Excerpt from Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Come here, you mutt.

Down in the yard, he hooked Scout back onto his chain, got his caulks off before the pegs driven through the soles for traction tore the hell out of the kitchen linoleum. Inside, Colleen turned bacon with a fork.

"Smells good." He draped his wet socks over the handle of the woodstove and padded down the hall for dry ones, the red tail of Chub's rocket night-light glowing in the morning dark.

Colleen set his plate on the table, eggs steaming.

"I might stop by and see Lark after work," he said, testing it out. It didn't sound untruthful. He tucked into his eggs so he wouldn't have to look her in the eye. He rarely lied to her, usually only to play down an injury.

"Should I pack him something?" she asked.

"Nah, I'll stop at the Only." His back tooth throbbed with the coffee's heat. He pressed his tongue to it, mopped up the last of the yolk, brought his plate to the sink, lifted his slicker off the hook—rain puddled on the linoleum below—and grabbed his thermos and lunch pail. Colleen turned the lamp on so he could see to fish his keys from the burl bowl, half-filled with the pea-sized beach agates she collected, bright as candies.

"Gloves?" she asked.

"In the truck."

When they were first married, she would inspect his body at night, feeling along his neck, his ribs, his abdomen, until his heart was pounding. When she found a new scrape, a bump or a scab, she'd cup her hand over it, as though it were an insect she'd trapped there.

Now she pecked him on the cheek—I choose you—in a better mood since she'd started helping out the Larson girl, pregnant again, and still too poor for a hospital birth. It had taken her mind off it, finally.

"Want anything from the store?" she asked. "I have to take Enid down to the clinic. The kids need their shot cards before school starts."

"She can't drive herself?" he asked, pinching a toothpick from his front pocket.

Colleen shrugged, Enid more her child than her sister. She stood out front, hugging herself for warmth, watched him climb into his truck. Over her shoulder, the wooden plaque he'd carved and mounted on the door shone with mist. HOME IS WHERE THE ♥ IS.

"Be careful," she called.

His denims were cut off two inches above his ankles to keep a Cat tire from catching the hem and pulling him under, mashing him like a potato. But there were a hundred other ways to die in the woods. He'd seen a three- thousand-pound haul block land on a man's chest, choker chains snap and send logs as big as school buses bouncing downslope, felt their shadows pass over-head when he dove below an old stump for cover.

Don't ever leave the house without kissing that woman goodbye, Lark had said, knotting Rich's tie tight enough to hang him, on his wedding day, advice tinged with his own regret.

Rich thumbed the blower on full blast and cracked his window down a half inch. Rain tapped the hood. Up valley roads, across creeks, in town and the glen, men walked through this rain to their trucks, wives looking up from the dishes, pausing the length of a prayer. Be careful. What besides prayers kept any of them alive? Luck, the steady hands and quick judgment of men he'd known all his life, men who swung an arm up over the seat back, reversing down their driveways as Rich did now, fog eddying in his wake, rain-beaten yard sign listing below the weeping willow:

THIS FAMILY SUPPORTED BY TIMBER DOLLARS.

From Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson. Copyright © 2021 by Ash Davidson. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.