Bells over Empty Fields

By Craig Giannelli

For three days there has been no smoke.
Matthias Adler is walking home. He left the valley at twenty-five and gave the
next fifteen years to a war that ended at last, not because anyone had won, but
because the ministers finally stopped talking.
He knows what he will find. He has helped do it to other men's villages.
He finds nine people alive. He finds his father's workshop a black rectangle in
the earth. And at the hour it has always been rung, he finds a bell ringing out
over empty fields, for nobody, pulled by a hand that has not stopped in four
years.
Everything fifteen years taught him says a bell in a dead village is bait.
He stays anyway.
What follows is not a story about the war. It is a fence that will not stand
under a soldier's hands. It is a loaf left warm on a cold stone by someone who
will not be seen leaving it. It is an old man who kept the seed corn through
four winters of hunger for a spring he had no reason to believe in.
It is a valley remembering how to be a village: one roof, one loaf, one
remembered name at a time.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H9FCK7J5
• ISBN13: 9798187716630
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"