The God of Endings Sneak Peek by Jacqueline Holland

Author:Jacqueline Holland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

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THE LIGHT OF THE RISING sun slants through the long row of windows, glazing the tops of the four low, hexagonal tables, and my shadow, backlit and severe, slashes through the light like dark fingers, as I walk from one table to another, setting out paper for coloring and refilling the buckets of pastels in the center of each one. Outside, it’s unseasonably cold, but inside, the classroom is overwarm as the antique yet ever-zealous radiators sputter and hiss along the walls and Marnie’s morning glory muffins rise in the kitchen down the hall, filling the air with spice. In one corner of the room, an antique washbasin is filled with disparate scrap metal parts: the complex innards of broken clocks and radios, coils of wire, nubby screws, and Phillips-head screwdrivers enough to go around. Small and odd but uniformly delightful works of metal art sit on a shelf above the tub. In another corner, bolts of loose-weave fabric, large, blunt-tipped sewing needles, and spools of colorful thread are strewn across a table. Beside the table, costumes for dramatic play—tiny doctor’s coats, carefully ripped pirate shirts, hats and shoes of every size and shape, as well as some of the children’s own creations—spill from a wooden trunk where one of the house cats, Myrrh, lies on her side and bats at the knotted tassels of a scarf. A Mozart concerto—the music of optimal cognitive function—hangs in the gold-lit air. With the exception of myself, everything is queued up and ready for learning.

It’s not been forty-eight hours since I last ate, and yet my stomach rumbles with my every movement like a push mower, and my thoughts all come around to blood. It’s a nuisance I have no time for; the children will arrive any minute. I step across the rug, where the children will soon sit cross-legged for circle time, and reset the daily schedule that parses out the day’s activities into bars of construction paper neatly labeled in French. Nap time for the children—sieste, as it is in French—is feed time for me. Six colorful bars separate this insistent hunger from its relief.

A minute or two later, the doorbell rings, and I make my way down the hall. It will be either Thomas and Ramona, a brother and sister who arrive early each morning to accommodate their parents’ commute to Bridgeport, or Rina, the office assistant I brought on last year. Marnie, the sweet and blowsy older woman who prepares meals for the school, has her own key and lets herself in and out through the back kitchen door.

The house is huge, a three-story labyrinth of rough-hewn stone, and it takes me a minute to get from the back of it to the front. It’s my grandfather’s house, the same house I was brought to as a child. In that parlor right there beside the stairs, I lay dead in a coffin elegantly staged among white lilies and wavering candles. It must have been about a mile out back, past the creek, where I was buried.

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