A Box of Matches
A Novel
Chapter One
Good morning, it's January and it's 4:17 a.m., and I'm going to sit here
in the dark. I'm in the living room in my blue bathrobe, with an
armchair pulled up to the fireplace. There isn't much in the way of open
flame at the moment because the underlayer of balled-up newspaper and
paper-towel tubes has burned down and the wood hasn't fully caught yet.
So what I'm looking at is an orangey ember-cavern that resembles a
monster's sloppy mouth, filled with half-chewed, glowing bits of
fire-meat. When it's very dark like this you lose your sense of scale.
Sometimes I think I'm steering a space-plane into a gigantic fissure in
a dark and remote planet. The planet's crust is beginning to break up,
allowing an underground sea of lava to ooze out. Continents are tipping
and foundering li ... read full excerpt from A Box of Matches ebook
