Would you read past this first page?

Here's the deal: I'm looking for people to tell me if they'd read past the first page if it were the beginning of a book they picked up.




1979

His little body burned Maizy's fingers. As soon as her husband closed the side door, drafts of cold air snaking around her ankles, Maizy lowered the infant into the playpen and let him drop the last inch, wringing her hands. He fussed, the scratchy radio static sound, but she turned away. Little good it did though; she could see his newborn blue eyes and his hair lightening from black to brown in her mind’s eye nonetheless.
 The old ceramic kitchen heater hissed as she stared out the windows etched with snowflakes as finely laid out as German shneirenshnidt paper art, lit pink and green and blue from Christmas lights lazily left out too long, lolling into this dark February morning.

Her fingers flew to the heat of her neck, scratching beneath the high neck of her house coat. The skin was red and dappled purple, all the way down her chest. She raked it nearly raw every time the baby nursed.

Maizy pressed her hands into her skin to still her fingers, heat surging from the spaces between them. As she paced, the old floorboards protested her every step, and her slippers on the new linoleum, harvest gold, squawked.

She banged through the kitchen door, sped through the living room and flung herself out onto the porch, gulping air that froze her lungs. She ran down the few steps, the cement roughing up her flimsy house slippers, as she glimpsed the towers of Three Mile Island. She was so close. In two minutes, she could be panting on the bank of the Susquehanna River. She could be frozen, numb, out.

She felt her eyelashes sink onto her cheeks. Something had to change. Itching began behind her ears and the back of her neck, and her face felt as hot as if she’d sat in the face of the fireplace’s open flames; but she’d not even struck the match to start the fire yet.

As she walked back into her hissing, protesting kitchen, she shivered, delayed. But she entered a different woman than the one who’d run from it minutes earlier. She'd made a decision. No one would understand, but she had to do it nonetheless. Just like no one had understood why she believed, before he was even born, that her baby would die, why she’d never expected to bring him home from the hospital, why she’d never put the gifts of clothes into drawers like he lived there, why she’d never even bought anything larger than three months, the age he was now.  Her husband couldn’t understand why she’d avoided holding him any longer than necessary, why she had to steel herself, why she had to work so hard to protect herself from a scrawny infant not even ten pounds yet. So he, they, wouldn’t understand this either.

She took a shower, leaving the baby in the kitchen, and when she dressed this time, she put on regular clothes. She would not be nursing again, she said aloud to calm the welts on her skin. Her doctor would be very concerned; he had impressed upon her from the beginning how such a low birth-weight, malnourished baby benefited from breast milk especially. But she just couldn’t do it anymore. She began devising how she could maybe even bottle-feed him without touching him. When she held him, her skin crawled, her mind raced, her heart beat so rapidly she couldn’t talk, move or even hardly breathe. She’d thought it was her penance to endure it, but she was beyond that now. The urgency to feed him breast milk for his health didn’t weigh so much, seeing that she knew so definitively that the thread of his life was to be cut short. Any day now.




Ok, so would you want to turn the page? Leave comments below. Why or why not?


Secondly, if you answer that, yes, you'd want to know more of the story, which of these descriptions of the whole story sounds like a better read?


1) You read the story of 2 couples who are connected, Maizy and Curt, and Ash and Ginny, all telling their viewpoints of the events in their lives in the year 2008-2009; Maizy and Curt's memories flash back to 1978 occasionally.


2) The book alternates between the story of Curt and Maizy in 1979, and the story of Ash and Ginny in 2008, both being told independently of the other, and as if each is the present (though you'll know by the dates that one happened earlier than the other). Instead of seeing an older Maizy and Curt remembering their young life, you'll see their young life, and you'll also see how Ginny and Ash view Maizy and Curt in 20008. While the 2 stories don't comment on each other, the reader will be able to make connections and draw parallels as they figure out how the two stories are intertwined.


So if you have any thoughts or find one more interesting than the other, let me know in the comments. I'm torn between continuing my writing as is or overhauling its whole structure.