As Promised - Peek Into "The Grim Daughter"

I am not an expert on the rules of publishing, though we all know I wish I was. LOL! But as such, because I have just begun to query this book out to agents, I am only sharing a brief excerpt from the opening scene. Over time I hope to share various other bits for your reading curiosity and pleasure. Here it is. "The Grim Daughter"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality....
~Emily Dickinson

CHAPTER ONE

            The first funeral that Kresley Morgan ever attended was when she was three years old. As cliché’s would go, it had been a somber affair with mourners dressed in the customary black, the sky had been overcast and spitting out a pathetic grey drizzle, and the tears had been flowing. Kresley remembered holding tight to her mother’s hand while vainly attempting to lean over the open hole in the ground and see below the casket. Looking back on it, Kresley realized that she had not been clutching her mother’s hand but her mother had been clutching hers, trying to keep her precocious young daughter from pitching head first into the dark and muddy hole.

            Since that first somber gathering, Kresley had attended, all total, sixteen funerals. She thought it ironic that she had basically attended one for every year of her life. Death had never scared her and now, as she approached her seventeenth birthday, Kresley found that she had developed a sort of passive acceptance to the concept of dying. It was hard to fear something that had been such a dominant part of her life.

            The last funeral she had attended should have choked her up, drawn a cry of anguish from her lips, leaked bitter tears from her brown eyes, or caused her to pull brokenly at her blonde hair. Instead, Kresley had stood by the mahogany casket, eyes dry, hair in place, mouth loose with relief as the sun beat overhead and before her, her mother had been lowered into the ground. She had been aware of the furtive, questioning looks from some and the overly sympathetic glances from others but she ignored them all. They had not had to live with her mother these last few months. They, who wanted to sob over the now deceased Mary Morgan, had not had to witness Mary’s last few weeks on this earth.