A brief excerpt.

So it's been nearly two months since my last post. Shameful. Hopefully I'll resume blogging soon enough, but for now, I'll be posting a series of short excerpts from my book as it's being written. Here is a bit from chapter one. The narrator is Alice Anderson, a patrol officer, describing her own relationship with her looks, and the idea of beauty:

I believe I can say, without violating the truth, that it was beholding Julie Sullivan in her youth, in the delicate arms of childhood, which finally delivered to me an understanding of beauty. I am not beautiful myself, nor can I ever hope to be. I'm in my sixties now, and I look every day of it and then some. My skin is mottled, large, hairy brown moles are protruding with greater size and frequency on what seems to be a daily basis, and I even have a liver spot or two. (I can remember when liver spots were relegated only to the elderly and infirm; now it looks as though I am joining their ranks.) As a girl I was tall and gangly, before my classmates caught up to me and I became, simply, average. Soon after the third grade they all passed me by and my growth suddenly halted, rendering me short and scrawny. My teeth, jagged and discolored, protruded from my mouth thanks to a hideous overbite, which my parents, despite my protests, were never willing to pay to have corrected. They never saw the point of it, accusing me of reckless vanity to even have considered such a thing. Vanity was an absolute evil in our home, on par with theft or blasphemy or masturbation. Consequently, I grew up indifferent to beauty, even my own lack of it. Well, perhaps that is not entirely true. I was certainly, keenly, aware of something missing from me. In childhood, I was never referred to as pretty, as every other girl I knew was. Adults simply looked at me and smiled and said, you sure are something. In adolescence, when girls are no longer called pretty and start hearing beautiful, I wasn't referred to as anything at all. I was a blank wall. One day, at about thirteen years of age, I decided to settle the matter once and for all. I approached my mother, in itself no easy feat, and asked Mama, am I pretty? She scooted her glasses up to the bridge of her nose, leaned in, and regarded me with the look of one appraising a found diamond, as if she had never seen me before in her life. She sighed. No, sweetheart, she had said. You are not. This did not, as one might expect, deflate me, nor even discourage me. Instead, it confirmed every suspicion I'd had about myself. A thousand lead sinkers dropped from my body, as though they'd been hooked into my skin since birth and were suddenly cut free. You are unique, my mother had gone on to say, with the concentration of a scientist, or a librarian. You are robust, lively, kind. Delightful. Your character is your beauty, and always will be. Then she turned around and resumed her sewing. I had heard things like this from grown-ups before, about being pretty on the inside, or special, or one-of-a-kind, and I always knew I was being sold merely a bucket full of bullshit. But my mother's voice betrayed nothing false. There was no lie in her tone, nothing to suggest that what she was telling me was anything less than some kind of prophecy. So I arrived at a level of peace, a feeling of a truce having been called between myself and beauty. I would never be pretty, or beautiful, or even cute, and it suited me just fine.