Two By Twilight

Irish countryside, 1808

I walked along the path that night, as I often did. Bonetired from working in my father's fields, coated in a layer of good Irish soil spread fine on my skin and held fast by my sweat. My muscles ached, but 'twas a good sort of pain. The sort that came of relishing one's own strength and vigor. Of late, I hadn't done so any too often. I'd been taken with bouts of weakness, my head spinning sometimes until I passed out cold as a corpse. But today hadn't been like that at all. Today I'd felt good, certain whatever had plagued me was gone. And to prove it I'd worked like a horse in Da's fields. All the day through I'd put my brothers and cousins through their paces, darin' them to keep up with me, laughing when they couldn't. And I'd kept on wielding my hoe long after the others had called it a night.

So 'twas alone I was walking.

Autumn hung in the air, with the harvest beneath it and a big yellow moon hanging low in the sky. Leaves crackled under my feet and sent their aromas up to meet me as I walked by the squash patch, with its gray-blue hubbards as big as Ma's stew pot, and orange-yellow pumpkins clinging to their dy ... read full excerpt from: Two by Twilight ebook