Slits

MEET ANGELA.

Teenager Angela wishes she could understand her odd family. Her mother is thornily difficult, her father is harshly distant, and her siblings offer no help, even after a terrible school incident. Struggling with self-injury, Angela’s plight intensifies at a parochial school sheltered within a tight coastal community. Strange family events, anxious friends, insensitive adults, and confusing occurrences swirl in a cloudy confusion. Then after a dreadful accident, Angela enters a psychiatric hospital with a special wing just for teens. An attentive therapist senses her turmoil, but small revelations seem only to increase the teen’s fierce façade.

What is wrong with Angela, her family, her parents, and especially her mother? Why are answers so hard to come by?

All seems lost until a herd of horses and Angela’s best friend Cali help point to a different way of thinking and believing.

CAROL MURPHY is a writer and consultant who lives with her husband, two cats, and a horse in Santa Cruz, California. She has an MA in Speech-Language Pathology and has her own business that specializes in pediatric speech-language disorders. She served for eight years on the CA State Speech-Language Pathology Audiology and Hearing Aid Dispensers Board. Besides publishing a newsletter, Learning Express, for over 25 years, she has written essays, interviews, stories and poems about children, language development, learning disabilities, the therapeutic and almost mystical influence of animals, and the many ways language, or a lack of it, colors life’s experiences. A few of her stories include “Likely Story,” published by www.specialeducationadvisor.com, “Dispersion” in Latchkey Tales: Afternoon Storms by Solarwyrm Press, “Whiffs” in Disorder by Reddashboard Press, and “Words” in Children, Churches and Daddies magazine by Scars Publications. She finds daily inspiration for writing through her experiences with the interplay of communication and the many ways lives can go awry, or be set straight, simply by a precise word at a pivotal moment. A favorite quote is “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein)