Promo of ‘The Delirium: A Zombie Opera of the Great War’

October 31, 2022 / jameswindale / Leave a comment

There are some changes coming to the Windale brand. There’s been some thoughtful contemplation with morning coffee and some decisions have been made which will help to hone and improve our craft. Some titles will be updated and moved around a smidge, all improvements, I assure you. In the meantime, in observance of Reformation Day/Halloween, we here at the Windale Estate would like to offer a glimpse of The Delirium: A Zombie Opera of the Great War which is available on Amazon both on Kindle and in print.

In addition, NaNoWriMo is upon us again and I’ll be adding 50K words to my Reformed Space Opera currently with the working title of Terra Jovia. Feel free to follow along and add me as a writing buddy and we’ll all get through this together!

Without further, here’s a snippet of The Delirium.

A shadow walked past the window, a human figure. It was making its way around to the back of the church, but it was alone thankfully. Unfortunately, he was armed, his rifle slung across his back.

“We’ve got a straggler,” I said picking up my rifle.

“Have you got him?” Charles asked sounding like a recruitment poster.

“Naturally,” I said coming to my feet. I didn’t want to make too loud a sound, and so I slipped my bayonet over the muzzle of the rifle and went to the back door to wait for the German to show his face. I crouched down, ready to spring onto the man as I heard him shuffling about. It was a rather strange scene as he did not seem to have a care in the world, just walked about aimlessly as though he were drunk.

I flung open the door and charged out onto the rear stoop. The sudden movement caught his attention and he growled at me, his eyes were sunken and drained as if he had been long suffering from some sickening ailment. I lunged at him, the bayonet on the end of my rifle jabbing into the centre of his chest straight to the hilt. Blood ran down the front of his uniform soaking through and running into a puddle on the ground at his feet. The man looked at me without expression, only his sunken eyes suddenly realising that I was in front of him. He offered no cry or wince of pain, only an open mouth and a blood tinged gurgling moan that escaped his mouth as he raised his arms and tried to grab at me. His fingers like claws I saw the visage of a man who by all rights should have been dead, yet apparently unfazed by the bayonet protruding from his chest. His skin was splotchy with a purple hue and his eyes bore no apparent life to them. They simply stared at me with what I could only have surmised was… hunger.

With a ferocity he lunged at me, nearly knocking the rifle from my hands as I wielded him like a fish upon a line. He growled at me and gnashed his teeth, trying to pull me close in order to bring his jaws to bear on my body. I pulled the trigger on my rifle and he lurched, his torso wrenching backwards, but not falling wholly off the bayonet.

He remained there a moment and we both collapsed to the ground. I worked to catch my breath not wholly believing that I had encountered a man with such dexterity as to take a bayonet to the chest and not flinch! If all the Kaiser’s men were of such breeding I feared for the war effort. We would be done for.

Suddenly my fears were once again realised when the German on the end of my bayonet picked his head up and brought me into focus with his empty eyes. His mouth opened again and he pulled at my tunic, trying desperately to bring me to his jaws. This frightened me terribly as I had already run him through with the bayonet and then shot him through the heart. There could be nothing viable left in the man’s chest and yet he still came for me!

I put my boot to his chest and thrust him off my rifle. He rolled onto the ground and flailed about, and to my horror began to find his feet and come to a standing position. Expelling the spent round from the chamber I advanced the next, aiming once again for his chest.

“Surrender, damn you!” I warned him. “Put your hands in the air and you’ll be given quarter!”

He put his hands up, but not to surrender. Reaching for me he hissed and lunged, his teeth gnashing at me. Utterly alarmed I swung my rifle about and offered his teeth the stock, which he bit into with some ferocity. We toppled over, landing on the ground by the church door. His teeth were covered in a film and his mouth wept with a putrid yellow fluid. He tried to remove the gun from his mouth, presumably to bring his teeth into my flesh. I know not why I thought of this in the moment, but he had a perfectly good rifle slung weakly over his shoulder, as well as a knife tucked into a sheath on his belt. He could have also bludgeoned me with his helmet, but it seemed that all he was interested in was biting me. Perhaps devouring me whole.

