She has failed, and now the voices are back, muttering indistinctly just beyond the range of her vision, behind her, here, no, turn and they've gone somewhere else.
Her shoes sink slightly into the soft earth. Patches of sky shine in puddles left over from last night's rain. She is not a writer at all, really she is merely a gifted eccentric. As she passes him on her way to the river she thinks of how successful he is, how fortunate, to be cleaning a ditch in an osier bed. He looks up at her, nods, looks down again into the brown water. She walks past one of the farm workers (is his name John?), a robust, small-headed man wearing a potato-colored vest, cleaning the ditch that runs through the osier bed. The voices murmur behind her bombers drone in the sky, though she looks for the planes and can't see them. She pauses, watching the sheep and the sky, then walks on. She walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she'll do, but even now she is almost distracted by the sight of the downs, the church, and a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a faint hint of sulfur, grazing under a darkening sky. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa.
She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. To be published in November, 1998 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. Excerpt from The Hours by Michael Cunningham.
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