Anniversary

Warming the Cold Edge combines unpredictably blunt prose with wry humor to tell a parable about finding emotional health during a few months of bad weather.

The story focuses around Paige, a girl who enjoys her own company. She prefers things that result in isolation, like anthrax exposure, to team sports or group shopping. But after Paige watches her parents die, her alone time grows toxic. Desperate for human interaction that doesn’t come with “she’s the one whose parents died” eyes, Paige moves from Orlando to Seattle.

She rents a room with two strangers who share her twenty-something socially disaffected attitude. Scraper, a prison security guard who talks in combat stories, shows Paige that she can’t control crazy. Lance, a college dropout who edits textbooks for a living, becomes Paige’s optimistic catnip. Lance lures Paige on pedestrian-friendly adventures, teaches her kung fu, and points her towards yoga.

Paige also starts taking care of Hank, an elderly man whose memory replays his orphan youth at Boys Town. Hank asks Paige whether she wants to be right… or whether she wants to be happy. Just when Paige thinks she knows the answer, she’s served with a subpoena to testify at the vehicular homicide trial of the girl who killed her parents. What will she tell the jury?