Giveaway Alert!!! Win a signed copies of The Second Cup by Sarah Marie Graye .@SarahMarieGraye #heartfelt #stories .@rararesources #sucide #tearjerking

Today, I’m taking part in the first anniversary blog blitz for The Second Cup by Sarah Marie Graye. I asked Sarah Marie to share the most heart-rending scene from her novel and she chose the scene where Abbie finds out she’s pregnant.

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 The Second Cup

by

Sarah Marie Graye

Abbie had known there was something awry with her body the way only a pregnant person can. And it wasn’t just the swollen ankles, swollen abdomen and swollen breasts.

The tiredness and the backache that she’d put down to too many long days and too many late nights had reached the heights where they could no longer be ignored as symptoms of something bigger.

The pregnancy test was a mere formality: a wand to wave magician-like at Ebbs in a “look what we’ve made” kind of way. Except that she didn’t want to wave anything at Ebbs, except maybe a hand to shoo him away.

She had a little person growing inside of her and it was half Ebbs and she didn’t know if she wanted it. And until she knew, she wasn’t going to be able to tell him.

The secrets and the waiting and the decisions. They all became nothing when the pain came. It didn’t just rip her in two: she’d felt hung, drawn and quartered, her mind flitting back to history lessons at school, to the horrors of the centuries gone by where people who betrayed the crown were subject to a slow and humiliating torturous death.

Abbie felt like she was suffering a similar agonising fate, but all she could think of was the little person inside of her, that they were probably dying in her place.

Ebbs rushed her to A&E, knowing something was terribly wrong, but having no idea of the cause. At that point Ebbs simply cared about Abbie – and she realised she could have told him. But it’s too late for confessions, so she must speak in whispers with the hospital staff.

A positive pregnancy test confirms what she tells them in hushed tones. An ultrasound scan confirms the worst. Nothing in her uterus.

An explosion in her right fallopian tube. The worst type of ectopic pregnancy. A medical emergency. Abbie rushed into theatre, crying for herself, for her dead baby, for anything to make the pain go away. She cried out – the sounds began to form the name “Paul” – and she quietens herself with her fist in case Ebbs is near.

Later, after a straightforward laparoscopy, she was moved to the recovery ward, her ruptured fallopian tube removed. Her baby removed.

The part of her and Ebbs that she didn’t know if she wanted she now so desperately craved. She knew it was the hormones pulsating round her body, but that knowledge didn’t stop her womb from aching for the life that never was.

Later still, she was at home with Ebbs, the two of them coming to terms with the pregnancy neither of them supposedly knew about. He thinks it is easier that way: that they never got to know the idea of having a baby before it was taken away.  

She agreed, nodding, trying to hide the waves of grief for the baby she’d known about for three weeks. And along with that grief, she needed to come to terms with a diagnosis of pelvic inflammatory disease causing damage to her fallopian tubes. The reason her baby didn’t make it to her womb.

The potential damage it may have caused to her other fallopian tube. The problems she may face conceiving safely in the future.

She comforts herself with “at least” – the motto she has come to live her life by – that at least they didn’t have a Band-Aid baby. So Abbie knew she needed to be grateful alongside her grieving. To not be trapped by a baby like her mother was.

And then later still, none of it matters. Shortness of breath, followed by feeling faint, followed by yet more pain. Another hurried journey to A&E. Another visit to theatre. A nasty infection. Another tube removed.

Just isolated ovaries swimming around inside her, with no connection to her womb. No way to make babies – Band-Aid or not.

And then later still, Abbie and Ebbs are no longer together. The doctor checked Abbie’s scars and told her she had healed well. She looked down at her abdomen and agreed. Physically she had healed very well.

The little cream lines near her belly button sat in the natural folds of her skin and could easily be mistaken for chicken pox scars. Yes. Physically she had healed very well.

And then later still, came an extra glass of wine to ease the pain, to keep her company, an attempt to fill the hole. And then later still came Dominic. But the hole was too big for him to fill too.

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 The Second Cup

Would your life unravel if someone you knew committed suicide? Theirs did.

Faye knows her heart still belongs to her first love, Jack. She also knows he might have moved on, but when she decides to track him down, nothing prepares her for the news that he's taken his own life.

