The Fourth Sister

By Laura Scott

Laura Scott's second collection, The Fourth Sister, is a book of unusual love poems. It features an assorted cast: lovers and sisters, but also parents and children, the living and the dead, birds and trees, painters, playwrights and their characters, a godfather who married the wrong man and a godmother who was surely a spy. The book's energy flows out into other lives, discovering vital connections and the gaps between them. Scott writes as a poet in Wordsworth's sense: 'an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere relationship and love.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Apr 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781800173064

Laura Scott

Laura Scott is honored to write for the Love Inspired Suspense line, where a reader can find a heartwarming journey of faith amid the thrilling danger. She lives with her husband of twenty-five years and has two children, a daughter and a son, who are both in college. She works as a critical-care nurse during the day at a large level-one trauma center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and spends her spare time writing romance. Visit Laura at www.laurascottbooks.com.

Book preview

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Short Story

The Sounds

Still Life

Jules et Jim

Cover Photo

To Be One of Them

Joy

Email

Murmur

The Bored Cowboy

These Days

For the Girl under the Tree

The Boring King

What I Should Have Said at My Father’s Funeral

Last Words

What the Trees Do

The First Sister

Time on their Hands

The Fourth Sister

In the Doorway

The Wrong Man

Dark Arts

Pinturas Negras

In Naples

A Song for My Mother

Poor Sea

Natasha and Her Mother

Rain and Sea

The Mother and the Son

In Pandora’s Box

Restaurant Window

The Line

The Photographer’s Daughters

Sad Tales Befit My Woe

Lost Children Are Never Found (Continued)

When Death Got Bored in the Hospital

The Therapist

Why Are You Silent?

Cheekbones

Your Eyes

Hare

Muse

La Scaletta

Rain

Thinking of Tony Hoagland

These Lines

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Laura Scott from Carcanet

Copyright

For Peter

THE FOURTH SISTER

11

Short Story

There’s a story about Chekhov I love and I’m not sure why,

how the night before he left for Sakhalin he was terrified

of being saddled with a bore for a travelling companion

and because the journey was long, really long, three whole months long,

all the way East as far as you could go across Russia’s great girth,

he had to do something, but what? Lacking whatever that trait is,

the one that would have allowed him to just say no, he put out a story

instead, or rather urged a friend to unleash it discreetly,

and apparently reluctantly, into the right circles, to let it be known

that although everyone covered up for him, the famous writer

was in fact a drunk and a swindler, a nihilist actually, and, to crown it all

in a final audacious swap, a bore, and if the truth were known,

nobody in their right mind would want to sit next to him. And the story

was so perfect, so balanced between telling and withholding, it worked.

12

The Sounds

I wanted something else

                   Chekhov

You swept the stage, brushed away the old sounds

as if they were dust so your people could come and sit

and talk long into the night, so long and so late they were too tired

to climb the stairs to bed, so they just sat