: Sarah Fitzgerald Hobel
: wish upon
: Books on Demand
: 9783749418350
: 1
: CHF 6.10
:
: Gegenwartsliteratur (ab 1945)
: English
: 264
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
An old woman wishes on a falling star, setting off an extraordinary sequence of events: a Vietnam Veteran decides to make one final journey before he dies and finds something he didn't know he was searching for, a single mother struggles to rescue her relationship with her delinquent teenage son, an emotionally crippled scientist resorts to crime to get her hands on a rare meteor and the leader of a snow-worshiping cult chooses a new object of devotion. All of them gather in the alpine town of Zermatt, Switzerland, where their wishes and memories weave a story of what it means to forget, to remember and to be remembered.

Sarah Fitzgerald Hobel was born in Wurzburg, Germany; grew up in Syracuse, New York; graduated college at Jacksonville University in Florida and since then has called Switzerland home. She has a husband, three grown children, a cat and a dog. She has worked with children in various day care and nursery school settings for over 25 years in addition to working as an English teacher. She has also been an amateur soccer coach at FC Seuzach for 15 years. When not working or writing, she enjoys training with her dog, trying a new groove out on her drum set, peering at the stars through her telescope or studying Russian.

Chapter 3


A few days after the meteorite struck earth, it began snowing. Fat flakes drifted down in the night as Lucia lay restless in her bed and Sparky kept guard by the window. She watched the ceiling without seeing it, musing that it hadn’t taken long for journalists to discover where the meteorite had landed and who had almost been clocked by it. The light and the noise must have caused quite a stir in town. But she figured that the media storm was over and the snow would protect her. The snow absorbed sound and the world around her had fallen silent.

At the crash site the intense heat from the meteor had somehow burned the snow in the impact area into a strange kind of hot crystal ice, but that was being covered up by fresh powder, along with all the journalists’ tracks—everything wiped clean for a fresh start. By the time the sun came up, burning off the fluffy snow clouds, 20 cm of new powder covered the landscape, taking the edge of the cliffs and spiky rocks. A skiers dream, Lucia thought as she peered out the window. She hadn’t donned skis herself for ten years, her bones were too fragile.

The window glass had become a bit warped over time, bending the landscape into gentle hills and swirls. The sunlight threw everything into stark relief—shadows were deep against the brilliance of the snow and it hurt her eyes to look at the scenery for too long. Snowblindness was a real risk in the mountains. Several of her childhood friends had suffered from various degrees of the affliction, sometimes running head first into boulders during games of hide-and-seek.

Lucia took a step back so her breath wouldn’t fog the window up. Her memory must be failing. She couldn’t remember how long she had lived in this house. She couldn’t remember what her mother looked like. She couldn’t remember the name of her last dog. And she couldn’t remember—something else. She patted Sparky’s flank. “I am getting old.”

An alpine clough, one of the few birds Lucia knew, called a warning. Suddenly the earth lurched under Lucia’s feet and from high on a peak on a mountain across from her house a tiny snowball started its way to the valley. As it rolled it gathered mass, which merged together to form a sliding sheet of snow, snow dust tossed into the air, a rolling cloud weighing tons. White death. Lucia watched the avalanche slide d