A commotion by the steps was my saving grace, but not from whom I expected. Our prisoner, Sergeant Schroeder, charged and hit the man atop me, flinging him off and causing him to land with a crunching thud on the tall grass. My assailant then made for one of his own while Schroeder crouched, lunging at him taking the knife from the man’s belt. He grabbed him by the throat and toppled him over backwards. Holding the man to the ground he thrust the knife into the eye of his own countryman. The man twitched and then lay still.

The next sound I heard was the sound of gun metal being raised. Charles and Buckley were at the door, their Lee-Enfields raised and leveled at Sergeant Schroeder.

“Drop the knife, mate,” Charles warned. The sergeant nodded and released it, dropping it to the ground with a quiet thud.

“We need to get indoors,” Sergeant Schroeder warned. “Immediately.”

‘Just Say Maybe’ Promo

April 24, 2016October 30, 2022 / jameswindale / Leave a comment

Check out a little bit of Just Say Maybe below. There’ll be a link at the bottom where you can go to the Amazon page and buy it in paperback or on Kindle.

from Just Say Maybe

In April of 1994 my sister Bonnie spent a week in her room sobbing into her flannel shirt and ripped jeans because her idol, Kurt Cobain, had stuffed enough heroin up his arm to put a rhino down and then blew his face off with a shotgun. She had been something of a prude about Nirvana, slamming her door in my face when I wanted to listen with her and her friends.

“Stay the fuck out of my room, Ashley!” she’d bark, her hair looking ridiculous, dyed red with Kool-Aid.

It didn’t matter that she didn’t want her “baby” sister tagging along with her friends. All I was interested in was the music and she played it loud enough so that I could hear it through her bedroom door. Mom bought me my own CD player for Christmas-1994, a Sony model with detachable speakers and a duel cassette player for transferring music from one tape to another or from CD to tape, for which I bought a stack of blank tapes from Strawberries at the Pheasant Lane Mall. Sneaking into Bonnie’s room I pilfered her Nirvana collection and put them on tape for myself. Meanwhile Bonnie began telling anyone who would listen that her Easter was now going to fall on April 8th, the day Kurt Cobain was found rather than the day he actually died. Like a lot of teenage girls, I suppose myself included, she could be a bit dramatic.

A stack of blank cassette tapes opened up the promise of making mix tapes, sitting with the radio on, the tape advanced to the right position waiting patiently for the DJ to play the song you wanted to record. This was my way of starting my own music collection, the CD player on top only for recording music, or as the later vernacular would call it “ripping”. The radio was an avenue to entertainment I had never been truly exposed to with the exception of my dad’s classic rock station and the vinyl LPs that still graced the turntable stereo in the living room. A year passed and Bonnie moved beyond Nirvana and adopted the Phish, a sound that made me gag just slightly more than the smells that came from her room while she listened to it. As her musical taste declined I was forced to seek out other music on my own and it was while I was waiting for a song by Alanis Morissette that I heard the most amazing thing that any thirteen year old girl in the post-Nirvana world had ever heard. That was the day I fell in love with The Smashing Pumpkins.

I sat in my swivel chair knocking myself back and forth on the rolling wheels, my Airwalks dirty and loosely tied. Billy Corgan’s voice had a quality to it that I had never found in Kurt Cobain or any other musician. The instrumentals in the song spoke to me with a lyrical storytelling was too much for me to bare and I pushed PLAY/RECORD after the first chorus. The song ended and I rewound the tape, playing it back and getting the same chills and goosebumps on my arms and legs that had been there when I heard it. I sat fixated on the dual black speakers, watching as they vibrated with each pulse of D’arcy’s bass. It was all so hypnotizing and I sat with my mouth hung open, the Red Hot Fireball I’d been working on dropping out and rolling across the floor.

Click here to get Just Say Maybe in paperback and on Kindle!

Bright Lights and Cold Steel

January 31, 2016February 20, 2017 / jameswindale / Leave a comment

This week I published my third title on Amazon in both paperback and on Kindle. Bright Lights and Cold Steel is a prequel to my EMS novel Twenty-Five at the Lip and takes place in the early 1980s. It features a number of familiar faces from Twenty-Five at the Lip like Richard Henry, John Davis, Frank Macomber, Dr. Wilson, and Marty from the Union ER when he was still working as a tech.

