The Cold Corner

Before I made it around the corner, I saw something that made me stop dead. A man wearing soot-stained overalls came toward me from behind the restaurant, mopping his neck and brow with a filthy white cloth.

I stared at him, because he was me.

Terry thought it was a victory when he escaped his small hometown of Cold Corners, North Carolina. But life in the big city didn't turn out to be as victorious as he'd expected, and after one failure follows another, he comes home to figure out what went wrong. What begins as a trip down memory lane turns into much more when Terry is confronted with alternate versions of himself-the people he might have become had he not followed his dreams of being a chef to California. At first, he assumes that meeting a chef TJ, a policeman TJ, and a bartender TJ is no more than the delusions of an identity crisis run amok. But as Terry sees "what could have been" reflected in these doppelgängers, he discovers that the simplest of life's choices could have led him down very different paths.

Inspired by Henry James's thought-provoking short story "The Jolly Corner," award-winning author Tim Pratt reinterprets the classic tale for a new, young adult audience, bringing it to life in a contemporary southern setting and penning a haunting look at the way life choices shape the people we become.

A short story excerpted from Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales, available October 2013.