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Yes, Harry is once again on the market. My sincere apologies to anyone who was left hanging during this period of strange publications.
Here’s the run down.
Harry Fein is out of coffee. Not a good thing on Saturday afternoon, when he has to go to work. What starts out as just another day turns into a carnival ride of murder, mayhem, addiction and cab rides. Harry doesn’t know Jacob Pratt, but their paths are about to cross. They are both going to learn first hand what it means to come face to face with the hardest truth they’ve ever glimpsed: that the act of forgiveness is the only path to freedom from fear, and that the ultimate forgiveness is of death itself. Will Harry make it through the night? No one knows, as the quiet city of Boise becomes a backdrop for a story you won’t soon forget.
Excerpt:
Personal truth lights up the mind like fireworks on the fourth of July. It’s an explosion that separates all other thoughts that are spoon-fed and twisted. Manipulated ideas of safety, virtue and false morality are sent to the void and discarded with the Sunday morning trash. When personal truth makes itself known, nothing else matters. The process can be long and arduous or introduced at a moment’s notice. There is no methodology, secret learning, sage, how-to book or any other tool to help one reach their instant of truth. Truth works at its own pace and for the most part, shows up at the most inopportune times.
For Harry Fein, it started with sirens in the afternoon. Usually the sound of sirens placed him in a state of wonder about who was living and dying, but today he felt nothing. Harry listened to the sirens and kept on smoking cigarettes. He was out of coffee, which was the only thing that mattered at the moment.
Harry’s mind, for the most part, was always filled with scenes from one encounter or another. He constantly went over every nuance of communication; an endless jumble of thoughts keeping him preoccupied as the world went by. Most people live their lives in an orderly fashion. They go to school, get married, build a career, make children and hopefully reach retirement. One day they die, as loved ones gather around to say nice things; deserved or not. In Harry’s case, none of that applied. Moving was the one thing he did repetitively. It wasn’t orderly or even predictable, but it was a choreographed boredom of stopping and starting over: another town, another state, another country, his version of nine to five. Moving for Harry had become the definition of his 33 years.
There was nothing extraordinary about Harry Fein, except his ability to adapt and remember every conversation he’d ever had. He woke up every day, showered and shaved and went to work. His dirty blond hair never stayed in place, but he would struggle with it anyway. It was a crazy morning ritual. His father had had the same problem with his hair, otherwise known as the Fein family curse. The hair was straight and thick with dozens of cowlicks, a hair dresser’s nightmare. No matter what anyone did, Harry always looked like he had just woken up.
Through it all, he drank coffee to excess and smoked an endless stream of cigarettes. He was up to four packs a day. He would chain smoke four or five right before he went to bed, just so he wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night to have one. Harry also smoked marijuana. The green herb was an extra crutch which he only bought when it was affordable. However, he always accepted it as a tip when it was offered, which was often. Always exact about his priorities, he was still careless about everything else concerning life.
Within all his odd sorting of priorities, Harry maintained a fixation of which he never talked: a preoccupation with death. It kept him busy and occasionally up well after he should have been asleep. Harry’s obsession with death had nothing to do with his own, but quite the opposite. Everyone he met was given a quick study and placed into a type of death Harry could match with his mood of the moment.
He didn’t consider it peculiar that he had never seen a dead person. Even the death of his own parents and brother barely affected him. He had been estranged from his family for years. No one knew where Harry was or how to find him to break the news on each of the three occasions. It was only through the grapevine of talking to someone who knew someone who knew someone, that he’d become aware of their deaths.
And yet over the years, Harry had imagined the deaths of thousands of people, one by one, dying from real or fantastic scenarios. His mind was an overgrown cemetery of death’s misunderstanding. It was an upside down obsession to understand a process that usually takes a lifetime.
Sometimes, an entire life is needed to grasp the last moment.
