Excerpt: Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time there lived a happy little boy with his parents in a big, rambling house on a hill. The sun always seemed to shine on that house, even when it was raining, glinting a myriad of rainbows in the droplets. The hill was surrounded by fields of farmland, rich soil with its crops of hay and corn and fruit, less arable soils with grass cropped short by ever hungry sheep, and then, the little boys favorite, the extra-carefully tended fields where the horses ruled. He remembered the sunshine-laughter of his mother the first time he bumped along the fence line past her on his first pony ride. But even that memory of happiness was fading.