This is not horror, but I want to share it just to show the beauty of the voice, the power of understatement and concision, and another fine example of Hemingway’s “iceberg principle”.
Grace is floating beside me, her eyes closed and her hair flowing out as silent and as weightless as the dark meadows of kelp all around us. She is smiling. The sun is still fierce, and it paints her lips the color of strawberry ice cream. We talk of plucking mussels from jagged rocks and steaming them in a tin pot over a driftwood fire. The doctor’s words are a fable from a land already forgotten. Her eyes flutter open. Let’s never go home, she says. We won’t, I say, and in that unending sea I hold her.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 