Sugar: A Novel - Softcover

Rob Slater, Slater

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1440172641 ISBN 13: 9781440172649

Verlag: iUniverse, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Frank Black is a god on Wall Street. He has survived the Great Recession. At home, he has the dream life; lives in a Mansion, has a beach house in the Hamptons, a beautiful wife and two adorable sons. The millions of dollars he makes each year, seem to provide him with everything he could ever want. When a prized client asks him to spend a month in the Dominican Republic to review the potential acquisition of a sugar plantation, he can't refuse. On the island, Frank meets a tiny man who has nothing except his daughter. Enslaved by the plantation, this man teaches Frank the difference between wanting and needing. He opens Frank's eyes to the real world, not the one made of Sugar. One person can change the world, and in this stirring tale, we come to understand how. It wasn't enough for Frank Black to have what most would have longed for in this life: a beautiful, caring wife, handsome, good boys, more money than ninety-eight percent of the world, comfort, luxury, and most of all he was loved. It simply wasn't enough. The drive for more consumed him. He would be a loser if he didn't win the big one. He needed to get more of what he had to satisfy his insatiable lust for the Sugar in life, the coatings, the super¿cial wants and desires of a life unful¿lled. His addiction had grown out of control. He needed now, rather than wanted. Where his wants turned to needs is hard to say, but it is for certain they were no less powerful than the addiction of drugs. He couldn't imagine a life without what he had, not who. He always imagined the who in his life would be there forever. Until it all changed. His American Dream went awry. He awoke, and that's when Frank Black started living and stopped dreaming.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rob Slater formerly worked on Wall Street with JPMorgan and was a venture capitalist in Upper Manhattan. Along with his wife, he frequently donates his time to charitable causes and community service. He is the author of The Web Master: Operation Peacemaker and The Streak. He lives in Northern Virginia.

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Sugar

A NovelBy ROB SLATER

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Rob Slater
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4401-7264-9

Chapter One

Franklin David Black was only ten in his dream. He was back on grandmother's farm.

Lost in the dark woods, on the west side of his grandmother's home in Connecticut, he recognized the large oak he had carved his name into just last year when his parents had dropped him off for a long weekend away with each other. It was rare they went away together, let alone spoke to each other for more than a few moments without erupting into an argument. Frank had felt something was wrong when they dropped him off; later that weekend he would find out about their plans for divorce.

Inside his dream, Frank was running from something. It was a terrible hungry thing that chased him. He could feel the hot, wet breath upon his bare neck. He ran, and ran. In only his white briefs he dodged the limbs and branches of the scraggly trees, each threatening to cut him as he passed. The woods looked as if it were filled with long arms, bent fingers and hidden dark faces.

As he ran he saw a large cake on the side of the path. It was white with purple trimming all along its edges. It was stacked in three layers like a wedding cake.

He ran up a hill, towards the light streaming in through the canopy of larger trees.

His legs were tired. He remembered having those skinny legs that didn't do much when he was young. They weren't much good for running or hiking or kicking, the things young boys need to do.

He was now on a paved walkway at the rim of the cliff. The walkway spanned the top of the cliff's edge, and below was the roaring ocean. Frank must have been one hundred feet high at the edge of the cliff. Down below were large brown rocks the frothy blue ocean violently thrashed, sending cool sprays of water and mist high enough to reach his flushed face.

As he turned, a large man in an overcoat stood before him. The figure was dark and ominous. His collars turned up shielding his face from view. The he lifted his head. His face appeared now like a rising moon from the black coat.

The dark figure was Frank, himself.

His breathing stopped with an enormous gasp!

If it could, Frank's heart would have fallen right out of his chest, then and there.

Stumbling backwards, his foot slipped off the edge of the cliff and he fell. Faster and faster he went down. Turning he saw the rocks racing towards him.

The sensation of flying through the air to his death was incredible. It was like no other. Suddenly, Frank Black felt alive.

He felt the tiny hairs on his hands. He could smell the clean salt water below and feel the fear drain away. The rocks were coming fast. They were craggy and pocked with holes.

Suddenly, everything went black.

Frank was in a dark place.

He heard water crashing and felt a churning in his stomach.

"Reef the mainsail!"

His father was at the helm of their sailboat. As a busy attorney in Manhattan, his father had little time for Frank, an only child. They lived in a substantial red brick colonial in a neighborhood where there were a few streets with houses and fewer children.

He also was not the most popular kid in his class. He was very intelligent and thought differently than most kids. He was always in the most advanced classes and usually the cool kids and prettier girls he liked were not in these classes. He was a nerd, banished to the nerdy classes with other nerdy kids.

"I can't! The wind is too strong, Dad!" He yelled back to his father, who was covered in yellow foul weather gear from head to toe.

Frank's mother would nag his father until he couldn't take it anymore and then he would relent and take his son sailing. This happened every four weeks or so. The nagging would build to a boiling point, and in order to appease her, his father would take young Frank out on his beloved boat.

"Can you man the helm!?" his father screamed up to him.

Frank stood there holding onto the boom, which was being tossed about as the full mainsail was still up. He couldn't get it down because the pressure of the wind was too great on the sail; it had pulled the sheets or ropes too taut for the little boy to un-cleat. His father would have to do it.

Frank tried to make his way aft, amidst the vicious pitching of the boat in the raging storm. He slipped and fell, sliding off the boat, but his father grabbed his rain jacket. In one swoop of the hand, his father exhibited his powerful strength as he grabbed his son and tossed him to the stern.

Frank stood now, holding on to the large captain's wheel. He watched the heavy mountains of waves rolling into the boat, leaving behind valleys of darkness. As the boat descended, it was launched upward by a rolling mountain, and so on.

His father was now on top of the cabin and struggling with the sail, bending and yanking and pulling to free up the main sheet, which would lower the sail.

The sound of the engine was now more pronounced. Frank heard the propeller lunge out of the water, and grind in the open air, as the bow of the boat nearly dove down to the floor of the ocean, then the stern would fill with water and the engine was nearly underwater as it rocked backwards from the force of the thirty foot waves, as the bow pointed 180 degrees the other way, into the black sky. Up was down and down, up.

He looked to the bow and saw his father still struggling with the sail at the mast. He saw the mast starting to bend from the force of the hurricane winds. Looking up, he saw the mast now was shaped like a bow, bending towards the sea.

He was about to warn his father, when all of a sudden, the mast snapped along with the sail and the boom; all floated away with his father, upwards into the dark, stormy sky.

It was as if his father were riding on top of a giant parachute, sucked up to the heavens.

"Daddy! Daddy!"

He heard an alarm sounding, like a Coast Guard horn, from the distance, out in the black world.

The staccato sound continued in an annoying and continuous interval: ERNDT, ERNDT, ERNDT.

Frank awoke from his dream.

His alarm clock was beeping.

It was time to get up and face another day of work.

Frank Black was still terrified as he blinked open his eyes in his California king-size bed, snuggled underneath the silk-laced duvet, head resting upon the goose down swath of multiple pillows. Comfort engulfed the handsome thirty-something man, as he stretched next to the woman he had married over a decade ago.

His brown eyes were slits underneath his tired eyelids. Turning toward the sound of the radio alarm clock, he saw his usual wake-up time etched in red numerals, 4:45 AM. Turning his alarm off and the radio on, he would ease into wake-up mode.

"Ahh," he groaned to himself, wiping the blur from his eyes.

In the distance he heard three small beeps from his automatic coffee machine downstairs in the palatial kitchen, signaling it was safe to get up; the coffee was made. Automation surrounded him.

It was time for work, again. He was safe here.

There were no storms or people chasing him.

Today was a very important day.

Just a few more seconds. I'll wait until the clock turns to 4:47. Frank thought.

The soft voice of the disc jockey, Mark Thomson, on the public radio station was questioning a guest speaker, "It's WTOP and it's May 21st at 4:45 AM and I am joined by Dr. Fallington. Doc, could you...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniverse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1440172641
• ISBN 13: 9781440172649
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland