# Read the first page of The Fell by Sarah Moss

Read the opening of The Fell by Sarah Moss free, no signup. A woman breaks quarantine and goes missing on a moor.

- Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-fell-sarah-moss
- Genre: Literary fiction
- Year: 2021
- ISBN: 9780374606053
- Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780374606053&s=read-page
- Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780374606053
- Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780374606053

## The opening

I THINK IT’S ready, Ellie says. Her hair, pale, silky, swings over her face as she peers into the oven. You get the plates, Dad. You’ll need the oven gloves, Rob hears himself say, and she sighs, as he knew she would. No, really, I thought it would be more fun to get like sixth-degree burns and spend the next four hours screaming in agony in the waiting room at A and E. Fourth degree, he says, there’s nothing after that.

Fourth-degree burns go through skin and underlying tissue to muscle and bone, and are usually painless because the nerve endings are destroyed. You wouldn’t get them from picking up an oven tray. He doesn’t say that. Also, even under current conditions a child with fourth or even third-degree burns would be seen immediately, though however bad the injury he’d drive her to hospital because ambulance response times are buggered. He doesn’t say that either. The oven gloves need a wash. Will you have my mushrooms and give me your olives, Ellie says, sliding the pizza perfectly competently from the tray to the plate, using the oven gloves to put the tray into the sink where it hisses a little. He likes olives. Of course I will, love, he says. It’s his weekend for giving her whatever she wants, except that they’ve only just swapped toppings, he’s only about to take the first bite, when his phone goes, and he knows before he looks, because it always happens when you don’t want it to, as well as sometimes when you do, which call it is, and he knows he could say no, you can always say no, and he knows he won’t, because you never do, not unless you’ve drunk too much to drive which he hasn’t because he never does, not these days. She looks at him, at the phone vibrating on the counter, threatening to jump, and he walks away from her as he picks it up.

MATT STANDS BACK to the wall, on the corner, safety off and fingers on the trigger. He won’t see nightfall but he’s going to take Jake down with him if no one else. That fucker. The air around him sucks in, a change in pressure that’s also a sound, and then the bridge at the end of the street implodes gracefully, as if a black hole opened in the river below and pulled it in. Dust boils into the dimming sky. It’s never fully light here. You can never see far enough. There are no shadows to warn you of what’s coming – and here he is, right now; Matt takes aim, waits until the crosshairs are on his friend’s chest, pisses a stream of ammo into Jake as he feels his own strength fade.

He sits back, rolls his shoulders. The light’s changed. He really needs to pee. He’s hungry. He reaches for his phone and messages Jake. Later, yeah? Gotta go. He picks up the phone and on second thoughts leaves it on his desk. It doesn’t have to be in the same room as him, not all the time. He’s not dependent. There’s something weird going on with his neck when he stands up. He winces, stretches until stuff clunks.

It’s when he comes downstairs that he realises he’s the only one in the house. The cat’s sitting on the stairs, waiting, the way that she does when there’s nothing going on.

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