Faye is left wondering how to move forward - and whether or not Jack's best friend Ethan will let her down again. And the news of Jack's death ripples through the lives of her friends too.

Abbie finds herself questioning her marriage, and wondering if she was right to leave her first love behind. Poor Olivia is juggling her job and her boyfriend and trying to deal with a death of her own. And Jack's death has hit Beth the hardest, even though she never knew him.

Is Beth about to take her own life too?

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Giveaway – Win 3 x Signed copies of The Second Cup by Sarah Marie Graye

(Open Internationally)

*Terms and Conditions –Worldwide entries welcome.  Please enter using the Rafflecopter box below.  The winner will be selected at random via Rafflecopter from all valid entries and will be notified by Twitter and/or email. If no response is received within 7 days then I reserve the right to select an alternative winner. Open to all entrants aged 18 or over.  Any personal data given as part of the competition entry is used for this purpose only and will not be shared with third parties, with the exception of the winners’ information. This will passed to the giveaway organiser and used only for fulfilment of the prize, after which time I will delete the data.  I am not responsible for despatch or delivery of the prize.

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Sarah Marie Graye was born in Manchester in 1975, to English Catholic parents. To the outside world Sarah Marie’s childhood followed a relatively typical Manchester upbringing, until aged nine, when she was diagnosed with depression.

It’s a diagnosis that has stayed with Sarah Marie over three decades, and something she believes has coloured every life decision, including the one to write a novel.

Sarah Marie wrote The Second Cup as part of an MA Creative Writing practice as research degree at London South Bank University – where she was the vice-chancellor’s scholarship holder.

Sarah Marie was diagnosed with ADHD in November 2017 and published an extended edition of The Second Cup in February 2018 that included character interviews so she could diagnose one of her characters with the same condition.

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Described as 'unsparing in its emotional honesty', Tilting by Nicole Harkin #memoir #excerpt @rararesources @harkinna

Tilting, A Memoir

by

Nicole Harkin

We only learned about our father's girlfriend after he became deathly ill and lay in a coma 120 miles from our home.

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Overhearing the nurse tell Linda--since I was nine I had called my mom by her first name--about the girlfriend who came in almost every day to visit him when we weren't there confirmed that the last moment of normal had passed us by without our realizing it. Up to then our family had unhappily coexisted with Dad flying jumbo jets to Asia while we lived in Montana. We finally came together to see Dad through his illness, but he was once again absent from a major family event--unable to join us from his comatose state. This is the moment when our normal existence tilted.

Dad recovered, but the marriage ailed, as did Linda, with cancer. Our family began to move down an entirely different path with silver linings we wouldn't see for many years.

In this candid and compassionate memoir which recently won a Gold Award in The Wishing Shelf Book Award, Nicole Harkin describes with an Impressionist's fine eye the evolution of a family that is quirky, independent, uniquely supportive, peculiarly loving and, most of all, marvelously human.

