De Amerikaanse schrijfster Alice Sebold op 6 september 1962 in Madison, Wisconsin. Zie ook mijn blog van 6 september 2010 en eveneens alle tags voor Alice Seebold op dit blog.

Uit: The Lovely Bones

„My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer. My murderer believed in old-fashioned things like eggshells and coffee grounds, which he said his own mother had used. My father came home smiling, making jokes about how the man’s garden might be beautiful but it would stink to high heaven once a heat wave hit.
But on December 6, 1973, it was snowing, and I took a shortcut through the cornfield back from the junior high. It was dark out because the days were shorter in winter, and I remember how the broken cornstalks made my walk more difficult. The snow was falling lightly, like a flurry of small hands, and I was breathing through my nose until it was running so much that I had to open my mouth. Six feet from where Mr. Harvey stood, I stuck my tongue out to taste a snowflake.
“Don’t let me startle you,” Mr. Harvey said. Of course, in a cornfield, in the dark, I was startled. After I was dead I thought about how there had been the light scent of cologne in the air but that I had not been paying attention, or thought it was coming from one of the houses up ahead.

“Mr. Harvey,” I said. “You’re the older Salmon girl, right?” “Yes.” “How are your folks?”
Although the eldest in my family and good at acing a science quiz, I had never felt comfortable with adults.
“Fine,” I said. I was cold, but the natural authority of his age, and the added fact that he was a neighbor and had talked to my father about fertilizer, rooted me to the spot.
“I’ve built something back here,” he said. “Would you like to see?”
“I’m sort of cold, Mr. Harvey,” I said, “and my mom likes me home before dark.”
“It’s after dark, Susie,” he said.
I wish now that I had known this was weird. I had never told him my name. I guess I thought my father had told him one of the embarrassing anecdotes he saw merely as loving testaments to his children. My father was the kind of dad who kept a nude photo of you when you were three in the downstairs bathroom, the one that guests would use.“

Alice Sebold (Madison, 6 september 1962)

Lees verder “Alice Sebold, Christopher Brookmyre, Jennifer Egan, Julien Green, Jessica Durlacher” →