The Texture of Glass by Ella M. Kaye
Rated 16+
©2018. All Rights Reserved.
Following is a Pre-Release, Unedited Excerpt. Content may change during edits. Do not copy.
Rated 16+
©2018. All Rights Reserved.
Following is a Pre-Release, Unedited Excerpt. Content may change during edits. Do not copy.
Catching a glimpse of color from within the light brown damp sand of the lakeshore, Isabel crouched and dug carefully with her fingers. Not glass. Plastic. A toy. A small pink troll with a silly grin plastered forever on its face. She wondered if the little girl who lost it cried over its loss or quickly forgot in favor of other things.
What should she do with it? Rebury it and let some other kid have the fun of finding it? Maybe. But maybe the girl would come back for it. She could simply leave it lie on top of the sand, but it seemed wrong, for some reason, so she decided to make the little thing a castle to help her be found.
How long had it been since she’d made a sand castle? These days, Isabel came to Presque Isle simply to walk along one of the beaches or one of the trails. It was her escape. It let her head and soul unwind.
And often, it inspired a song or at least a line or two of a song.
Today, it was not relaxing. It was not bringing words or music from anywhere within. She hadn’t found even a small bit of sea glass. Today, she got nothing but a troll.
So be it.
Tucking the thing in her pocket so it wouldn’t get lost again, Isabel dropped her sandals and moved closer to the water where the sand had more moisture. She had no bucket to haul the sand or water up farther onto shore as she did as a child, so she positioned herself at the edge of where it was wet enough to work with and the dryer sand where the castle would be safe longer.
It was slow going without a bucket. Still, she had all day if she wanted. No one was waiting on her. She had nowhere to be, since she’d run her errands the day before, always on Saturday to get it out of the way. Work was tomorrow. Today was her own. If she wanted to stay and build a sand castle, she could take as long as she needed.
Her shoulders felt the heat of the late midday sun and her legs felt the work of crouching, standing, bending by the time she had a decent castle made, complete with a turret to stand little pink troll on top of so she could look out in wait for her ... owner. At least it was just a piece of plastic. Replaceable. Unlike...
Telling herself not to go there, Isabel took the little troll from her pocket and gently nudged her into the sand of the turret, leaning against it for support, looking out. And then she changed her mind and turned it away. The little thing would be annoyed about being left behind, wouldn’t it? As though not important enough to remember or to be looked for? It should have its back turned.
With a deep sigh, Isabel took a few steps backward, pulled her phone from her bag, and snapped a photo of the little troll with Lake Erie in the background. Maybe she’d post it to a local wanted and found page. Chances were good, though, that it would be found and taken by then, or the waves would come in and claim it.
Because she hated to see it with its back turned, Isabel went to fix it so little pink troll was again looking forward, hoping...
Letting the thought go, she grabbed her sandals to carry the direction she’d come. As she did, she kept her eyes down, watching for any glimmer that might turn out to be a bit of sea glass. By now, there wasn’t much hope of finding it. Tourist season had already set and the pastel shades of water-smoothed glass had already been largely picked up, either by a curious child or a collector. It was getting much harder to find these days since sea glass had lately became the in thing. Still, it was always possible to run across a piece.
The clear glass vase she’d been dropping them in was two-thirds full from the past few years of searching, and running across them while not searching. She had no plans for them yet. After finding the first one, it became an obsession. For her, it was the mystery of where they had come from, of how long they’d been at the bottom of the lake or swirled along strong currents, of what it had been before. There was also the simple beauty of each piece.
Her roommate laughed at her obsession. “They’re just from broken glass, you know, from people throwing beer bottles overboard. What’s the big deal?”
“Beer bottles aren’t pale blue or pink,” Isabel countered. “How do you explain these?” She’d pulled a few pieces out of her vase.
Lisbon shrugged as she braided her silky dark hair down her back. “Wine bottle. Whatever. It’s just glass, Iz.”
Lisbon Garcia, named after the Portuguese capital city, was the only friend Isabel had kept from her school days. They looked about as different as they could, with Isabel’s strongly Irish heritage and Libs’ Portuguese heritage, but Libs had asked about Isabel’s Spanish-spelled name one day when she didn’t look Spanish, and somehow, that led to a so-far life-long connection.
“Maybe. But it’s beautiful.” She’d shaken off the laughter. It was friendly laughter, no harm meant. Isabel loved how easily her friend laughed. And she understood the point. She did. She didn’t even know why she was obsessed with the search. She just was.
