Heather Fowler Writes . com

A brief summary of the novel Gravity:

Gravity is a magical realism love story novel about a woman born able to hold anything down, falling in love with a man who can easily up and float away.  Beth Rimmel is a famous painter returning from New York after a failed love affair, recovering at her overbearing mother's house.  Walter Hays is a day trader with zero gravity, caring for his dying father.

They first meet when Walter uses his antigravity talent to rescue Beth by running atop Puget Sound and diving to save her after he watches her fall from the end of a pier. As Walter saves Beth on that eventful day, Beth, too, saves him as the story continues by pulling him away from the dark emotional vortex his demented, dying father's rants inspire about the true nature of Walter's troubled childhood and  his immediate family tree.

As Beth and Walter come together and spin apart, Gravity is a story that illustrates that, often, the deepest, truest loves are best founded on the willingness of one partner to provide comfort and succor during the time of another's great weakness. 

An excerpt of the prologue:

Prologue:

On the day he was to rescue a drowning girl from the water, Walter Hays stood aimless on the Puget Sound , wearing a white t-shirt, powder blue swim trunks, and a pair of SunBand flip-flops.  In some seasons of his youth, when the tide pulled back like a grey-green coverlet, the shore was as wide as his eyes could see, and he remembered digging for clams, watching for bubbles to rise from the sand.  But the tide was in now, licking at the fences of nearby houses and making the shoreline scant.  

Long ago, he picked blackberries or huckleberries along roadsides, or searched for sea-softened glass with his sister Kelly--all this before their mother killed herself that last summer—but in this moment, at 35 years old, older though not necessarily wiser, Walter felt both empty and giddy with his lacking future prospects.  

It had been twenty years since this beach held any real sway for his motivations, but now, locked into his new duty of helping his father and his need to discover more about his childhood, he stood on the postage stamp of sand available at the edge of his father’s home, simply wanting to escape it again. 

The day was warm, only getting warmer.  A walk along the shore would have been grand, he mused, for the ocean was no less beautiful or mysterious than it had ever been, but today the water clung so close it lapped the back steps and porches of the decrepit dwellings he knew so well, and there was no soft, continuous place to amble.  What bits of beach there were were covered with small pebbles and driftwood.

Walter surveyed the strip.  He looked towards the pier and out to the island where the ferries traveled most during tourist season.  Later, as Kelly had advised, he would lay in the sun, reading financial magazines and listening to his transistor radio because,  “Relax, Walter,” she had said.  “Make a day of it.” 

He stretched his arms above his head, glancing towards the pier, and he dreamt about fishing.  It was then that he saw a distant, curvy redhead.  She wore a suit of black velvet in the May sun and traipsed unevenly along the pier.  “Must be a tourist,” he thought.  “Is she drunk?  And what a strange ensemble!”   

She wavered as she walked.  A thatch of her copper hair blazed in the midday sun.  If she had a black parasol, an imaginary one, he could foretell it blowing away in a stiff breeze.  She took each of her steps methodically, without looking up, her head bent stolidly down as if to view, plank by plank, her every faltering step. 

Because she didn’t belong to this beach or his retina, Walter kept watching.   Here, in warm weather, people often dressed as though the sixties had never passed.  They sported light cottons, sundresses, muumuus, or other casual clothes one would wear in a place that time forgot, for this was what this was: The town was slow, small, quiet…  A place where people lived in blue jeans and t-shirts, walking horses along paved roads.

Black velvet girl was out of place. Didn't she know?

Still, there she was, maneuvering precariously, and she approached the pier's end as though there were a destination beyond it, but Walter knew this pier had no railing.  Keep watching her, something told him.  So he did. 

 When she stood at pier's end, she first stood still, then stretched her arms to her sides, froze for a moment, and started spinning.  As she lost control and one foot missed the pier's edge, soon followed by the other, he witnessed her body enter the pale, cloudless sky, her skirt ballooning mid-air for just an instant before she met the water. 

Her head bobbed once, twice, a third time-- tiny like a small, reddened buoy in the distance—but she did not re-emerge.  "She's down," he said.  "She's really down."  It was the first time he felt a sense of urgency about anything in weeks.   He had to go after her.

