Earth and Air: Stories

By Tara McTiernan

A handsome singing gypsy who has the power to make girls sleep, sometimes forever, decides to rest from his journeys in an old Victorian house in suburbia with two mesmerized sisters. A broken jukebox leads a girl into uncharted territory, a wilderness in the back of a bar where the colorful neon lights of a working jukebox beckon and where she learns terrible things from a dragon-like woman breathing fire in the dark. A thirty-something career woman trying to rediscover her purpose on an island retreat is attacked in the still of the night by a neighbor whose greatest wish is for her to leave.

Tara McTiernan's stories resemble twisted modern fairy tales, full of real-life magic and Grimm-like darkness. Containing three unforgettable short works, Earth and Air, like her novel Barefoot Girls, illuminates and explores the lives of women with rare eloquence, keen insight, and a sharp wit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tara McTiernan
• Release date: Jun 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476396699

Tara McTiernan

Tara McTiernan lives in North Carolina with her husband and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut and on an island in the Great South Bay on Long Island, New York, which has been the setting for her novel and short stories. Her stories have been included in multiple literary magazines including Eureka Literary Magazine and Ultimate Writer. Her debut novel, Barefoot Girls, has recently been released as an ebook with the print version to be available in late spring 2012. Visit her blog at http://taramctiernanfiction.blogspot.com/ for more information.

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Product Description

EARTH AND AIR

By Tara McTiernan

A handsome singing gypsy who has the power to make girls sleep, sometimes forever, decides to rest from his journeys in an old Victorian house in suburbia with two mesmerized sisters. A broken jukebox leads a girl into uncharted territory, a wilderness in the back of a bar where the colorful neon lights of a working jukebox beckon and where she learns terrible things from a dragon-like woman breathing fire in the dark. A thirty-something career woman trying to rediscover her purpose on an island retreat is attacked in the still of the night by a neighbor whose greatest wish is for her to leave.

Tara McTiernan's stories resemble twisted modern fairy tales, full of real-life magic and Grimm-like darkness. Containing three unforgettable short works, Earth and Air, like her novel Barefoot Girls, illuminates and explores the lives of women with rare eloquence, keen insight, and a sharp wit.

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Earth and Air

And Other Stories

TARA MCTIERNAN

Bramblevine Press

Raleigh

Copyright 2012 by Tara McTiernan

Smashwords Edition

Discover other titles by Tara McTiernan at Smashwords.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights.

Bramblevine Press

Raleigh, North Carolina

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Cover design by Kate Brown

Cover art by Alexander Kuzmin

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For my wonderful husband, Ash,

my teammate in life.

Table of Contents

Cover

Description

Title and Copyright

Earth and Air

Joan Jett and the Broken Jukebox

Retreat

Barefoot Girls Excerpt

About the Author

Earth and Air

In the dimness of the pantry, everything faded into shades of gray that early October morning. The potatoes in their net bag glowed faintly next to the beets bunched and tied together in a bouquet complete with an old pink silk bow and the preserves she’d put up that were usually jewels in the sunlight hunkered on the shelves looking like jars of mud. Freddie could barely make out the room’s contents, yet the bare spot on the white-painted floor where Seth’s huge army-green backpack had leaned against the wall all spring and summer was a shout in the silence.

He was gone then. Time to ramble on, he crooned softly to himself from time to time, making electricity spike up Freddie’s neck.

No, things were different with them, different from all the other places he’d decided to leave. He loved it here. He said so.

He also said he was a wanderer. At first, she thought he was being romantic, this handsome sloe-eyed man with his infectious smile, shaggy black curling hair, and a penchant for secondhand clothes, mostly remnants from the seventies. He even had one of those feathered roach-clips clamped on one of the loops on his backpack. A gypsy, she’d mused, looking across the table at the restaurant he’d taken her to that first night they met, candlelight and wine making the idea sparkle.

Standing wearing only a light cotton nightgown, she blinked several times staring at the bare spot on the floor, stepped back into the kitchen, and craned her neck to look around for the backpack, hoping he’d simply moved it. It wasn’t in sight. Maybe upstairs? He hadn’t been in bed this morning, waiting for her to wake, watching her sleep as he usually did. If it had been anyone else watching her sleep, she would’ve been bothered by it, but Seth was like an elusive bird, non-committal, moving away whenever she tried to pin him down. Opening her eyes to his inspection filled her with hope.

She couldn’t take it anymore and did something she hated. Seth? Seth!

The round yellow forties farmhouse clock ticked steadily on the wall next to her and one of her three cats, Jojo, appeared, curling his lean black body around the edge of the doorway leading to the living room. Meow?

Usually Freddie would meow back, but her throat was closing. Where was he?

She took off, running across the icy kitchen floor in bare feet, her haste when she found him missing that morning making slippers afterthoughts. She climbed the stairs two at a time and then she was in their bedroom. A lone pair of his underwear lay clumped by the bed where he left them the night before, after the party, before the make-up sex. She took a deep breath and sighed, the air shuddering out. It was okay.

Maybe he’d gone for a hike and wanted the extra weight of his pack? He was used to walking with it strapped on his shoulders, had been all over the country that way, by foot and by thumb. Or had he taken her car again for one of his day-long drives, bringing the pack along for some reason? She went to the bedroom window overlooking the driveway where she'd left the car the afternoon before; too busy unloading all the party supplies and then with the other preparations to put it away in the garage. It was parked where she left it.

Then he'd gone for a hike, and he couldn’t have picked a worse morning to take off for a little exercise. After her accusation last night, pushing him for something concrete and instead forcing out an explosion of festering disillusionment and disgust. Yes, they had come together afterward, fell together on the bed and made things right. Almost right. Not right enough. Why had he done that last night? After all her confessed fears about Natasha?

No, she needed him reassuringly here, engaged in their Sunday morning routine of coffee and classical music and called-out questions to him about that day’s crossword in the paper. He almost always knew the answers. He would clean up the mess from last night, insist on it, and tell her to go and play, which meant the garden. It was her true love, digging and pulling, sowing and reaping. The smell and rough texture of soil on her hands was practically erotic to her.

Downstairs, plastic cups lined up on almost every surface, gluey drops of dried jungle-juice making them stick more often than not. Every garbage can overflowed with crusted paper plates, crumpled napkins. Outside, near the back stairs, she knew there was a scattering of bent crushed cigarette butts.

If the party hadn’t been for Natasha, her sixteenth birthday, Freddie would have gone into the next room and dragged her sister out of bed and made her clean up, hung-over or not. Five years of giving up her youth, the wild adventures she should have been having, to stay here tied down by duty had taken their toll.

What? Freddie said.

You were named guardian of your sister. Your parents never spoke to you about their will?

She looked at their lawyer, Mr. Bobrov, with his rounded gnome-like face and neatly trimmed cottony beard. All he needed was a peaked red hat. When he took her in his office, separating her from Natasha to talk to her alone, she had assumed that maybe their parents had left her something special, something that couldn’t be