An excerpt from Fallen Wood, Andy’s latest novel.
People will tell you about the light, about the long tunnel they glide up, on their way to the brightest, warmest, most dazzling incandescence you could imagine. They’ll tell you about making it almost all the way to the light, then being sucked back into the world and waking up in hospital, or at the side of the road, or with some lifesaver blowing air into their mouth. For me, not so. For me, death was the tall tree that I had climbed as a kid, when I’d wagged school every Wednesday afternoon rather than humiliate myself in sports class. Death was the gnarled, sap-sticky branch on which I sat, eating the neighbour’s passionfruit while I waited for the right time to show up at home. Death was the cool wind that caressed my face, turning my lips numb and making my throat and the back of my nostrils burn. Death was the voice of my father, deep, gravelly, rising up from below and calmly telling me to climb down from the tree and meet him in the kitchen. Death was the dread that filled me as my sweat-slicked hands slid down the trunk, as my leather shod feet whispered through the long grass, picking up a hundred sticky green seeds on their way. Death was me, pushing through the door and seeing him sitting at the table, his face an unreadable mask, his eyes slicing right into my head.
