Book Excerpt – Passing By Samaria
Passing By Samaria
by Sharon Ewell Foster
Hardcover Unavailable for Sale from AALBC
(Check with Amazon )
Buy the Kindle eBook
Borrow from Library
Publication Date: Jan 01, 2001
List Price: Unavailable
Format: Hardcover, 382 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780739408056
Imprint: Multnomah
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read Our Review of Passing By Samaria
Read a Description of Passing By Samaria
Copyright © 2001 Penguin Random House/Sharon Ewell Foster No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission from the publisher or author. The format of this excerpt has been modified for presentation here.
With just a second’s pause, Alena stepped into the strange green world. Entranced, she walked further in amongst the trees. She did not look back. The sounds of her friends and family, of those she loved, who loved her, grew fainter and fainter still. Alena’s heartbeat quickened. She was excited by being alone in this new world. A world that was at once tranquil and threatening. Sounds and smells she had not experienced pulled Alena further in with thoughts only of going even further - until she saw him. She beheld him.
Her brain slowed and refused, resisted comprehending what she saw. Then just as suddenly knowledge and panic flooded in on her.
She knew him. Not this way, but she knew him. Charred pieces of a uniform. Shirt, pants, shoes. Holes on the chest as if medals had been torn away. There was still enough familiar about him that she knew him. Something about the feet, not blackened with mud this time, blackened by something else, something more permanent.
Alena grasped her throat. Her hands ripped at the starched white collar, buttons, and ruffles, grasped for air. She fell backward over something and hit the ground hard. Still grabbing at her collar, then clawing at the ground, she could not take her eyes off him. She continued stumbling, wrestling something invisible trying to fight her way back into the world she knew.
A world where boys played baseball, not where they hung from trees. A world where boys did cartwheels, not where their arms hung like lifeless extensions from a body on a rope.
Alena heard a voice screaming. Maybe they know, she thought. Maybe the others see it, too. She wanted to add her own voice to the voice that screamed. The hand that grasped her collar moved to her mouth, and Alena realized the horrified voice was her own.
The world went black.