SE10: A PARANORMAL ROMANCE: ETERNAL CUCKOO

Title: Eternal Cuckoo

Age Category: Adult

Genre: Paranormal Romance

Word Count: 90,000

Pitch:

Every time Rebecca and Adam die, they wake in the body of someone new. Finding each other could end their loneliness, but to stay together, they must cope with the moral implications of their condition.

First 250 Words of Manuscript:

Leo has a gun pointed at me. The wall clock over his shoulder goes tick, tick. I try to focus on it and not the gun. It’s an anniversary clock, our twenty-fifth.  “I want my wife,” Leo sobs. His finger trembles. This makes the whole gun shake. According to the clock it is 8:10 in the evening and four seconds… five seconds… six.  I take a breath. “Honey–”

He shouts: “Stop using her voice!” A few blond strands from his comb-over drift into his eyes. This is my husband, a balding Omaha veterinarian; and I am his wife, fifty-eight years old, pudgy, but pretty, with a sparkle in my brown eyes. I’m a bake sale queen, a church deacon, and until a moment ago, I was gripping a mug of hot cider labeled with the name REBECCA.

He steps forward to push the barrel against the skin above my left eye, right into the star-shaped chicken pox scar that Rebecca — I — got when she was nine years old.

“Tell me where she is,” he says.

Little, insignificant things I know about Rebecca rattle through my head in staccato, like how she abhors coconut and is allergic to lemon balm. She’s a size ten shoe, and she’s been embarrassed about that fact since college.  “Leo, put the gun down.”

“Stop talking like her!” he yells into my face. “Stop looking like her!”