Music Fiction
Date Published: 09-30-2025
Publisher: Covfefe Press
For anyone who’s ever said, “They’re playing my song!”
Halloween Eve, 1961, in his dingy Bronx walkup apartment, seventeen-year-old
Jimmy Welton hears the opening notes of a song in his head. Jimmy’s
still mourning his firefighter father, who taught him to play the guitar but
recently died in a house fire, leaving his family destitute. Jimmy takes this
song, about all he misses from his life now, to the New York amusement park
where he works after school. There, he meets Mark Morgan, a rebellious teen
with his own band, who eventually invites Jimmy to join them. And the rest is
rock’n roll history…
the songs they write and sing together become the backbone of rock musical
history. And the song Jimmy first heard on Halloween, “Wrapped in Gauze”,
becomes the song that not only comforts him in that terrible time but also
comforts others: Victoria, recently divorced and dealing with an unthinkable
family tragedy; Carolyn, whose final flippant words to someone in pain can’t
be taken back; and Jack, battling back from unimaginable loss with the help of
his cheeky therapist and a song he thinks he hates.
FROM A SONG is the story of a song that makes us smile, that breaks our
hearts, that stays with us forever, and the very special band that started it
all.
EXCERPT
The results were in before Victoria had prepared herself to hear them.
Cancer! How could a boy of twelve get cancer? How was this possible?
She didn’t know what to do first. Call her ex? Tell Dave? Tell Michael? Call the school?
The doctor advised her to start treatment immediately, to let Dave and the school know and then handle everything else as needed. This was a lot to deal with, and Dave needed treatment as quickly as possible. Once they established that, they could do everything else in small bites.
Victoria asked the inevitable question. “How bad is this? I mean, it’s not—he’d not going to die?”
The doctor answered gently, “This is bad, Victoria. I have to be honest with you.”
“But you’ve had other patients who—” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.
“No, actually,” the doctor said as gently as possible. “I’ve never had a patient this young develop cancer.”
“Well, but you’ve had other patients who did? How did they do?”
The doctor sighed. “Let’s get Dave into treatment as soon as possible.”
Victoria found her voice. “How bad is this? What are we looking at, here?”
The doctor looked her as kindly as possible. “We’ll see how he responds to treatment. Some people do incredibly well with chemotherapy and radiation. They’ve beaten it. But it’s going to be hard on his system, and we’ll do our best.”
“Surgery?” Victoria asked. She was thinking she needed to stop at the library as soon as she left the office and pick up every book they had on cancer.
“I’m afraid Dave’s growth is too big for surgery,” the doctor answered. “It’s too deeply rooted. We couldn’t get it all, even if we went in. But chemotherapy has done some really good things. You’ll be surprised. He won’t have an easy time of it, but we’ll do our best.”
Victoria stood up and shook hands with the doctor. She didn’t know that the tears were pouring down her face; she felt nothing but an emptiness deep inside her. She had a million things to do and no idea where to start. But she would do whatever she had to do.
In the car on the way to the library, she snapped on the radio, hardly knowing what she was doing. “Here it is again,” the bright-voiced DJ announced. “It’s ‘Wrapped in Gauze’, the remake, by the legendary GooseBumps, and everyone’s asking for it this week. Enjoy!”
She didn’t know when the song began that she was singing along with it. She had no idea how she got from the doctor’s office to the library. But she did know that when she pulled into the tree-shaded parking lot ten minutes later, her voice was hoarse, she was almost blind with tears, and somehow, she felt a million percent better.
* * *
Dave handled the news very well, though Victoria broke down, even as her friends tried to tell her it wasn’t good for Dave to see her like this. She tried to apologize to him, choking on her tears, and Dave put his arms around her and said, “It’s okay, Mom. Don’t worry.”
That made her cry harder.
Michael was speechless and almost as upset as she was. He hadn’t hugged his brother since Dave learned to walk and started annoying him, but he wrapped Dave in his long bony arms and hugged him until Dave pulled away.
Long after Dave went to sleep, she sat with Michael in their little kitchen. The size of it no longer mattered. The fact that it never got the morning sun and was often gloomy no longer mattered. The old wallpaper she wanted to replace but couldn’t afford to replace no longer mattered. Suddenly, every problem she’d ever had narrowed to one: Dave.
“He’ll be all right, Mom,” Michael said to her. He was patting her hand while she tried to drink a mug of hot coffee, but she kept spilling it out of the mug. She wanted to fix him a sandwich or something to eat, but he said he couldn’t swallow anything. He looked pale and suddenly much older, though he was only three years older than Dave. She found herself praying that he would never get sick like this. It couldn’t happen twice in one family, could it?
She hoped the stack of books she’d checked out of the library had answers. She hoped someone had answers.
She’d had a terrible conversation with her ex that afternoon, before Dave came home from school. At first, he was mad at her for calling his office, as usual; he never liked her to call the office, even when they were married. Then he was heartsick at the news. He asked her repeatedly if she shouldn’t get a second opinion. She explained that the tests had already been done twice. He told her he wanted to bring in another specialist. Exhausted, finally, she told him to consult whomever he liked; she was starting treatment with Dave at once, and he’d better be sure the insurance was up to date.
“I don’t care what it costs,” she told him. “Don’t bother me with that. I’ll spend whatever I have to. Nothing matters except getting him well. So don’t even think about cheaping out here, or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
Dave, the ebullient twelve-year-old who rode his bike too fast, played basketball every day, in season or out, and had a crush on a girl in his history class, charmed all the nurses at the hospital. He wasn’t too sick to joke with them, and they adored him, bringing extra portions of the soup that was the only food he could keep down, and making excuses to slip into his room to say hello when he was awake.
SUSAN SLOATE is the author or co-author of
more than 25 published books. This includes 3 editions of Forward to Camelot,
a time-travel thriller about the JFK assassination that became a #6 Amazon
bestseller, was honored in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a
Hollywood company for film production. She also wrote the autobiographical
Broadway novel Stealing Fire, which became a #2 Amazon bestseller and Hot New
Release, and Realizing You (with Ron Doades), for which she invented a new
genre: the self-help novel.
and non-fiction, including the children’s biography Ray Charles: Find
Another Way, which won the silver medal in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam
Awards. Mysteries Unwrapped: The Secrets of Alcatraz led to her 2009
appearance on the TV series MysteryQuest for The History Channel. She has also
been a sportswriter and a screenwriter, edited the popular Kyle & Corey
young-adult book series, managed two political campaigns and founded an
author’s festival to promote student literacy in her hometown outside
Charleston, SC. She has appeared in multiple volumes of WHO’S WHO IN
AMERICA, WHO’S WHO IN ENTERTAINMENT and WHO’S WHO AMONG AMERICAN
WOMEN.
