The Effigy

By James West

The Effigy is the story of how a young man known as the Killer Cook and a young woman (Lisa Treatorn) living in a small fictitious town in a fictitious county (Madison County) become entangled in a relationship and had a child in 1986. The man, an inexperienced cook, learns how to cook in a restaurant, while the woman works at the telephone company. They are separate most of the day, but in the evenings, they get together and contend over how they are going to afford to raise their child. This fantasy becomes clearly exposed through the images and story of The Effigy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9781491795453

Book preview

The Effigy

Copyright © 2016 James West.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9543-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-9545-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016906762

iUniverse rev. date: 08/08/2016

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Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight—Outside Larry’s House

Hindsight

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Chapter One

Golden sunlight flared through the stained glass and open shutters, glancing off the angled surfaces of the unfinished pine floor and simple furnishings of her bedroom. Beneath the white linen sheets on a king-size brass railed bed, her blazing hair spilt over the cotton, Leslie Alexandra Dumas lay sleeping, dreaming of visiting the Eiffel Tower in Paris, though she’d never been there in all her twenty-five years. In her mind the gargantuan structure towered before her, its four legs swooping down to meet the concrete floor of the Champs D’Elysees from a pinnacle lost in the bulbous cumulus clouds that all but filled the blue sky overhead. And then, suddenly, she was at the top of the Tower, hundreds of feet above France, above a seething part of the landscape that corruscated from infinity to focus upon the fragile sheet of steel that suspended her.

The platform was shifting, swaying in the winds that had moved the clouds; the girl felt her center of gravity being coaxed away from the safety of the Tower, out into the void where she’d accelerate toward the earth, her limbs scrambling for departed handholds. A cry of desperation sprung from her lips, and her hands shot out to grasp at the framework; instead, they found the smooth, cylindrical tubing of her familiar bedframe, and she awoke, her heart pounding in her breast.

For several minutes she lay there, gratefully absorbing the tranquil luxury of her bedroom. Brilliant morning light, as it danced amongst her humble possessions, her books, the clothes she had laid out for today, her Oriental rug, her desk, filled with warmth and cheer and eagerness for life. She inhaled deeply, and as she exhaled