if you didn’t lose our gloves.”
“Our? How about my gloves. My hands. My pockets.”
“Haven’t you figured out what’s yours is mine?”
“Okay. You take our hands out of our pockets.”
“If I did, I’d punch you RIGHT IN THE BEEZER.”
Patrick leaned closer to the glass. “Here. Go ahead.”
“FUCK YOU.”
“You curse way too much.”
“Too much?”
“Yes. Too much.”
“Really? FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK YOOOUUUU.”
Patrick shook his head. “If anyone hears you, they’ll think it’s me.”
“Boo-hoo, crybaby. Nobody hears me but you. Get over it.”