I’ve always been fascinated by the practice of EMS and firefighting in the era when I was young or not even born yet. Bright Lights is something of a gray area in this sense because I was born the year that this story takes place in. In Twenty-Five at the Lip Frank Macomber laments about how the service has changed in the years since he started working in it; how crews used to help one another, partied together, etc. regardless of the uniform they wore. Bright Lights and Cold Steel gets into some of that.

G from The EMS Lounge was good enough to give me a shout out after beta-reading Bright Lights. If you haven’t heard The EMS Lounge podcast you should definitely check it out. It’s both insightful and humorous and is one of my all-time favorite podcasts. They are also on iTunes so if you can get over there, give them a listen they’d definitely appreciate it.

In a final thought, I’m working on getting my Facebook author page up past 500 followers. When this happens I’ll be giving away, at random, several signed copies of Twenty-Five at the Lip. I imagine I’ll also be doing something similar when I get to 1000 followers and so on and so forth.

—

from Bright Lights and Cold Steel

The phone ringing woke Richard from a sound sleep. It rang twice before Meg picked it up and he checked his wrist watch to see the time. It was 2:05 in the morning and he rubbed his eyes while Meg took the call. It was possible that the call could be turfed off on a EMT-Basic crew, but the feeling sitting in the pit of his gut told him he was about to be getting up.

The top door to Meg’s dispatch office opened and she leaned out with a slip of paper in her hand.

“Richard,” Meg rasped. “I need you and John to take it uptown. 19 Dexter Street for the difficulty breathing.”

He sighed, coughing into his elbow before swinging his legs over the edge of his bunk. “Got it,” he said. “I’ll go wake up John.”

Pulling his shirt back on he pushed the swinging door out into the garage where he found the ambulance parked in front of the door, right where they had left it. He reasoned that even if it had been a Basic call that he was going to have to move the Cadillac for them anyway and then he and John would be up for the next run.

He hit the garage door button on the wall and the door began to open. Walking to John’s office bunk room he wrapped on the door. “John, we got a job,” he called before going back to the Cadillac. He hopped into the driver’s seat and started the engine, checking the rear view for John to emerge from his office. Impatiently Richard climbed out of the driver’s seat and went to the door again, half expecting the man to be opening the door as he approached. Richard knocked again, this time John calling angrily through the door.

“What?!”

“We got a run!” Richard said. John groaned from behind the door.

“Take one of the Basic’s with you,” he said. Richard was about to argue that if another call came in then he was going to have to take it with the other Basic’s partner, a situation that nobody but Richard could truly stand to be in. Richard sighed and pushed the swinging door into the quarters and called to the sleeping crew.

“Which one of you wants to go on a medic run?”

The first on their feet was the girl on the top bunk, a short freckle-faced new girl with braided red hair. “Me! I do!”

“What’s your name?” Richard asked.

“Doreen,” she said.

“Alright Doreen, do you now where Dexter Street is?”

Doreen thought for a moment and then nodded, “It’s up past the community college, a few streets west of the cemetery.”

“Good,” Richard said walking back out into the garage. “Grab your shit, let’s go.”

John had made a point of not hiring females until it was brought to his attention that the practice was completely illegal. He believed that a woman’s place in the job market was as a secretary, a nurse, or a teacher. As he famously quoted when he opened the doors of Pocasset Ambulance, “A woman can’t be an ambulance driver…” something he still said in private company, mostly to Richard, which to Richard elaborated on just how much John Davis knew about his own company. He knew that John would have a few things to say about Doreen taking the call with him, but Richard wasn’t about to put sexism before patient care.

Richard climbed into the passenger seat and rolled the window down as Doreen scrambled into the garage bay still buttoning her shirt. She slipped on a patch of oil and fell onto the hood of the Cadillac. Horrified at her own clumsiness and shot back up and rounded the front of the car, swinging the door open and tossing herself in.

“Slow down, it’s not your emergency,” Richard said. “Light it up, but you can leave the siren off unless we hit traffic.”

“OK,” Doreen said as she put the car in gear. They rolled out into the lot and Richard tapped the garage door button on the visor of the Cadillac. Doreen pulled out onto the street, silent and still in the middle of the night.

“How long have you been an EMT?” Richard asked.

