First Lines
Papa’s Death and the Orphan Train
No matter how many times Horace told her different, Eliza knew her brother was wrong. The woman in the woods didn’t look the least bit dead. The woman in the woods looked beautiful. With her long flowing hair and a leaf-gold cape, she made Eliza think of an ancient Irish queen. Of course, the woman didn’t speak as she made her way along the trail. The woman was communing with her subjects, the dead and dying trees.
Sometimes Eliza suspected her brother’s heart was an ancient stone, rigid as a dead man’s body. “You don’t try hard enough to remember,” Horace accused whenever he caught her following the leaf-cape of the woman in the woods, “I think that’s why Mother still hasn’t come.”
The Journal
Necessary Fiction is a webjournal that publishes a new book review each Monday, a featured short story each Wednesday, a contribution to their Research Notes series each Friday.