Eve's Refusal

By Michael Hearing

St. Francis knew it, Bobby McGee learned it, and Andrew Thurston meets the realization head on.

Eve is a nobody – just a dirty, mentally challenged homeless woman who stands on a street corner in her rags and "prophesies." But she knows exactly what she possesses, what most of those who pity her don't have.

Eve refuses to take advantage of the social programs and for a good reason. She refuses to submit to the medical procedure and the progress monitoring, preferring instead to keep what she has.

Eve has an important lesson to teach Andrew Thurston, Director of the Social Equity and Rehabilitation Department, who is determined to help her. And it's a lesson he learns the hard way.

"Eve's Refusal" is a Flannery O'Connor-esque short story of approximately 3,400 words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Hearing
• Release date: Feb 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301782567

Michael Hearing

Michael Hearing is a freelance writer/essayist/novelist living with his wife, dogs, cats, horses, and ferrets on a few acres with a small lake in northeastern Oklahoma. There, he tries to grow vegetables, catches quite a few fish, and does his writing.Having lived a fairly desultory life, Michael decided that it’s time for some order and method. So he is finishing up and publishing some books he’s had in the works for many years. But, still, he is likely to be all over the genre map. In most cases, though, he has lived what he writes about, and his works ring true.

Book preview

Eve's Refusal

Michael Hearing

Spring Lake Books

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013

All rights reserved. This book may not be used or reproduced in any manner—by any means or in any medium whatsoever—in part or in whole without written permission of the author (except, of course, small excerpts in reviews). Please respect intellectual-property rights and help authors protect what they've created.

This is a work of hortatory fiction. The characters and situations presented here are nothing more than inventions of the author’s imagination. If anything in this story resembles real persons, places, or institutions, it is purely the result of coincidence.

Eve's Refusal

There she was on that corner again, hair filthy and matted, three ratty mufflers around her throat, oversized coat stained and torn, laces missing from her once red Chuck Taylors. And all of her uneven fingernails had black grime under them, a detail that turned Andrew Thurston's stomach, when he passed close by, almost as much as her vile body odor. He saw that her mouth was flapping open and closed and her arms were flying around in wild, incomprehensible gesticulations. She reminded him of some ragged, noisome marionette whose body had been set in