Doreen swallowed and adjusted her hands on the steering wheel. “About two months,” she said.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Twenty,” she said. “But I was in the healthcare program at Diman…” she said tossing the technical high school’s name out, hoping it had some meaning to her new senior crewman. She fidgeted in the driver’s seat, beginning to sweat as Richard leaned back. He looked back into the rear of the Cadillac and Doreen turned around too.

“What are you doing? Watch the road!” Richard said.

“Sorry!” Doreen said nervously.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that you’re Richard Henry.

“So what?”

“So you’re the boss’ right hand man…”

“Woah hold on there,” Richard said laughing. “I work with John, that doesn’t mean I’m his right hand man.”

“Sorry,” Doreen said sheepishly.

“Doreen,” Richard said. “Relax, alright? Like I said, this isn’t your emergency. Have you done many emergency runs, or just transfers?”

“I’ve only done a couple emergencies that Meg threw us when you or the other medics were busy. Mr. Davis said that he had to hire me, but didn’t want me running emergency calls.”

“Well, that’s some bullshit right there,” Richard said hanging his elbow out the window. You’ve been to school, you’re capable.”

Doreen sighed and turned onto Bedford Street, opening up the accelerator. “To be honest, I’m afraid of screwing up. I jumped at the chance to do a medic call because I want the experience, but I’m afraid of messing up.”

Richard shook his head, “You’re not going to mess up. Just follow my lead and I’ll have you listen to lung sounds and take a blood pressure. The best kind of experience is real world experience.”

“Alright,” Doreen said. “What’s the call for?”

“Respiratory difficulty,” Richard said. “You ever handle something like that?”

“No, like I said I’ve only had a couple of emergencies. A nursing home fall and a hangnail.”

“A what? A Hangnail?”

“Yea. The Kimwell Home called it in last week and Meg turfed it to us.”

“Did you drive or tech the call?” Richard asked.

“I teched it,” Doreen said.

“And how’d that one go? What did you do?”

“Well there wasn’t much to do,” Doreen explained. “I took a blood pressure and dropped her off at Union.”

“That sounds like a successful call to me,” Richard said smiling at her. “What about the fall? What did you do there?”

“Well I drove, but I put her on a backboard with Reggie, dressed a head wound, and took her blood pressure, pulse, and respirations on scene while Reggie got report from the nurse.”

“So you’re basically telling me that you ran the call, but Reggie rode in while you drove?”

“I guess,” Doreen said.

“I think you’ll be fine, Doreen,” Richard said. “This one might be a little more complicated, but we’ll see how it goes.”

Both Twenty-Five at the Lip and Bright Lights and Cold Steel are available on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle. Click on the images below to be redirected to the Amazon page!

Tuesday’s Gone Promotional Piece

July 26, 2015July 26, 2015 / jameswindale / 1 Comment

This story takes place in 1924…

From Chapter 1

Tuesday loved to ride the train at night. It was loud, but the rocking motion of the long line of cars hauling cargo, performers, and animals was such that it rocked her to sleep easily. Tucked under her burlap blanket and laying on fresh hay was as good a place to make her bed as any. A few feet away from her in the corner, a hole had grown progressively larger in the past few months thanks to the rotten wood there. On nights where the moon was bright she could even see out of it, watching the ground whiz past in a blurry rush of blue. Grass and rocks were sometimes discernible, but specific landmarks were not and she had to look through the boxcar door for that. The door was always open, even in the winter which was possible because in the winter the circus train traveled south, first into the Carolina’s and then Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. She knew that it would eventually take them into Mexico and it would be like summer down there until it got warm in the northern United States and southern Canada and they would return there in the summer.

A black woman sat in the open doorway peeling apples with a pairing knife. Tuesday watched as she peeled them in the light of the moon. She cut them and then dropped them into the metal pale with a crank operated masher attached to the rim beside her. They made a peculiar plunking sound as she dropped them in and she could hear them even over the noise of the train as it rolled over the tracks. The woman’s legs hung out over the edge of the doorway and beyond her Tuesday could see the landscape outside as the train passed through sleepy towns on the way to their next stop. Some of the towns had buildings with lights on and Tuesday tried to see what was going on inside the buildings as they passed them.

“You’re awake, Tuesday,” the woman said. The woman continued pairing her apples, a knowing smile appearing on her face in the moonlight. Tuesday sniffed and rubbed her nose.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“You’ve been sleeping in this boxcar with me for years, girl. You think I don’t know how my babies sleep?” she said.

