Feral Hearts

By Courtney Milnestein

There is a story about Maiden’s Point, an old story, a story about a jilted lover who, in her grief, threw herself into the sea.

It is the warm summer of 1993, and across Gloriana, Super Soakers are all the rage, children wear Ray-Ban sunglasses and Airwalk skate shoes, and there is not a boy alive who is worried about the mention of a new planet glimpsed just within the shadow of Pluto. No boy save for Dorin, on the cusp of adolescence.

Having recently moved from the city to a large communal home in the country, Dorin has to adjust to his new life in the country within a house his father constantly assures him is haunted. He tries to balance his budding friendship with Ailbe, a boy from one of the other families at the house, with the growing shadow of the tenth planet Nimue as, all around him, it feels as if the adults he has trusted for so long seem to be making increasingly irrational decisions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JMS Books LLC
• Release date: Apr 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646567706

Book preview

Feral Hearts

By Courtney Milnestein

Published by JMS Books LLC at Smashwords

Visit jms-books.com for more information.

Copyright 2021 Courtney Milnestein

ISBN 9781646567706

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Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

All rights reserved.

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This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published in the United States of America.

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Feral Hearts

By Courtney Milnestein

There was a story about Maiden’s Point, an old story, a story about a jilted lover who, in her grief, threw herself into the sea. That summer, my father wouldn’t stop going on about it. In the lead up to our trip, he brought it up at every opportunity, during the long journey in the car through the empty countryside, he would glance back over his shoulder and ask us if we had heard the story, and then, at the very last, as we were unpacking our things, moving bags from the back of the car to the big house, again, he turned to look at us and reminded us that Maiden’s Point was where that lonely woman had once decided that life was not worth living without love.

That had been the summer I had annoyed my older sister, and, as punishment, she and her friends had made me dress up in her old clothes, passing me around, pulling at my cheeks, and telling me how adorable I was.

I can’t even remember what it was that had got her so riled up, though I think it was probably something to do with the Perky Pat dolls she still collected, even though she was three years older than me. I guess it doesn’t matter. In those days, we were a lot more like feral animals, this was before children became expensive commodities, before they were the sacred, fragile things we treat them as now.

Everything, of course, was different then, and the feeling in Gloriana at that time was one of prideful optimism, of indignant contentment, the idea that something bad could happen to us being thoroughly unimaginable. This was the year we first caught sight of Nimue, you understand, the year in which scientists began to warn of the dangers of this new and unusual sight within our night skies.

This, my sister said, leaning in close to me, her hands wrapped around a large cardboard box full of things from home, is going to suck.

Three years older than me, and already a very different kind of creature, I never knew what to make of sister, even less once the stark differences between us became so apparent. I remembered the sensation of her hands on my back as she had pushed me forward into the embrace of one of her friends, remembered my cheeks being