For those of you who know me and follow my blog, this post is for writing and for the novel I’ve been working on for the past year … it takes a long time and lots of feedback and writer friend help to get a novel to its best. This is another step in the journey made of hard work and long hours of doing what I love most. Thanks, as always, for your support!

 

Author: Jennifer King

Title: The Golden Willow

Genre: Upmarket fiction

First 250 words for It’s All in the Voice blog hop, May 16-17, by Heather Webb:

The Golden Willow

For sixty-five years, I wrapped up my secrets and locked them into the iron vault of time. To anyone who happened by, my life looked like a fine American painting, defined by tea parties and smiling family portraits. But it was the time before, the memory of what I had done, that haunted me in the darkness every night. On the morning of my eighty-fifth birthday, those nightmares finally bled into daylight.

I awoke believing my lover would be waiting for me out in the rose garden. I hurried to descend the steps, thinking that morning we would leave to travel to Milan. We did that in those days, for our art club, for the unspoken Resistance. I remembered the series of encoded messages that had called us to da Vinci’s Last Supper. It was in danger then. We had little time.

With a quick pause on the staircase landing, I grazed the texture of the oil painting with my fingertip. It felt cool, like Judas’s face. Leonardo had surely painted him to be the devil. But in my next step, a stair creaked and I saw the picture before me for what it was—a gaudy portrait of my late mother-in-law—and in a blink, I slipped out of the daze.

I’d never felt so betrayed.

 

Thank you, writing friends, for all of your comments and help with the voice (and any other comments, too) in The Golden Willow opening! -JK