The Fold

By: Michael James McFarland

Narrated by: Eric Reed

What if, on a clear summer day, your worst fear came to pass?

Driving home from vacation, tanned and relaxed, you pull into an isolated rest stop and your entire life changes. While your back is turned, your pregnant wife disappears. No cause, no explanation, just a lone shoe in the tangled weeds to prove she was ever there.

What would you do?

Search the area, of course.… Call her name until your voice is raw. But eventually, to summon help, you have to get back in your car and drive away without her. The first town you happen upon is utterly deserted; no suggestion of death or calamity, just unguarded storefronts…the residents inexplicably gone.

Your wife is found the following morning in this same town, though now it’s populated, almost normal to the passing eye. She’s been raped, traumatized. There’s a gap in her memory and she seems haunted. You try to get back to your lives, though nothing is the same. A grim shadow darkens the celebratory date on next year’s calendar. You find yourself cursed, doing things you never imagined…finally returning to the town where it started to find out why.

The Fold is a novel that explores the darker elements within ourselves. It’s a novel that brings out the worst in its characters, in turn asking the listener the same uncomfortable questions: to what lengths will we go to resume our former lives? What depths?

©2022 Michael James McFarland (P)2023 Michael James McFarland