A shine caught her eye and Isabel crouched to pick it up out of the sand. Glass, but not smooth. Dark green. A piece of broken bottle. Beer bottle. Maybe the color faded over time. Maybe the water changed the color. Maybe this piece would be worth collecting some day after it had time to be sanded and smoothed and faded.
Bracing herself in the sand that shifted under her bare feet, she threw the piece as far as she could out into the water, which wasn’t very far since she’d never had any arm strength. Then she wondered if she should have. What if it hit a fish? Not likely, she guessed. The smack of the small piece against the surface of the water would slow it down and it would drift slowly into the depth. Any self-respecting fish would be able to move away from it.
Continuing down the shoreline, Isabel watched for glass, but also for sharp rocks to avoid since she was leaving the sandier part of the beach. Most of the rocks weren’t sharp. Most had been in or along the water too long to still be sharp. The lake smoothed everything away, even broken hearts after a while, if you gave it enough time.
With enough time, it would. Once she filled her jar, Isabel would tell herself it had been enough time. She would let him go. She would stop expecting the phone call that hadn’t come in two years, the one she knew wouldn’t come but still could. Two-thirds. She had only a third of the jar left, and then she’d forget him.
When some girl looked at her funny, Isabel realized she was humming again, a song she was working on, her other obsession. About getting over him. Most of what she wrote was about him, sadly. Isabel stopped playing her songs for her mother because she was tired of hearing, “Him again, Izzy? Let it go, already. He wasn’t worth it then, and he’s not worth it now, either.”
Easy for her mom to say. Jocelyn Dillon met the man of her dreams at eighteen, became Josie Dillon-Sanderson at nineteen, and had Isabel at twenty. Everything perfectly in order, like everything in her mother’s life. Nothing got to her. Nothing distracted her from her goals.
Completely unlike Isabel who was distracted by everything and was always meandering through shifting sand. She’d have to wonder if they were even related except for their nearly twin-like looks. Along with the same facial structure, too-narrow eyes, and too-long nose, their hair was the same shade of mousy ashy light brown. Except her mom had red tints; in sunlight the red was nearly like fire burning along the edges of her head. Isabel was lacking even that much vibrancy. She was dull, inside, outside. Dull. The word he had used when he left. “You’re just too ... too dull, Izzy. I kept waiting for you to pop out of that gray shell, and I know it’s in you, but you won’t let it out. If you’d let me in more, I could help you, you know, but since you won’t and I’m tired of trying, I have to give up. Sorry.”
“Sorry.” The jerk actually said Sorry like, Yeah, no big deal. Five years of dating and your only real boyfriend. Let you think it was going to be forever. But hey, see ya ’round.
And she knew exactly what he meant by wouldn’t let him in. He meant it physically, even if he was trying to make it sound like more than that. She couldn’t do it. The risk was too high. He hadn’t committed enough. What choice did she have but to stay inside herself when she had to try so hard not to repeat her mistakes?
Her mother did not understand. She couldn’t. Jocelyn Dillon-Sanderson – who went by Josie as a kid because she hated the name Jocelyn and yet now only went by Jocelyn so she would be taken seriously – so often talked about a boy who broke her heart before Isabel’s father, but only for two days, and that was enough grieving time. If she hadn’t let go and moved along, she wouldn’t have given Isabel’s father the time of day when they met and then Izzy wouldn’t be there. Think about what you might be missing, Isabel. It’s not worth it.
What she might be missing? Like the way her mother these days only put up with her father because they were married and for no other reason? Why would she want that? Isabel had even dropped the second part of her formerly hyphenated last name that used to match her mother’s so she was now Isabel Dillon. To her, it represented her grandparents, and especially her grandfather. It was one of the first things she’d done when she moved out at eighteen, first to her grandparents’ place in Pittsburgh, and then in with Libs at the place her friend found in Meadville. A cheap place, and barely affordable for the two girls starting out in their jobs, but workable. And away from her parents. Away from a past she was still trying to outrun.
It wasn’t a pretty past, but it made for good songs, even if no one but those who dropped in on open mic nights in the area would ever hear them.
Music wasn’t as fickle as love. It was fickle, but not as fickle as love, not that she’d found. The last one was strike three. At only 25, Isabel already had three big heart-breakers, even though she’d only officially dated one of them. You give your heart too easily, her mother said. Her grandmother tended to agree, even if she was a fellow songwriter, Isabel’s greatest muse. Her grandfather, though, he understood her. He wasn’t even her biological grandfather, but they were so much more alike than she and her mother.
