I’m happy to share this excerpt from MAGDALENA, a new novel by Candi Sary. The excerpt and images are courtesy of Regal Publishing House.
“Magdalena once told me she knew how to cure sadness. She read on that little phone of hers that we all need fifteen minutes of sun every day and without it, depression could set in. Those of us here on the peninsula barely get fifteen minutes a week. The fog comes in over the cliffs in the morning, creeping through town, shrouding all neighborhoods with a thick graveyard effect. We don’t have an actual graveyard, but the landslide all those years ago took enough lives and left enough ghosts behind to bring on that kind of fog. If it does lift around midmorning, a heavy cloud cover still stays most of the day, keeping things gray. I’d always thought my sadness came from the unfortunate things that happened in my life, but according to Magdalena, my gloom might simply be a lack of vitamin D.”
Author Candi Sary
“From the day she got the phone, she stared into it constantly, seeking answers to all of her questions and even finding new questions she would have never thought of on her own. She fed on its information like meat.
“’Mushrooms,’” Magdalena said. ‘We need to eat mushrooms.’ The girl was my only visitor. When she spoke, I hung onto her every word. ‘If we eat enough of them, we’ll get the vitamin D we’re missing from the sun.’
I didn’t question her. For weeks, I based all my meals around mushrooms. I made mushroom casseroles, salads, risotto, soups, but I’m not sure it changed me. I’m not sure it changed her. How many mushrooms would it take to replace the sun? I wish I could ask the girl, but she’s gone. Three weeks ago, I lost her for good.
I pull up my sleeves and roll up my pants. My arms and legs are so pale in this light. They look like white maps with long blue roads leading to nowhere. The lighting in my house is soft enough to disguise my pallor, but here in the rest home, the deficiency is glaring. I quickly lower my sleeves and pants again.
‘Focus, Dottie.’ My command is quiet.
“I swallow down one of the tiny white pills and sit up straight in my chair. Pen in hand, I look around the dismal room I currently share with Mario. It is a holding cell for the dying. We aren’t dying like the old people in this nursing home. But our town is small. They had nowhere else to put my husband after the accident a decade ago. And they had nowhere else to put me after the devastating incident at my house last week. So now we live together again in room eleven with the beige walls, the brown and yellow floral comforters on our beds, and the slim, dark wood secretary desk beside the bathroom door. The old desk is where I currently sit as I tap my pen on the blank page, trying to gather my thoughts.”
Author Reginald Gibbons, courtesy of JackLeg Press
Reginald Gibbons is the author of eleven books of poetry, including CREATURES OF A DAY, a finalist for the National Book Award. His new novel, on sale Aug. 1, 2023, SWEETBITTER, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. I’m pleased to share an excerpt; thanks to his publisher, JackLeg Press, for allowing me to post this prologue, book cover and author photo.
“This is an adventure story and a romance, but in Gibbons’ hands, it’s that and much more. Exquisitely rendered and deeply felt, this is as astute and absorbing as fiction gets.” — Booklist
PROLOGUE “Many generations ago Aba, the great spirit above, created many men, all Chahtah, who spoke the language of the Chahtah, and under- stood one another. They came from the heart of the earth and were made of clay, and before them no men had ever lived.
“One day they all gathered and looking upward wondered what the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds were made of. They determined to try to reach the sky by building a great mound. They piled up rocks to build a mound that would reach the sky but at night the wind blew from above so strongly that the rocks fell down. The second day, too, they worked, building the mound but again that night the wind came while they slept and it pushed down their work. On the third day they began yet again. But that night the wind blew so hard it hurled the rocks of the mound down upon the builders themselves.
They were not killed, but when daylight came and they crawled out from beneath the rocks that had fallen on them and they began to talk to one another, they discovered that they could no longer understand each other. They spoke many languages instead of one. Some of them spoke the original language, the Chahtah language. Others, who no longer spoke this language, began to fight with those who did. Finally they separated. The Chahtah remained, the original people, and lived near nanih waya, the mound they had not been able to complete. And the others went north and east and west and encountered more tribes.”
“In this way or some other, all the peoples of the earth were created, each from some substance and thus of different appearance, and at times struggling against each other. This is what the Chahtah told to a white missionary. But this was only a little of what the Chahtah knew. It was not for that man to know everything. And then he wrote mistaken things about them.”
