Excerpt from Honeydew by Edith Pearlman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Even when miserable after Carl's death she had endured no such haunting. When she thought of Carl she remembered with pleasure the soft brown hair of his thick eyebrows, and the reflective way he examined any broken-down appliance before deciding how to fix it, and Sunday football, and the disappointing fact of his sterility, though it had troubled him more than it did her: she played the hand she was dealt. And anyway, he wasn't impotent. Oh, his feet. He liked her to wash his feet and clip his nails, and she liked to do it, and they always made love afterward, first lowering the shop's blinds, then lying flat on the floor, sole to sole. Edging forward, he stroked her inner thighs with his heel and then he put his big toe in her keyhole and worried it for a while, and that was all she needed. After her ecstasy they progressed to conventional positions and a second pleasure.

She sat down in Bobby's chair and kicked off her clogs. She picked up The Later Roman Empire?—?it was hiding under a towel. She let her bare feet slide into his tray of water, now cold. She felt the calm disinhibition that liquid provided. She thought: Bobby and his wife, former, had been selected to witness a disaster and had failed to act. Another thought, heavy and treaded like a tank, rolled up to her; Carl gazed out of it with disappointment. She too had failed to act. She had not refused to let Carl enlist. She might have stopped him. She could have held him home. "Who knew there wasn't a child in that car?" Bobby had inquired half an hour ago, eyes closed, Ibid and Sic on her lap, not knowing or caring that he was thinking aloud, not knowing or caring that his unmoving feet had kicked a hole in her smooth innocence. "An infant, maybe."

An infant, an ancient, a mature U.S. Marine . . . what matter who. Whoever they were they had been flipped into lifelessness and had abandoned the future. They had turned their dead backs on survivors now doomed to mourn until the end of their own days.

Excerpted from the book Honeydew. Copyright © 2015 by Edith Pearlman. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.