Novel in Progress/An Excerpt

It’s been a few years since they let the patients go—herded the inmates away in buses; slipped the loonies down the loop in cars; did not see the only escapee who shuffled straight to the river, crab walked the bogged banks, and paddled deep into the channel. So that she wasn’t found until three days later—a turtle egg in the nest of her hair, a chewed strip of rubber on her wrist. A child made the discovery. He’d been playing. He had thought at first that she was Galatea, the milk-white one in his book of myths. No one would believe him when he came shouting, spinning home—mud to his elbows, shoes undone.

“You leave your imagination out of this,” his mother said.

“I’m swearing,” he told his mother, crossing his heart.