The end of the pier would be a far swim, he decided.  He’d get there faster by running.  As he had done that morning when he walked the walls of his borrowed bedroom, he took off his shirt, his shoes, and the sixth gold necklace, and then ran towards the place where she submerged, allowing the pads of his feet to graze the top of the water, cooling his soles, with the sixth chain and pendant held out far to his left so as to keep his weight from centering. 

Squinting against the glare, he sought her below the surface, and when her dark shape finally hung below him, he brought the chain back to his chest and dropped.  He then did a diver’s flip to reach her.

When he reached her, he pulled at her arms, hefting her body towards the surface, but with the water lodged in the velvet made her heavy, so he stripped her blazer and long skirt...    From his underwater space across from her, he watched her blink and appear to stare towards him, but hers was an aimless stare, the current was cold, and the bubbles escaping her lips were both small and infrequent.  He focused his attention to loosening the buttons and stays on a few more garments until she was a slight girl again, and then he pulled her onto his back when she wore only her long, white slip.  This, just before he swam like hell, kicking hard to surface.   

As he swam her to shore with a double-arm tow, he was barely aware he had dropped the sixth necklace in the process, but he thought of Kelly and how proud she would be.  "You saved someone, Walt?" she'd ask.  "No.  Really?"  Fearful by nature, it was his first effort at saving anyone. 

And the girl was cold on his back, unmoving except perhaps one small shift of her legs that resembled a slight kick as her limbs tangled with his, though even that could have been illusory, a trick of the current.

As he laid her flat on the sand, he lowered his mouth to hers and alternately pumped her chest and breathed into her mouth, watching for signs of life as he addressed her cold, still face with growing intensity.  “Breathe!” he said, trying to wake her. “Goddamn it, woman, Breathe!” 

~

Moments before, Beth Rimmel ambled onto the pier, hardly caring where she wandered.  She thought about Julia’s fiancé and her own relative failures, putting one foot in front of the other, walking the pier like a tight rope. Dave was useless as a therapist, she decided.  No more therapy. 

She thought about Stew, about her mother, and about how she missed

.  Then she looked angrily outwards towards the sea.  “I hope you are enjoying your irritating new fling, Stew,” she said.  "I am alone, and I hate you."

 Her hands flung to her sides.  Wind whipped her clothes.  Her hair blew free from its stays.  It's a big world, she thought, yet I am so minute.  She stood, staring at the water from the pier's end for the longest time. 

Then she began to spin. 

This spinning started slowly, like a child's motion in the grass, one whose movements accelerated only with a growing daydream, but the planks felt shifty below her feet.  She ceased to care what she kept in view.  All was a whirling circle of doubt.  Her mother would continue to demean her.  She was a nobody here in this place.  She wanted for nothing. 

Most of all, she did not want to return to her that house where everything seemed more than a little unkind.  She simply wanted to cease to exist.  And who was Julia’s fiancé, she asked, to denigrate her to the ranks of unimportant people that even she would have shunned?     He didn’t know her.  He didn't know Julia.

Then again, he wasn't the one ambling to a pier's edge with his sole purpose to spin out and fall.  Falling would be nice.  Beth wasn’t good with men.  Wasn’t good with family.  Wasn’t even good enough even for a cheating, no-good, lying scumbag like Stew, despite that she could paint well-- and no one doubted that.  Yes, I am a failure at living and loving, she decided as the world twirled.  I am home, yet I am nowhere---or possibly I am somewhere and something so small that my newest absence will leave no trace.

Looking at the ocean, unpeopled as it was, it was easy to dream of being a molecule of air, a particle of nothingness.    It was in this moment that she sped from the pier to the air beyond it, first one foot then the other descending. 

There was no railing.  She knew this.  Not for years.  Not since the motorcyclist accident.  As she fell, wind lifted her skirt and the coattails of her dress jacket swelled upwards.  She closed her eyes tightly.  She entered the water, bobbing up and down only twice, then wrapped her arms around herself and let herself sink.

