Read from the first chapter, "Ghost Town", of The Plain Sense of Things by Pamela Carter Joern:

“Gramp went to fetch Billy himself after the telegram arrived announcing that Carlene had died. Grandma took to her bed, turned her face to the rose patterned wallpaper. Gramp sat at her back, careful not to mar her Double Wedding Ring quilt, tentatively reached his hand out toward his wife but could not think what to offer. He shrugged his shoulders, stood, said well then, and clumped off to the Elmyra train station.

See, he stands on the brick platform with his sheepskin jacket pulled snug against the wind. His shoulders sag. Metal clasps clang against a flagpole, the ground bare with scattered piles of dirty snow. His breath freezes in front of his face. It’s early, the light gray and diffused. His jaw aches, clamped in anger.

The train shuff-shuffs onto the platform, and Gramp heaves himself up the steps to the passenger car. He’s gotten heavy, his wavy hair white, his lower lip scarred from the cancer Dr. Blackford cut away. He still chews tobacco, a stolen pleasure when he’s out in the barn or at the far end of the hayfield, brown juice dribbling through his ruined lip onto his overalls front so that he fools no one.

A private man, he moves to an empty seat. He settles into the worn velvet cushion and turns his head to watch the Nebraska prairie roll by. Later, after the train has passed through Cheyenne and Greeley, he steps out to take a breath of air. He’s had no lunch, couldn’t force a bite between his clenched teeth. His stomach is a bit off. He rides a while on the back end of the train, watching the track slide out from under the caboose and spin across the snowy ground. He’d made his way to this eastern plateau of Colorado as a young man. Orphaned at fifteen, he left England on a freighter and worked his way west from New York City to land a job in a candy factory. Every day he swept, mopped, toted bags of sugar, and every night at closing he scooped up what had spilled during the day and returned it to the swirling vats. He will never, for the rest of his life, eat a piece of store-bought candy, although he loves sweets and orders a dozen tins of fruitcake every Christmas.

The train rocks and rumbles, and although he is shivering and his hands are thrust deep in his pockets and the icy air sears his nostrils, he cannot bring himself to move back inside. He hates cramped spaces. He’s thinking that if this had to happen, it’s a good thing it happened in February when there’s less work to be done in the fields.”

Pamela Carter Joern’s debut novel, The Floor of the Sky (available in a Bison Books edition), was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and winner of the Alex Award and the Nebraska Book Award. Joern is a playwright, the winner of a Tamarack Award, and the recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board writing fellowship. To read a longer excerpt or to purchase The Plain Sense of Things, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Plain-Sense-of-Things,673400.aspx