The glittering fall

The Ferrol Sams Award
Silver, ForeWord Book of the Year in fiction
Books and Culture Favorite Books of 2012

     Alden kept whispering in the dark, but Pip was emptied out and unable to speak. The jag of glee had depleted him, and he felt as if he had been gulping at some fine mist of drowsiness. Perhaps it was the Sandman's crystals, flung by the handful into the air. For a long time he lay caught in a no-man's-land between waking and sleeping until he opened his eyes and saw that a delicate and glittering rain was falling in the room. It came to him that he had seen many wonders in his travels, had gone north until he met the midnight flares of the aurora borealis, had waded through the high prairie grass until he knew it to be endless, and had crossed a western beach piled with agates and inset with pools of pink and green stars, but that now he had come to what might be home and this sight was the strangest of them all. In its in-between realm, he struggled to name the peculiar snow but could not. When he realized that he had felt no surprise, it occurred to him that he must be asleep. But yet he could feel the flecks against his skin and piling in the bedclothes though not moistening them. He closed his eyes.