BORROWED HANDS

Eli Marsh counts things. Minutes, boxes, the fare between two towns, the exact number of days his family's inn has been for sale. It is how he keeps a bad autumn down to a size he can carry. Then, alone in the basement stacks of a college library built inside a hundred and thirty-two year old asylum, he stops holding on. And he is in the same room, seen from the side where attention lives. No sound. No colour. Nothing that weighs anything, including him. Except a woman who says his name and waits for an answer. Her body is in a room forty miles away and has been for twenty-eight months. She cannot move. She will not tell him her name. Over there she has no grip on anything at all, and he is the only thing in that world with any purchase, which makes him, for as long as he can stay, her hands. She needs him long before she likes him. She says so, often. Every crossing is paid for in waking hours. He loses minutes, then afternoons, then a whole night he cannot account for. He is spending the one thing she has already spent, and he is spending it to reach someone he has never been able to prove is real. He has until he runs out of himself. First in the WHERE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN trilogy.