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  Extract 

Tilting, A Memoir

We made great time on the first day of the trip and didn’t stop at any marinas. We ate the peanut butter and jelly or ham sandwiches Linda brought and drank the juice boxes.
“Mom, where are we stopping tonight? Can you show me on the map?”
Both parents looked at me but didn’t say anything.
“Mom, the hotel is where on the map?”
“A hotel has different floors. A motel is only one floor. The places along the river are motels,” Linda said.
“We’re sleeping on the boat tonight.”
I stared at Linda, thinking about what she said.
“But there’s no place to go to the bathroom. Why?”
“Dad doesn’t know where the money is,” she said.
“It’s in his wallet.”
“Nicole, he doesn’t know where his wallet is.”
“Did he lose it?”
Again my parents looked back at me.
“He might have left it in the car,” said Linda.
The boat with its orange cushions and orange all-weather carpet shrank. The party barge quickly lost its fun.
“Well, we have to go back.”
“It’s too far to go back. You can never go back,” said Linda.
“What about the bathroom?”
“The boys can pee off the boat.”
“I’m not a boy.”
“You’ll have to jump in,” said Linda.
“What about you, Mom?” I asked.
“That’s enough.”
The locks that peppered the river lifted and lowered boats, as though they were in a giant bathtub, allowing the boats to traverse areas of the river with dams.
After the kids fell asleep on the boat the next evening, Dad pulled up to a lock and rang the bell to alert the lockmaster we needed to go through it. Without showers, we smelled and looked homeless.
Nothing happened.
Dad kept ringing. Once the kids woke up, Linda blasted the boat’s air horn. The lockmaster still didn’t respond.
This lock had railroad ties placed together to form walls and doors. Rebar steps formed a ladder for climbing out of the lock. The stars and moon shined brightly and an outline of the trees could be seen.
“Jack, you need to climb up and go find the lockmaster,” Linda said.
“He’s coming.”
“He’s not coming.”
“What else am I supposed to do?” Dad asked.
“I already told you to climb up the ladder and go get him.”
He didn’t want to get on that ladder, but he climbed slowly up it.
“Can you see those spiders above your head? Watch out for those.”
“LINDA!”
“I see some big spiders.”
Linda used the flashlight to light Dad’s way up the ladder.
“Linda, stop laughing and point the flashlight where I can see it.”
“The flashlight’s attracting bugs,” she said.
Dad found the lockmaster in his house, asleep. The lockmaster hadn’t expected a family on a pontoon boat to come through in the middle of the night.
On the way back down the ladder, Linda kept harassing Dad.
“I think I saw some really big spiders. Did you feel their webs?”
“Linda!”
Dad called a guy who had bought a plane from him and lived nearby asking him for a loan. The guy lived in Memphis, and he met us at a marina along the river for an exchange that must have looked like some shady deal. The guy drove up, handed the Dad a wad of cash, and drove off. We had some money again, but still only enough for fuel and some food, not for a motel.
The next day things took a turn for the worse.
“Dad, why’s the boat tilting to the side?”
“Well, Nicole, I think there’s a leak in one of the pontoons,” said Dad.
His calm response meant he had already noticed the problem and deemed it unworthy of mentioning to me. The fact that the pontoons were steel instead of aluminum seemed more important.
“A leak?”
“Yes.”
“We’re sinking!” I screamed.
“Sinking” sat in that spot in my brain where the most terrifying things that could happen to a person resided.
“Yes, technically, we are sinking. But very slowly,” said Dad.
“What are we going to do?”
“Nothing. It’s not that bad.”
Linda seemed resigned to Dad’s assessment: keep going, press on.
I was less convinced but stuck on the boat nonetheless.
It hadn’t rained much that summer, making the river low in some places. Dad had taught John and me how to drive the boat, making sure we looked at the map to stay away from the shoals.
“Dad, it’s a little shallow here,” said John.
Dad was in the back of the boat working on something else, not listening to John. We jolted a bit as the boat slid firmly onto a shoal. The other times we’d run aground, Dad had jumped in and pushed us off.
“Jesus Christ, John. I’ll push us off.”
“Jack, no! You can’t do that,” Linda said.
“Why not?”
“Can’t you see the signs?”
We turned our heads. The signs along the banks of the river stated, “NO FISHING, SWIMMING, OR RECREATING. CONTAMINATED WATER” above icons with swimmers and fishermen X-ed out.
As we sat there on the shoal hours went by. The sun moved from one side of the river to the other. There were no trees nearby and the mosquito spray no longer worked. And, we were running out of drinking water. Dad stood up.
“Jack, you can’t get in the water.”
“I have to. It shouldn’t be that difficult.”
There was no other way. He jumped in and struggled to move the boat.
Linda shouted, “Keep your balls up, honey.”

A few days went by like this, living and sleeping on the boat. We’d lay out our towels and fall asleep on the open front deck under the stars. Linda and Dad lay on the bench seats, covered in towels. Linda had had some money in her wallet, but not enough for the whole trip. For food, we had sandwiches that came in triangular-shaped containers from vending machines at the marinas. The long side of the container peeled back so I could get my ham salad or turkey sandwich out. When we ran out of those we only had the Oreos Linda had packed as a surprise.

“OK, where’s the motel we’re stopping at?”

Once she laughed, everyone laughed.

Nicole Harkin currently resides in Washington, DC with her husband and two small children. She works as a writer and family photographer. As a Fulbright Scholar during law school, Nicole lived in Berlin, Germany where she studied German environmentalism. Her work can be found in Thought Collection and you are here: The Journal of Creative Geography. She is currently working on mystery set in Berlin. Her photography can be seen at www.nicoleharkin.com.

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