Jocelyn/Josie was five when her mother, Melodee Lerner, met Niall Dillon at a park in Pittsburgh where Meladee had gone to escape from Josie’s sperm donor, as she called him, but Josie loved her adoptive father as much as she loved anyone. So did Isabel. She loved her grandfather more than anyone else in the world, if she was honest with herself. But then, Papa Niall understood her and supported her and told her to take whatever time she wanted and needed and not to let anyone tell her she was wrong, while her mother only lectured and her grandmother tried not to be in the middle.
She wanted and needed... The phrase struck her and Isabel repeated it within the melody she’d been humming. Wanted and needed and no one could tell her/ she loved him and... she loved and adored him and no one could tell her/ he wouldn’t stay long/he wouldn’t be ’round/when she wanted and needed his strength and his ... needed his need of her...
His need of her. Wanted his need of her. He had needed her.
Isabel stopped wandering through the damp sand and stared out at the restless waves, the constantly moving and mixing and churning water that drew her to the lake so often. She didn’t come for the glass, not really. She came for the lake. The crying seagulls.
She wanted his need of her.
Isabel frowned at the thought. He had needed her. He had. Deeply. Like no one else in the world. Is that all it was? Not love, but the feeling of being so desperately needed? She’d spent much of her childhood alone while her father worked more than full time and her mother did her part time paycheck job and her groups and societies. The organizer everyone needed. Isabel was her only child because Jocelyn Dillon-Sanderson wanted no more than one. She had other things to do, obviously more important things than her own daughter.
Isabel had found plenty of activities to fill her time, some of which ended in suspension from school and grounding at home. It was nothing horrible. She’d never hurt anyone. Her mother only gave her that look and then added to her chores to keep her too busy for trouble, so she said. It was hard to enforce grounding, though, when no one was home to see whether she stayed home. Eventually, her mother realized she wasn’t staying home, that she was wandering Pittsburgh instead, sometimes alone, sometimes with other unwatched teens, and then she got sent to her grandparents after school.
It was her grandfather who bought her a guitar. “Here. Focus that energy on something productive,” he’d said with a wink. Isabel wouldn’t have been able to sneak out of her grandparents’ house if she’d tried. He always knew what she was doing. He always paid attention.
Repeating the lines along with the melody that had needed words for some time, Isabel found herself singing aloud as she walked the shoreline despite people stopping to stare. She didn’t care if they did. Maybe it would help more than open mic nights to sing out and about where people didn’t expect it.
[The prequel novella to The Texture of Glass was part of the Music of the Heart anthology by Fire Star Press, an imprint of Prairie Rose Publications. To read more about Meladee and Niall, find A Melody in the Dark within the Anthology, which features a story per decade from the 40s to the 80s, one story per author.
What should she do with it? Rebury it and let some other kid have the fun of finding it? Maybe. But maybe the girl would come back for it. She could simply leave it lie on top of the sand, but it seemed wrong, for some reason, so she decided to make the little thing a castle to help her be found.
How long had it been since she’d made a sand castle? These days, Isabel came to Presque Isle simply to walk along one of the beaches or one of the trails. It was her escape. It let her head and soul unwind.
And often, it inspired a song or at least a line or two of a song.
Today, it was not relaxing. It was not bringing words or music from anywhere within. She hadn’t found even a small bit of sea glass. Today, she got nothing but a troll.
So be it.
Tucking the thing in her pocket so it wouldn’t get lost again, Isabel dropped her sandals and moved closer to the water where the sand had more moisture. She had no bucket to haul the sand or water up farther onto shore as she did as a child, so she positioned herself at the edge of where it was wet enough to work with and the dryer sand where the castle would be safe longer.
It was slow going without a bucket. Still, she had all day if she wanted. No one was waiting on her. She had nowhere to be, since she’d run her errands the day before, always on Saturday to get it out of the way. Work was tomorrow. Today was her own. If she wanted to stay and build a sand castle, she could take as long as she needed.
Her shoulders felt the heat of the late midday sun and her legs felt the work of crouching, standing, bending by the time she had a decent castle made, complete with a turret to stand little pink troll on top of so she could look out in wait for her ... owner. At least it was just a piece of plastic. Replaceable. Unlike...
Telling herself not to go there, Isabel took the little troll from her pocket and gently nudged her into the sand of the turret, leaning against it for support, looking out. And then she changed her mind and turned it away. The little thing would be annoyed about being left behind, wouldn’t it? As though not important enough to remember or to be looked for? It should have its back turned.
With a deep sigh, Isabel took a few steps backward, pulled her phone from her bag, and snapped a photo of the little troll with Lake Erie in the background. Maybe she’d post it to a local wanted and found page. Chances were good, though, that it would be found and taken by then, or the waves would come in and claim it.
