Visits from the Drowned Girl

Chapter One

Chapter 1

Benny Poteat has seen a lot of THINGS.

Benny PO-teat has seen a lot of things.

Benny Poteat has seen a LOT of things.

Almost NOTHING would surprise him.

Almost nothing would SURPRISE him.

ALMOST.

Emphasis is negotiable, and emphasis is everything.

Of the vast array of things Benny Poteat would claim to have seen in his life, the ones he’d consider formative, the handful, or less, of those experiences one tends to have while hurtling blindly through the banalities of day-to-day existence, moments that leap so suddenly, so forcefully into your path that you careen off them two or three degrees into a different sort of future than before—for better or worse, who can say—most of those things he’s witnessed from above. That day, as with countless days before it, from two hundred feet up, the Carolina Piedmont spread out 360 degrees around him, county bleeding into county: dogwood, pitch pine, and red-dirt hills for mile after mile. It was spring, wet and fecund. Benny Poteat had been climbing towers, legally, since he was fifteen years old, and fifteen years later he still love ... read full excerpt from Visits from the Drowned Girl ebook