Tuesday looked around the car. Along the wall lay several other children between the ages of five and fourteen, sleeping on the cold, moist hay. It had rained several days earlier and the water had leaked in. Tuesday found that if she could get past the first few moments of laying on the hay, it would warm up once she lay still with the burlap blanket drawn up over her.

The black woman, whose right name was Millie, took care of the girls and boys who belonged to the circus. Millie had come from a plantation in Georgia, born in servitude and now serving a different master who gave her wages. Millie’s hair was gray and nappy, though hidden under a scarf that she kept wrapped around her head. Her dress was stained with sweat around her armpits and the threadbare apron she wore up to twenty hours a day while taking care of her surrogate children. Millie sighed and put her head back. Without turning to look into the train car she said. “If you’re going to be up you might as well help me with breakfast.”

Tuesday knew better than to disobey Millie and got up from her sleeping spot, leaving the burlap blanket behind. She wore a white tank top undershirt and a pair of bloomers, but the most striking feature of Tuesday was the tattoos that covered her body from her neck to her feet. Nearly every square inch of her eight-year-old body was covered in intricate tattoos, a job requirement for her position in the sideshow. The soles of her bare feet did not mind the rough wooden planks of the rail car, as her hands and feet were well calloused from trapeze acts and tumbling.

Tuesday bent forward and placed her hands on the floor, swinging her legs up where her head should have been and walked on her hands to the edge of the train car and the door. She could see the ground moving quickly by as the train rolled over the tracks and the wind caught her hair, blowing it in Millie’s direction.

“I’ll not comb your hair more than once a day, Tuesday,” Millie warned her. “It will get tangled like that.”

“Yes’m,” Tuesday replied dropping her legs quietly, concentrating all the energy in her core and arms. She passed her legs and body through her arms, her palms planted firmly on the floor of the rail car and set her bottom between them. She kicked her legs out of the rail car door and Millie handed her the pairing knife, pulling the sack of apples closer to the girl.

“Where’d you get the apples, Miss Millie?” Tuesday asked.

“Mistuh Tyler got them at our last stop in Staunton,” Millie said. “He’s always looking out for you children.” Tuesday smiled and cut into the top of her first apple letting the blade ride along the curvature slicing the skin off in a coiled string. His first name was Tyler, but all the children called him Mr. Tyler out of respect for Miss Millie who insisted that the children not be familiar with their elders.

“I like Mister Tyler,” Tuesday said. She cut the apple in half and sliced out the core on both halves.

“He’s a fool,” Millie said of the sword swallower. “But he’d sooner go hungry than see you children go without.”

“I think I would marry Mister Tyler,” Tuesday said as she dropped the apple into the grinder. Millie began to turn the crank and the coil inside the slot began to turn, catching the apple inside and beginning to break it apart into a mashed form and falling into the pale.

“Mister Tyler is more than twice your age,” Millie said. “Besides you’re just a girl and shouldn’t be thinking about boys, never mind men like him.”

“I like his mustache,” Tuesday said. “It makes him look like a walrus.” Tuesday giggled and started in on another apple before Millie reminded her what her job was. She looked past her bare legs and knees down to her toes covered in dark inked patterns, symbols, and swirling designs. Tattooed on the top of each of her toes were little stars painted in a rainbow pattern. Tuesday had seen other children in the towns they visited, but none of them looked like her friends in the circus. Most of them were acrobats and tumblers, but she was one of the side show; members of what people in towns whispered about under the term freaks of nature. One boy, called Sam, had a furry face and body. At only twelve years old he looked like a furry dog, which was how he had gotten the stage name The Wolf Boy. Only a few of them were actually related, specifically the acrobats that Tuesday performed with. She shared her spot in the rail car with their youngest daughter Nicole who was nine years old. Most of the young children in the side show were part of performing families, but Tuesday had been acquired through a trade deal when she was a baby. She had been young enough to forget most of the experience of tattooing but Millie could remember the baby crying. The owner wanted to get as much out of the girl as he could and set the acrobats and tumblers to teaching her their craft as soon as was possible.

