Sunday Sneak Peek 7/7

Sneak Peek Sunday is a weekly blog hop in which writers are challenged to post six paragraphs, no more and no less, from a published work or work in progress and then invite other writers, readers and random bloggers to read, critique and comment. Visit their site by clicking on the button below for a list of other participating writers and share the love!

All this month (and maybe into next month), all of my snippets for Hump Day Hook, Sneak Peek Sundays and WeWriWa will be taken from The Last Hour of Gann, beginning with the first word on the first page, picking up right where the previous snippet leaves off, and ending only when I’m ready for the book to go live. To further motivate me, I am offering up a free Kindle copy of The Last of Gann to one lucky commenter. Just remember that all my books contain graphic violence and strong sexual content, so you must explicitly tell me so if you want to enter the giveaway. The winner will be drawn at random just as soon as my last edits are done (You can see my progress in the WIP widget in the sidebar there. I’m in the second of three edits. This is the beta-reading phase, which takes the longest as we only meet once a week. The third round of edits goes very, very fast).

Nicci—easily frightened under normal circumstances and utterly terrified by this slack-faced stranger who looked like their mom—started crying, and once she did, Mary Bierce burst out into huge, wet sobs also. She lay spread out over the sofa with her legs wide open and that plastic diaper showing under her skirt while her daughters hugged each other and stared, but all she seemed capable of saying was one nonsensical word.

“Spayed!” their mother wept, over and over, until she was screaming it. Screaming and digging at her stomach so hard that one of her bubblegum-pink fingernails broke right off. “Spayed me! Those motherfuckers spayed me!”

At last, in a kind of desperation to quiet everybody down before one of the neighbors had them written up again, Amber climbed up on the kitchen counter and brought down a bottle of her mom’s black label. She poured a juice glass for Mary and, after a moment’s uneasy deliberation, a sippy-cup for Nicci and made them both drink. Within an hour, they were both asleep, but her mom kept crying even then, in a breathy, wailing way she couldn’t quite wake up for, and all she could say was that word.

Spayed.

Later, of course, she had plenty to say—about Measure 34 and the Zero-Pop zealots who passed it, about the insurance company and their fine print policies, and about men. It always came back to the men.

“They’ll spay the hookers, sure they will,” she’d sneer at some point. “But do they ever talk about neutering the fucking johns? Oh no! No, they’re still selling Viagra on the fucking TV, that’s what they’re doing! Let me tell you something, babies, what I do is the most honest work in the world because all women are whores! That’s how men see it and if that’s how they see it, little girl, that’s how it is!”