The opening chapter of my debut novel, THE WHISPER OF FALLING SNOW.

October 2086

The Commissionary of Community Wellbeing, Gregory Stepanov, stepped into his private office bathroom and washed his hands and face for the seventh time that Monday morning. He’d been counting. When he was anxious or feeling bad, he had a habit of counting lots of mostly irrelevant things: the number of books on his shelves—there were forty-nine; the number of trees along the driveway—twenty-one. When things were really bad, he made categories of the things he counted: thirteen novels, twenty anthologies, sixteen collections of Party journals; nine maples, eight spruces, four birches.

What was troubling him today was not irrelevant.

A golden-brown face stared back, its almond-shaped hazel eyes reddened and hollowed from a night of grief and guilt, its normally wavy hair awry. His face, stripped of its beauty.

He wrung his soaped hands under the cold water. A bleak mixture of sleet and snow hissed against the windows. 

The language of the Snake.

Gregory Stepanov had had a good man murdered, a man whom he had respected and loved for many years. True, he had extended his life by more than a decade before he signed—had been forced to sign—the recalcitrant old man’s death warrant.

Like Pontius Pilate, “I am guiltless of this man’s death.” Except I’m not, and neither was Pilate.

Stepanov detested the “Sunday Specials,” and there were dozens of them every week. They were strangers, but as he signed their death warrants, Stepanov hated each one of them personally, by name.

By the time they went up the crematory chimney, though, he had forgotten them. Until the next week. And the whole damned process began again. Week after week. Year after year.

Yesterday was different. Yesterday was personal. Yesterday was John Pavlov.  No matter how delayed, a betrayal is a betrayal, and Gregory Stepanov knew it