Because she hated to see it with its back turned, Isabel went to fix it so little pink troll was again looking forward, hoping...
Letting the thought go, she grabbed her sandals to carry the direction she’d come. As she did, she kept her eyes down, watching for any glimmer that might turn out to be a bit of sea glass. By now, there wasn’t much hope of finding it. Tourist season had already set and the pastel shades of water-smoothed glass had already been largely picked up, either by a curious child or a collector. It was getting much harder to find these days since sea glass had lately became the in thing. Still, it was always possible to run across a piece.
The clear glass vase she’d been dropping them in was two-thirds full from the past few years of searching, and running across them while not searching. She had no plans for them yet. After finding the first one, it became an obsession. For her, it was the mystery of where they had come from, of how long they’d been at the bottom of the lake or swirled along strong currents, of what it had been before. There was also the simple beauty of each piece.
Her roommate laughed at her obsession. “They’re just from broken glass, you know, from people throwing beer bottles overboard. What’s the big deal?”
“Beer bottles aren’t pale blue or pink,” Isabel countered. “How do you explain these?” She’d pulled a few pieces out of her vase.
Lisbon shrugged as she braided her silky dark hair down her back. “Wine bottle. Whatever. It’s just glass, Iz.”
Lisbon Garcia, named after the Portuguese capital city, was the only friend Isabel had kept from her school days. They looked about as different as they could, with Isabel’s strongly Irish heritage and Libs’ Portuguese heritage, but Libs had asked about Isabel’s Spanish-spelled name one day when she didn’t look Spanish, and somehow, that led to a so-far life-long connection.
“Maybe. But it’s beautiful.” She’d shaken off the laughter. It was friendly laughter, no harm meant. Isabel loved how easily her friend laughed. And she understood the point. She did. She didn’t even know why she was obsessed with the search. She just was.
A shine caught her eye and Isabel crouched to pick it up out of the sand. Glass, but not smooth. Dark green. A piece of broken bottle. Beer bottle. Maybe the color faded over time. Maybe the water changed the color. Maybe this piece would be worth collecting some day after it had time to be sanded and smoothed and faded.
Bracing herself in the sand that shifted under her bare feet, she threw the piece as far as she could out into the water, which wasn’t very far since she’d never had any arm strength. Then she wondered if she should have. What if it hit a fish? Not likely, she guessed. The smack of the small piece against the surface of the water would slow it down and it would drift slowly into the depth. Any self-respecting fish would be able to move away from it.
Continuing down the shoreline, Isabel watched for glass, but also for sharp rocks to avoid since she was leaving the sandier part of the beach. Most of the rocks weren’t sharp. Most had been in or along the water too long to still be sharp. The lake smoothed everything away, even broken hearts after a while, if you gave it enough time.
With enough time, it would. Once she filled her jar, Isabel would tell herself it had been enough time. She would let him go. She would stop expecting the phone call that hadn’t come in two years, the one she knew wouldn’t come but still could. Two-thirds. She had only a third of the jar left, and then she’d forget him.
When some girl looked at her funny, Isabel realized she was humming again, a song she was working on, her other obsession. About getting over him. Most of what she wrote was about him, sadly. Isabel stopped playing her songs for her mother because she was tired of hearing, “Him again, Izzy? Let it go, already. He wasn’t worth it then, and he’s not worth it now, either.”
Easy for her mom to say. Jocelyn Dillon met the man of her dreams at eighteen, became Josie Dillon-Sanderson at nineteen, and had Isabel at twenty. Everything perfectly in order, like everything in her mother’s life. Nothing got to her. Nothing distracted her from her goals.
Completely unlike Isabel who was distracted by everything and was always meandering through shifting sand. She’d have to wonder if they were even related except for their nearly twin-like looks. Along with the same facial structure, too-narrow eyes, and too-long nose, their hair was the same shade of mousy ashy light brown. Except her mom had red tints; in sunlight the red was nearly like fire burning along the edges of her head. Isabel was lacking even that much vibrancy. She was dull, inside, outside. Dull. The word he had used when he left. “You’re just too ... too dull, Izzy. I kept waiting for you to pop out of that gray shell, and I know it’s in you, but you won’t let it out. If you’d let me in more, I could help you, you know, but since you won’t and I’m tired of trying, I have to give up. Sorry.”
“Sorry.” The jerk actually said Sorry like, Yeah, no big deal. Five years of dating and your only real boyfriend. Let you think it was going to be forever. But hey, see ya ’round.
