Excerpt from Time's Mouth by Edan Lepucki, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Part One Chapter One

Let's begin with Ursa.
She is Ray's mother—though, in 1938, when she is born in the caul like a mystic in Mystic, Connecticut, that lineage is yet to be written. Her name isn't even Ursa yet. It's Sharon.

At first, Sharon is only a beautiful baby, and then an adorable little girl, living with her parents in a creaking clapboard house with a narrow staircase and the faint tickle of mildew in both bathrooms. On a chair by the front door her father's hat settles like a mound of dark soil.

Imagine Mystic, Connecticut, back then: the brick post office, the ships in the port, the sea salt in the air. Imagine young Sharon, the child she used to be, bows at the end of her pigtails, saddle shoes on her feet, porcelain dolls lining her bedroom shelf. Nothing amiss. Or everything.

Imagine her a few years older: slipping into reverie during a dull classroom lesson, or riding her bike through town, or biting her nails. Picture her at sixteen years old, lying on her twin bed in her room.

It's a Wednesday. About five in the evening. Mid-October.

It was chilly out, but because Sharon didn't want to have to remake her bed, she lay very still atop her pink chenille bedspread. There was a hole in her left sock, and she wiggled the exposed toe before tucking it back into the white cotton. She was tall, and her feet reached the end of the mattress. Downstairs, her mother cooked dinner, and Sharon could smell the pot roast and the mushy carrots, no doubt too much food for a widow and her daughter.

She felt bored—desolate with it. The lamp on her dresser cast a sallow glow across the pale blue wall and the painting of the teddy bear that had hung in her bedroom for her entire life. The bear's black marble eyes were beseeching and needy, but if she took the painting down, its absence would reveal a darker rectangle of blue on the wall, and what then?

Sharon was a high school junior and hated everything about it except slamming her locker shut between classes, and afterward, tossing her majorette baton high into the sky before catching it in her fist. Right now, she wanted a cigarette, yet she didn't dare steal another from her mother. The widow had begun counting them.

The days were getting shorter, and within weeks the trees would be spindly and bare. At the thought of the red and orange leaves fluttering from the trees to a soppy ground, she closed her eyes. She held her breath for as long as she could before letting it out in a rush like a swimmer coming up from the deep.

It was then that she felt it. Something. It brushed her as a breeze might—it wasn't a breeze. It was like a spirit, only not one. It was like an invisible butterfly tickling its wings against her skin, or like a stirring. What was it? Nothing like this had happened before.

Her eyes remained closed. The nubby roses on the coverlet nudged her spine. She didn't consider herself spiritual, or mystical, and she wasn't much curious about the unseen. No matter. A lack of interest isn't the same as prevention.

She took a shallow breath. Her body prickled with goose pimples. She—went.
She found herself ... elsewhere.

Her backyard, at night. In the dark, the tall trees bordering the lawn had turned into craggy monsters, the moon a fingernail clipped against the black above. A few feet away, she saw herself, kneeling on the grass, as if praying.

How could she see herself? She could feel her own body, back in the bedroom, but she was also here in the backyard, without a form. She was a floating consciousness. This other self, the one on the grass—Sharon recognized herself. Three years in the past. She was thirteen. And, still, sixteen. Here and there at the same time.

This was the night of her father's funeral. The best day of her life. Her younger self wore the new black dress her mother had purchased for the service. With effort Sharon had zipped it up herself that morning, and now she never wanted to take it off. If she could wear it forever like a new skin, she would have.

Excerpted from Time's Mouth by Edan Lepucki. Copyright © 2023 by Edan Lepucki. Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.