Sample 3rd Person - Mona Corso
Sheri Moon Zombie PB

It was evening, and New York was hushed, even warm. The windows in the bedroom were open, with the heavy curtains tied back to let the air move. They were such thick curtains; winter caught a lot of dust up in them, and Mona had sneezed more than her fair share of times, in pulling them back. She wondered if she ought to wash them, but as she sat in the centre of the bed she shared with her fiance, a book barely touched on her lap, she knew it could wait.

On the wall, the hands of the clock stretched into miniature highways left uncharted for the last hour. Mona liked clocks with hands. Digital clocks cheapened the work one went through, as a kid, to learn what the hands meant, and how to count by fives. Every time she had to read the hour from a clock, she thought of her mother teaching her. Then she thought of her mother pulling out nickles and dimes and quarters, to line them up in straight rows, and tell her which were equal to the others. She remembered asking why there was no fifteen-cent coin. Her mama laughed, because it was such an unanswerable question. No one in the world knew why there were no fifteen-cent coins.

One day, Mona thought, she would have her own little one to explain fives, and tens, and twenty-fives, and the strange absence of fifteens and twenties, to. A month ago, she would have said, Yes, but that's not for a long time, now. Tonight, she drummed her knuckles against her chin, resting in her palm, and thought, That's in six months. And then she thought, But it had better not be - a baby might eat those nickles.

This morning, she stared at herself in the mirror, and knew she couldn't deny it, anymore. It wasn't much, but there was a curve at the bottom of her abdomen, where she had been all straight lines, before. It snuck up on her, rounded itself just so, when she wasn't paying any attention. When she was too busy worrying about when it would, in fact, sneak up on her. This is ridiculous, she had told herself. It's really ridiculous - why would he mind? Why do you mind? Why would anyone mind? And then she laughed, nervously. She tossed her head, in the unconscious way people do when they're making a show of nonchalance for the people around them. When it dawned on her that there was no one around, and she had done it anyway, she knew she had a problem.

Eddie, she knew, didn't suspect anything. Well, he had to have suspected something, as out of sorts as she had acted for the past two weeks. She assumed he had already called her parents and demanded (or politely suggested) to know which one of them was dying. When neither one of them was, well, he had probably tried to ask her what was wrong, and she had probably, for the thousandth time, started babbling on about a jell-o mould, and walked away.

In fact, she was sure all of that had happened. She bought a new mould earlier in the week. But the important thing was that, thus far, he couldn't possibly suspect her of trying to spring a baby on anyone. He knew she was trying to gain weight - if he had noticed at all, he must have innocently assumed her resolutions were going according to plan, and not given it another thought. Mona uncurled her loose fist, and tapped her fingers against her lip. But this week, this month, was the longest she could possibly go, without him catching wise. She was going to have to say something.

The bedroom door nudged open, and Lynn slunk in. The cat warbled affectionately (or something like that - Mona liked to imagine it was affectionate, since Lynn was always coming to find her, when she was holed up somewhere), and her mistress slid off the bed, and followed her, both their footsteps equally light, downstairs. Mona had always had the uncanny feeling, growing up, that cats were much wiser than they let on. It had been unfounded, until Lynn. The cat led her straight to Eddie, miraculously watching TV, instead of sitting in his basement. She wondered if Lynn hadn't brought him upstairs first, before coming to find her.