And she knew exactly what he meant by wouldn’t let him in. He meant it physically, even if he was trying to make it sound like more than that. She couldn’t do it. The risk was too high. He hadn’t committed enough. What choice did she have but to stay inside herself when she had to try so hard not to repeat her mistakes?
Her mother did not understand. She couldn’t. Jocelyn Dillon-Sanderson – who went by Josie as a kid because she hated the name Jocelyn and yet now only went by Jocelyn so she would be taken seriously – so often talked about a boy who broke her heart before Isabel’s father, but only for two days, and that was enough grieving time. If she hadn’t let go and moved along, she wouldn’t have given Isabel’s father the time of day when they met and then Izzy wouldn’t be there. Think about what you might be missing, Isabel. It’s not worth it.
What she might be missing? Like the way her mother these days only put up with her father because they were married and for no other reason? Why would she want that? Isabel had even dropped the second part of her formerly hyphenated last name that used to match her mother’s so she was now Isabel Dillon. To her, it represented her grandparents, and especially her grandfather. It was one of the first things she’d done when she moved out at eighteen, first to her grandparents’ place in Pittsburgh, and then in with Libs at the place her friend found in Meadville. A cheap place, and barely affordable for the two girls starting out in their jobs, but workable. And away from her parents. Away from a past she was still trying to outrun.
It wasn’t a pretty past, but it made for good songs, even if no one but those who dropped in on open mic nights in the area would ever hear them.
Music wasn’t as fickle as love. It was fickle, but not as fickle as love, not that she’d found. The last one was strike three. At only 25, Isabel already had three big heart-breakers, even though she’d only officially dated one of them. You give your heart too easily, her mother said. Her grandmother tended to agree, even if she was a fellow songwriter, Isabel’s greatest muse. Her grandfather, though, he understood her. He wasn’t even her biological grandfather, but they were so much more alike than she and her mother.
Jocelyn/Josie was five when her mother, Melodee Lerner, met Niall Dillon at a park in Pittsburgh where Meladee had gone to escape from Josie’s sperm donor, as she called him, but Josie loved her adoptive father as much as she loved anyone. So did Isabel. She loved her grandfather more than anyone else in the world, if she was honest with herself. But then, Papa Niall understood her and supported her and told her to take whatever time she wanted and needed and not to let anyone tell her she was wrong, while her mother only lectured and her grandmother tried not to be in the middle.
She wanted and needed... The phrase struck her and Isabel repeated it within the melody she’d been humming. Wanted and needed and no one could tell her/ she loved him and... she loved and adored him and no one could tell her/ he wouldn’t stay long/he wouldn’t be ’round/when she wanted and needed his strength and his ... needed his need of her...
His need of her. Wanted his need of her. He had needed her.
Isabel stopped wandering through the damp sand and stared out at the restless waves, the constantly moving and mixing and churning water that drew her to the lake so often. She didn’t come for the glass, not really. She came for the lake. The crying seagulls.
She wanted his need of her.
Isabel frowned at the thought. He had needed her. He had. Deeply. Like no one else in the world. Is that all it was? Not love, but the feeling of being so desperately needed? She’d spent much of her childhood alone while her father worked more than full time and her mother did her part time paycheck job and her groups and societies. The organizer everyone needed. Isabel was her only child because Jocelyn Dillon-Sanderson wanted no more than one. She had other things to do, obviously more important things than her own daughter.
Isabel had found plenty of activities to fill her time, some of which ended in suspension from school and grounding at home. It was nothing horrible. She’d never hurt anyone. Her mother only gave her that look and then added to her chores to keep her too busy for trouble, so she said. It was hard to enforce grounding, though, when no one was home to see whether she stayed home. Eventually, her mother realized she wasn’t staying home, that she was wandering Pittsburgh instead, sometimes alone, sometimes with other unwatched teens, and then she got sent to her grandparents after school.
It was her grandfather who bought her a guitar. “Here. Focus that energy on something productive,” he’d said with a wink. Isabel wouldn’t have been able to sneak out of her grandparents’ house if she’d tried. He always knew what she was doing. He always paid attention.
Repeating the lines along with the melody that had needed words for some time, Isabel found herself singing aloud as she walked the shoreline despite people stopping to stare. She didn’t care if they did. Maybe it would help more than open mic nights to sing out and about where people didn’t expect it.
[The prequel novella to The Texture of Glass was part of the Music of the Heart anthology by Fire Star Press, an imprint of Prairie Rose Publications. To read more about Meladee and Niall, find A Melody in the Dark within the Anthology, which features a story per decade from the 40s to the 80s, one story per author.