First Chapter ~ First Paragraph Tuesday Intros - One Vacant Chair; Joe Coomer

Every Tuesday I host First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where I share the first paragraph or (a few) of a book I am reading or thinking about reading soon. Care to join us? Today's pick is a book I bought 10 years ago and still haven't read - it has a 5 star rating too (I am pathetic - this must change in 2014).

One Vacant Chair - Joe Coomer

Graywolf Press - 2003

" PERHAPS OUR LIVES ARE SUSTAINED by a suspense of dying.  These are the things I know and everything else is in between.  Grandma Hutton called Aunt Edna to her deathbed and then decided to linger for twenty-two years.  She measured her life with spoons, the brimming spoons of medicine or milk or soup that my aunt balanced with a painter's sure grip over her own cupped palm, her free hand mimicking in form and movement the dull spoon's bowl, her arm the narrow handle.  My grandmother, for the last few years of her life, answered the telephone as if she were standing at the mouth of a dark cave, halooing for a lost soul.  When someone answered she was always taken aback.  That's how we talked to her at last, by phone, everyone but Aunt Edna.  Then the family returned to Fort Worth for the funeral like separate drops of condensing water pooling in the bowl of a cold spoon, a last offering to an old dead woman none of us cared for.  That's not true.  Aunt Edna missed her."

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 What do you think? Would you keep reading? Feel free to join us by linking your First Chapter post below.