Excerpt from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Our subject is love. Unrequited love, you might think, the heedless headstrong ball that hurtles nearsighted down the alley. It has to get close before it can pick out which pin it loves the most, which pin it longs to set spinning. Then I love you! Then blammo. The pins are reduced to a pile, each one entirely all right in itself. Intact and bashed about. Again and again, the pins stand for it until they're knocked down. The ball return splits up the beloveds, flings the ball away from the pins. You stay there. The ball never does, it's flung back by the bowler, here it comes flying, blammo.

You understand. It only seems unrequited.

The policeman brought the so-called Bertha Truitt to the Salford Hospital, where it could not be determined whether she had amnesia or a privacy so pigheaded it might yet prove fatal. Did she want to stay in the hospital? Of course not. How old was she? She wouldn't say. Did she know anyone in town? Possibly: she hadn't gone door-to-door to ask. How long had she been in the cemetery? If they didn't know, she surely did not. Where had she come from?

"I'm here now," she said.

Lie down, lie down.

"Will you let me go if I do?"

All right.

The Catholics came to see her, and members from the Hebrew Ladies Sewing Society, and some Presbyterians. She didn't need or seek charity; they just wanted a gander. Newspapermen came to interview the curiosity but found only a pleasant plump woman whom nobody could account for. Those the city was full of. The mayor visited; his deputy had suggested that the recent reports of a strange creature stalking the fens on the north edge of the city—the newspapers called it the Salford Devil—had been this woman, looking for a place to lie down. The Salford Devil had red eyes and brachiated black wings, was the size of a dog, or a swan, or a malnourished child, had a long tail with a tassel (like a zebra or giraffe or a sphinx) or one that opened like a fan (like a bird). Bertha Truitt had none of these things, and on the second day of her hospitalization Moses Mood, the owner of the hardware store, swore he saw the still at-large Salford Devil steal a poodle where it had waited for its owner outside the public library. A real poodle, a pony-size one.

Bertha Truitt confounded people. She was two things at once. Bodily she was a matron, jowly, bosomy, bottomy, odd. At heart she was a gamine. Her smile was like a baby's, full of joyful élan. You believed you had caused it. You felt felled by a stroke of luck.

Nobody who knew her came to visit, though the nurses noticed she was always peering down the ward with a hopeful expression. She had no recognizable accent, no regional manners, no cravings for a certain cabbage salad known on only one side of the Mississippi. When asked about her past, she waved it away. "I'm here," she said. "Wherever that is."

People began to dream of her. Not just her fellow patients, though they were the first, they dreamt of Bertha Truitt sneaking into their beds, lowering the mattress, raising the temperature, dissolving in the daylight. She got into the dreams of the nurses and doctors, then people through the town. One man swore he saw her fly through the air on her back, naked as a piglet, using her impressive breasts as wings.

Really?

Well, maybe more like rudders, he allowed. Otherwise I stand by it.

It was just a dream, his wife told him, as wives did everywhere in Salford, husbands, too, parents who could not imagine where their children had heard of the smiling lady who whispered in their ears at night, I have a game for you. And, it is possible to bowl away trouble.

The other patients hung around her bed to be smiled at. This included Jeptha Arrison, a lumpheaded young man who'd been hospitalized after swallowing a bottle of aspirin, one pill at a time, like consuming a tree twig by twig. Soon enough he was found sleeping under Bertha Truitt's bed. "Let him stay," she said, and though it was the woman's ward he was left alone. Jeptha Arrison began to sleep abovedecks at the foot of her bed. "I like it here," he said to Bertha Truitt. "The hospital. My ma told me I once nearly died in a hospital but now I think they do me good."

Excerpted from Bowlaway by Elizabeth McCracken. Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth McCracken. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.