She did not struggle as some people may have.  The velvet was heavy, but she could have done something if she swam, if she knew how to swim—and perhaps she would have reclaimed her will to live and done something more than look around at the underwater world around her as the finite quantity of bubbles escaped her lips, but “I don’t swim and I won’t swim,” she thought again, recollecting, as the cold water permeated her garments, the essential moments of that long-ago summer when her mother had signed her and Julia up for lessons.  They had gone to the pool in pink swimsuits with ruffles and matching caps, but Beth had refused to learn.  Within weeks, Julia spanned the pool with a butterfly stroke and floated.  Julia was could do all of it.  Beth balled up her fists and sat against the wall, sulking.  In the end, her silent sulk paid off.  Her mother stopped insisting that she even step into the shallows.  “You’ll do what you want to do,” Lisa Rimmel had insisted.  “And not a damn thing more.”

Still, motionless today as her lungs began to burn and the sun seemed a golden, blurry disc above the water, she remembered those moments of rebellion and closed her eyes, almost wishing she’d chosen differently.  Even in her twenties, when boyfriends wanted to help, she had feigned indifference. "I can live without swimming," she then.  But now, as her lungs began to sting and fill, she wondered whether drowning would be painful. Whether and how much?   Dear God, please let this come quickly, she thought. 

Her clothes were both heavy and buoyant.  She felt the water sliding between their layers and her skin.  She didn't fight the sinking feeling as she dropped deeper that her natural gift for overzealous gravity made this a fitting end. 

Her skirt floated below her, making her feet and lower half invisible.  It was dark and cold in the murky water, and soon, she would see nothing. "I'm sorry, Julia," was her last thought.  "It would be terrible for you if I died today.  I'm not trying to ruin your engagement."  

She closed her eyes, trying to clear her head, especially trying not to let her last cognitive moment become some commercial jingle or a hateful expression condemning Stew to rot in hell. This was not about him!  She thought of buttercups and the red tropic flowers in Hawaii.  She thought of saints, the scent of oil paint that clung to her after a studio session, the way the thinner cleaned the brushes with dipping whorls of paint. 

Just then, a hand reached out and touched her. 

A man’s hand. 

She had seen his feet on the water above her seconds before, but thought this a hallucination. Until he made contact, she thought he too was surreal and non-existent—but it was real enough then how he stripped the clothes from her body, real enough the heat of his touch on her thighs, shoulders, and waist. 

He had no diving gear, but wore a large amount of gold jewelry on his neck, and “Freak,” she thought, as he removed her jacket, noticing that the gold chains glimmered on his neck like a school of glamorous fish catching darting surface light.  Then she thought: “Thank god for you, freak.”  

And he somehow drew her back up towards the air.

And he swam her to shore.  How, she didn’t know. 

She had blacked out completely until he pressed on her chest with his hands, breathing into her mouth to practice CPR.    On shore, as her eyes fluttered open, she watched his lips moving before she registered his words.  “Breathe!” he said insistently, shaking her, “God damn it, woman, breathe!” 

She opened her eyes. 

He stared at her. 

She stared at him.   She vomited water repeatedly, and then drew breath. 

“Thank you,” she said, with a shaky voice.

“You’re welcome,” he replied.  “I’m Walter.  You were drowning.”

“I was drowning?” she asked.

“You were,” he said.

And then, like the unwelcome group they had become, the bulk of her family, from the engagement party and at least thirty members strong, converged.

***

Current Projects:

Along with Gravity, which is a complete novel of 86,000 words,  Heather Fowler is currently in the process of writing two more novels entitled Fidelities and Sex Angel, as described on the homepage.

An avid fan of the short story, Heather Fowler currently compiles and edits 6 book-length works of stories and is in the process of researching venues for publication. 

She also writes form poetry and free verse, and is currently working on four manuscripts of poetry.

 With over 160 stories to her name and a growing body of work in the novel form, she seeks  a fearless publisher willing to look at work that spans the "traditional right up to the edge"--or an agent who desires a prolific author with an emerging platform.

To Request a Partial or Complete copy of any manuscript on this site:

Please either use fowlerhm@hotmail.com or the contact page on this site.