Get an idea of a couple of the stories from the abridged extracts below... and follow them up from the book - Free on Kindle Unlimited
I saw the lightning come zagging down, spitting and cracking. So loud. So bright. Hitting dadra. He sizzed. As though exploding. He crumpled; fell.
‘Dadra!’ I screamed; and stumbling, gasping, ran to him.
Around the mountain peaks, the clouds roiled as never before. The lightning had come from the spirits, the eternal wraiths that lived among the peaks and snowfields.
I was to him. He’s alive. No eyes – burned out. Blasted black and empty. Smoking pits in a black-charred face. My dadra! ‘No no no no no…’ Screaming to make it not have happened.
Another lightning spike – zagging towards us. Stopped short. Hovered in the air – crackling and blazing as though in fury at our farmstead. Until it faded and went to vivid blackness.
Sis came running. I sent her to the troughs for water to slop on him and go scream for Mamin. She came and nearly dropped the babs and was screaming and shrieking, so I knew it was really really bad....
Breathe...
Breathe…
Breathe…
Slow… steady. It seems to be mechanical; it is so regular. But it changes if I think about something and forget to breathe.
It hesitates, or is much deeper sometimes. So it is not mechanical. Not a machine breathing on my behalf.
Breathe... Breathe… Breathe…
I stop. Wait. But it recommences in a gasping burst.
I can't stop it. I try again. But breathing is a compulsion.
There is not much to see. Blackness.
I'd think my eyes were shut, but there’s more to see when your eyes are closed – a million tiny faint molecules of shifting light. But here, in the vacuous blackness, there is no sign of such multitudinous pinpoints in this total, uncompromising, blackness.
Breathe… Breathe… Breathe…
A point of light is drifting in from the right.
I look at it. Cold hard light. Near white. Chilling.
It continues to move into my vision; a slow drift.
I try to recall.
Yes. I am in the vacuum of space. I am alone. Adrift, like the point of light.
They did for me at last?
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