Smashwords
Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: Peter Rehard
Copyright: 3/3/2011
Price: $1.99 (eBook)
Medi is split between two sides of a town where the Redds and Greenes keep a forced peace. Murder and death awaken the greed that laid hidden. Why are people killing each other over a small rubber stick?
Medi is neither a Redd or a Greene, but he watches each group die all the same. A simple rubber stick is pushing a secluded town to all out war. Why do people have to die? Why does blood have to be let out? What is it about the rubber stick that makes men become so lost?
The town is ready to erupt in chaos and Medi, along with his family are stuck in the middle of it.
Excerpt
Old Johnson lived out by the creek. He used to work at the power-mill way back before Warden Redd took it over. He's been living in an old shack away from the plant ever since he got fired and probably still is living there, being the oldest man in Perient. I never talked to him. My dad sent me out once a week to bring him groceries; didn't charge him, never kept a tab, which is a hard thing to believe.
That year, before our summer dance, my dad told me to run over the bags. It's a long walk from Perient square down the outskirts and to the river and worse from there having to go along the rocks and past the quarry where they dug out all the stone before my dad was even born. But I got there in time to get back before dark. I put the bags on the ground in front of the door, and man, that door was barely hanging on; I could smell urine from inside like he just pissed on the ground.
I could hear him talking to himself too, but that doesn't matter. I ended up leaving Perient before summer was done—but you know that. It was a week before the dance then, and I went back to the store and my dad was counting out the drawer. He had two big piles of money stacked up, the Redd bills on the right and the Greene's next to it. When I came in he said, “What were you doing, hawking the girls in the square?”
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