“Miss Millie, am I pretty?” Tuesday asked. Tuesday had seen the children in other towns and cities all over the country. Children in Mexico and Canada too, and none of them had tattoos. They looked freshly washed and well fed, leaving half eaten popcorn and cotton candy in rubbish cans and in the dirt outside the main tent of their three ring circus. She saw the way they looked at her in the side show, mothers and fathers appalled at such creatures as she and her other sideshow cast members.

“Tuesday, you is a child of God,” Millie said. “You is beautiful.”

Tuesday’s Gone is available on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle.

Twenty-Five at the Lip Promotional Piece

July 19, 2015July 8, 2015 / jameswindale / Leave a comment

From Chapter Three

She came in hung over one April morning and wanted to sleep on the stretcher. They drove to post and Calvin saw her rolling over in the back with her hand on her head, hearing the occasional moan. He turned around and asked her if she was OK.

“I’m fine.”

“The hell you are, you look like crap.”

“Thanks, why don’t you take a nap?”

“I can’t with all the noise you’re making.”

“So close the slider.”

He got out of the cab and came around to the side door and popped it open. He pulled out an IV line setup and a bag of saline out of the cabinet and sat down on the bench. He looked over her arm and poked it with his finger. She turned toward him.

“What are you doing?”

The IV was clenched in his teeth and he began to wrap the tourniquet around her upper arm.

“I’m giving you an IV.”

“Like hell you are.”

“Like hell I’m not. You’re hung over and I can’t have my partner like that. You’re getting an IV, we’re going to run this bag of saline into you and we’re going to work the rest of this shift. I’m not getting cut early so you can go home to nurse your hangover.”

She reached up, broke a cabinet seal, and pulled down an ice pack. She smacked it with one hand on the rail of the stretcher and placed it on her forehead. Her partner was being a prick again.

“Ow,” she said as he stuck her arm.

“Oh shut up, it doesn’t hurt.”

“The hell it doesn’t. Let me stick you next.”

He finished the IV and let the bag run into her freely. Opening the back door he climbed outside and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He looked back at her and flipped it open. After speaking to someone on the other end of the line, he climbed back inside to check the progress of the bag. It was half empty.

“I suppose you called the supervisor.”

Ignoring the comment he fished another bag of fluid out of the cabinet. He handed it to her and stood up.

“I may be a pompous prick,” he said repeating what she had said about him, “…but I’m not a rat. I told dispatch we are out of service because I’ve got the runs. What happens in the truck stays in the truck. You can hook that one up when the first one is done.” And with that he opened the side door and climbed back into the passenger’s seat.

He was leaning the seat back when the unspiked bag of saline flew forward through the rear window and smacked onto the dashboard. The back door opened and slammed and Valerie appeared at the driver’s door holding the current bag of saline in her hand. She looked angry, but Calvin was indifferent to her mood. She climbed in and hung the bag on the seat belt latch over the door and turned to him. There was a brief pause and then she spoke.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For saying that. It’s just frustrating with you being in a lousy mood all the time.”

“I have a lot of things going on.”

“I know that. And I know you don’t know me all that well, so talking about it is out of the question, but if you’re at work you don’t have to bring your problems with you.”

She was right and he knew it. Tossing her left foot up onto the steering column Valerie produced a switchblade knife from the inside of her boot and used it to open the second bag of saline.

“But I am your partner, and even though you think I’m a pain in the ass” she said repeating what she had heard while gesturing with the blade still in hand, “I appreciate you looking out for me.”

“No problem,” he said putting his feet up onto the dash and deciding to ignore Valerie’s own notion of scene safety. She began to think he might not have been a total jerk after all. She reached for the knob on the radio and flipped it on. When she heard How to Save a Life which had been overplayed for weeks she groaned and leaned forward against the steering wheel.

“I hate The Fray,” she said switching the tuner from the poppy 92 Pro FM to 94 HJY, a local rock station, and with Pearl Jam in his ears he noticed the chipped black fingernail polish she wore. He started to think that she wasn’t so bad either, and that maybe she had some promise as a partner.

“How do you feel about Nickelback?” he asked testing her music tastes. She sneered and said

“They should just call themselves ‘Waaaah’. That’s all I hear when they come on the radio,” she said. Calvin smirked, appreciating the sentiment. Valerie spun the wheel on her IV line and let the solution flow into her vein, replenishing her fluid.

Twenty-Five at the Lip is available on Amazon in paperback and on Kindle.