Corliss

Corliss

A Short Story by Heather Haven

Genre: Humorous Suspense

Tags: Short story, humorous, suspense, small towns, women

Release: July 6, 2012

Editor: Fiona Young-Brown

Line Editor: Penny Ehrenkranz

Words: 7274

Pages: 29

ISBN: 978-1-77127-091-5

Price: $2.50

Back Cover:

It’s 1964 in the small, rural town of Ash Flats, Arkansas. Green-eyed, auburn-haired, 25-year old Corliss has spent her youth feeling lonely, unloved, and an outsider in the town where she was born and raised. When she reaches out for her chance at happiness, she finds not love but murder, and done by her own hand. Will she be discovered? If so, will the town to which she has so wanted to belong turn on her?

Excerpt:

I got to know Wayne the summer after I finished high school. Wayne was a lot older, maybe forty. I was never much at making friends, and that was about the time my best and only friend, Lanie Sue, got married and moved away. The year or two before when I’d walk back and forth to school, I’d seen Wayne watching me, standing in the door of the hardware store, his orange jacket saying “Wayne’s Hardware,” flapping in the breeze. Sometimes he’d wave. He never said anything to me, though, until that summer.

I’d gone into his store looking for a new spring for Grandma’s back screen door. Wayne jumped all over it, saying I didn’t know nothing about putting in a spring on the back door, a pretty little thing like me, and he’d better come over and do it. By then Grandma was pretty sick, staying in bed with her rotgut bourbon, still talking to her squirrels, so when she died, I married Wayne. I guess you could say I looked on him like the daddy I never had.

That’s not how he saw me, though. Our wedding night he came to me and said, “Now Corliss, I’m going to show you what a husband and wife do. I don’t want you to be fearful.”

“I won’t be fearful, Wayne.”

“You just relax, Corliss.”

“All right.”

Then he climbed on top of me and did his business, which was fine with me and over real quick. I had done the same thing once before with one of the Barker boys, didn’t care for it much, and never did it again, no matter what Freddie Barker said. Or any of the other boys in school, neither.

About the Author:

Heather Haven has been putting pen to paper all her life, with novels, television treatments, plays, ad copy, short stories, comedy acts, blogs, even ghost-writing a book. She is the proud author of the successful and humorous Alvarez Family Murder Mystery Series, Murder is a Family Business, A Wedding to Die For and the soon to be released, Death Runs in the Family. Living in the foothills of San Jose, California, Heather is married to a wonderful guy, a musician when he’s not teaching, and has two very intelligent, obedient cats…well, maybe not so obedient.

Customer Reviews:

Heather Haven is the multi-published author of the ground breaking Alvarez Mystery Series, but here she shows us another facet of her diamond-like writing skills.rnrnCORLISSrnrnShe begins this story by taking us for a long...well, sorta long...trip back into the allegedly more simplistic (haha) times of yesteryear.rnrnCorliss lives with her grandmother in the small country town of Ash Flats, Arkansas. She meets her mother for the first time in 1959 at the age of fifteen when she's on the cusp between adolescence and adulthood. Not exactly an experience to pin your future hopes on.rnrnLife in a small town in America...as anyone who's ever lived in one can tell you...beneath the seemingly staid surface, raw, dangerous, intense emotions percolate. Corliss is PACKED with raw, dangerous, intense emotions percolating at their scary best.rnrnI love Heather Haven's Alvarez Mystery Series, and now that I've read Corliss, I am equally in love with her historical trips and highly appropriate salutes to the realities of CAUSE AND EFFECT. rn

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