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    Dead Time
    Dead Time
    Dead Time
    Ebook41 pages32 minutes

    Dead Time

    By Joseph Eastburn

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    About this ebook

    A young girl killed when the campus was still a farm. A sizzling college romance—but every time they kiss—the dead girl is watching them…

    Joan is a radiant but quiet young woman on campus. She’s been dating someone at the football fraternity whose brothers keep other guys away from her. Tim is a loner who falls in love with her anyway.

    The first time they kiss is alongside the main road under the giant oaks that shelter the campus. At the end of the block, Tim sees a young girl staring—her head cocked oddly to one side as if it’s been broken. He realizes she’s the child who years before died tragically after she fell off a tractor and was run over by a harrow.

    When she keeps appearing before him, Tim grasps that he’s the only one that can actually see her—that she’s warning him. Again. And again.

    What is she trying to tell him?

    Joseph Eastburn also writes thrillers. In reviewing his first novel, "Kiss Them Goodbye," re-released in 2016 by HarperCollins, The Armchair Detective wrote, “One of the most thoroughly bizarre mystery/ suspense novels in quite some time, creating and eerie, atmospheric, and compulsively readable tale… a gripping, intriguing book… This is a writer to watch."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJoseph Eastburn
    Release dateSep 26, 2016
    ISBN9781536597349
    Dead Time
    Author

    Joseph Eastburn

    Joseph Eastburn lived fourteen years in New York City, where his parents met on stage at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 1941. Working as an actor/singer, he appeared in over thirty productions, including A Study in Scarlet with Alec Baldwin at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. He's the author of 15 plays, including The Godhead, which won the 17th Annual One-Act Play Festival at USC, and Heart's Desire, which was given a staged reading at Williamstown with three Tony-award winning actors. His new play, Wild Blue Yonder, is set to appear in Ensemble Studio Theatre-LA's Winterfest. He earned a master’s degree in Professional Writing from USC, where he taught for ten years. His writing has appeared in Existere Journal, The Apalachee Review, storySouth, Crack the Spine, Forge, Reed Magazine, Sliver of Stone, Slow Trains, The Sun Magazine, Tower Journal, Sand Hill Review, and Hobo Pancakes. His first novel, Kiss Them Good-Bye, was published by Morrow in 1993, and brought back in paper and eBook in 2016. His new book, A Craving, was a Third Place Winner in the Operation Thriller Writing Competition.

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      Book preview

      Dead Time - Joseph Eastburn

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      First up, try this fast free thriller short story—built from a sequence that was cut from a new book: follow Keller as he tries to get his ex-wife back—and ends up in a dungeon.

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      Now, enjoy Dead Time, a short story...

      Tim’s mother had passed away. They had grown apart after he’d gone off to college—the break between them having never been repaired. Maybe he shouldn’t think about that while he was camped out at her house in New Jersey, 3000 miles from where he now lived—with the unenviable task of cleaning up her house and putting it on the market. He didn’t know where to begin. He felt depressed as he drifted into his old upstairs bedroom, gazing out the window. He noticed how the bark on the beach tree outside reminded him of skin when it stretched in the summer wind. He turned in the middle of the room, staring at the available space on top of a desk and bureau, the small nicked pieces of maple furniture his mother had left in that room as if he was still living there—a museum to a college student from another era, with felt pennants he had put up himself, old German mugs as symbols of beer drinking days, even a football sagging under the impression that it might be thrown again. Tim was touched that his mother had left his old room intact; it recalled sweeter days before their estrangement.

      He pulled open the closet door, pushed aside a stack of term papers—relics from when college papers were printed out—some preserved in clear binders now yellowing and cracked. There, under the text to an English History course, was his college yearbook. He lifted it down, thumbed through the pictures of sorority girls posed in interesting environments—on the slopes of hillsides or in the graveyard—all the girls with their matching blazers on, trying to look subversive.

      Joan wasn't there.

      He turned to the senior pictures, much larger than those for underclassmen, four shots per page with clubs

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