Trans/plant/portation

This past summer I published a short story that generated some feedback from readers, much of it the same. Happily enough, they said they wanted to see 200 more pages to the story; I’d flung a world at them that was similar to our own, but askew in several ways, most dramatically in that this world’s children all metamorphosized, sooner or later, into fantastic and mythical creatures.

Readers and publishing pros I know wanted to know why this was happening, something I knew in my own mind but hadn’t explained in the confines of the story, which only runs for 1,200 words. My goal in the story was to show the big and subtle changes that the main character—precociously named Hannah Pace—emerges with at the end of the story, but readers wanted to know what happened the next day. And the next after that. It was a flattering response. I smiled and wrote back, not communicating that this was all I’d intended. I was on the cusp of getting started on a new novel about a 500-year-old mummy in the 22nd Century (take that, genre purists), and I didn’t need ideas like lengthening a one-off short story into a long piece crowding my vision.

Well, it didn’t just crowd my plans, it upstaged them and then threw them out of the theater. Read More…

I’d been sleeping, somewhere between my cycle in fetal position and an overhead reach to stretch out my right hip because years of nursing my left knee had taken its toll on my other side. I suppose it was easy to surround me in my vulnerable state, sitting ducks and all, but I woke up to the sound of them humming. They hummed like camels and llamas do to warn off potential threats, but I guess, with their aggression toward me and all, that their motivation was somewhat different.

I rolled over and rubbed my eyes. I was trapped. Trapped by three dozen jumbo prawns.

Holding toothpicks like spears. Read More…

The tracks stretched so far toward the horizon that the individual rails merged into one point, and then they devolved into something indistinct. If men had laid down a railroad here, at some point it became lost to the wilderness. I followed the tracks, using a scrap of paper I’d received a couple of hours earlier. Edgar camped out where the tracks took on a look of modern sculpture, the result of a terrible derailing several years ago. Not that modern art was anything anyone had heard of yet. The old conductor told me I couldn’t miss it.

I’d been tracking him for a week, and I was running out of time. I crunched through a stream of broken glass and pottery. Moonshine bottles, brown beer glass, growler jugs, or so I guessed. Hopefully I was getting close. If the story was right then he hadn’t started to spiral down yet, but this was the last night for his sobriety. Read More…

Eve’s feet stung in response to the cold tile floor. It was the downside of taking such boiling hot showers, but nothing else eased the tension between her shoulders. She tiptoed into her tidy bedroom, marred only by the messy sheets and her cat Oliver, who seemed asleep save for one sliver on an open eye.

She rubbed Oliver behind his ears, who gave a pinched half-meow in response. He lifted his head and sniffed at the room. In the next second he looked at Eve, then hissed, and jumped off the bed, running into the darkness of the closet.

“Oliver! What’s wrong?” Eve went over to the front of the closet and craned her head in, looking for him in the back, in the dark. Oliver continued to hiss.

“Oliver, it’s me! What’s the matter with you?” He’d never acted like this in his life. The hissing continued. The cat was scared out of his mind. Read More…

We drove until we reached the other side of three towns, and then pulled up to a general store. I cut the engine and Jackson and I inspected each other.

“Well, you’ve looked better,” he said, lifting my chin.

“You’ve looked worse,” I said. That made him smile for a moment. “So who was that back there?”

“I don’t know,” he said, taking the opportunity to look back behind us, where the dust we’d kicked up was settling back on the wide lane. “You were kind of in a hurry when you talked to me the last time.”

“Last time? How many times have I come by?” Where did I get the time for all this, I wondered, and then paused. If I could jump at will then I kind of had all the time in the world. On this side, anyway. Read More…

I hoped my memory of how to find his house wasn’t fuzzy, but if I was right, we had quite a ways to go before we’d show up at the white row home. As the sun prepared to set, I sniffed around an abandoned strip of train cargo cars. Judging from the height of the weeds and the rusty state of the tracks here, no trains had passed through here for a long while.

I slept in fits, as Pie was tied to a crumbling handle on the open cargo door. The wood was rotted in places and my nose stuffed up from the smell of mold and old urine, but I’d become so exhausted I couldn’t keep myself awake, and I hoped the horse would alert me if I were in any danger. Read More…

For those of you following along, here’s the latest piece I’m sharing of my work in progress.

Closing my eyes made the experience feel more familiar, even if I knew I was sitting back on Jeannine’s friend’s couch and not in a lab. I appreciated Dr. Stanger’s voice, strangely comforting even after everything I’d put him through. Without seizures anymore, we weren’t sure if this would work. I should have been more nervous about the hand-built EEG machine than my own capacity for out of control neuron activity, but I didn’t think the doctor would have subjected me to anything that could hurt me. Even if he’d gone through a terrible ordeal on my account.

“Just relax, Jack,” he said, and it occurred to me that I didn’t know why he cared to do all of this for us. Was he interested in inventing a time machine? Wanted to prove himself correct? Was he actually insane?

I considered ripping the wires off of my head, held to my scalp with some kind of hair product instead of the medical putty I was used to. This was reckless, dangerous. What was I thinking? I should jump up and get out of here, explain to my parents that I’ve been stupid and desperate. They’ll have to get over it at some point. Read More…

For those of you following along, here’s another excerpt of the first draft. Enjoy!

While Dr. Stanger worked on building a crude EEG machine, I drove out to Conestoga for more information on the town and its residents. Whatever town square I’d seen was gone now, subsumed into a street grid. Only on the outlying areas were there still farm lands, but the vast majority of the area had been developed. I pulled over, seeing a yellowed sign in the window of a storefront: Historical Society. I fumbled for dimes in my pocket and bought an hour’s worth of parking time, and headed inside. An older lady with curly white hair greeted me.

“Suggested donation is one dollar,” she told me, “but you can see if that’s worth paying after you walk through.” I smiled and put a bill in her metal box. It didn’t appear they had visitors often. Read More…

My latest bit of Parallax, from the first draft. To read the earlier excerpts, click on Parallax in the tag cluster on the left side of the screen.

Sanjay looked much older in scrubs.

“Green’s a good color on you,” I said, sitting in my car.

“Oh shut up.” He clipped his brother’s hospital badge on his shirt and said, “Wish me luck.”

The plan was for Sanjay to say Dr. Stanger needed to go to respiratory therapy, and he was the orderly to remove him. With all the smoking the doctor did, we hoped it wouldn’t look suspicious. According to Jay’s brother Prabal, lots of patients on the mental wellness ward smoked a lot and it was common for them to get checkups from the respiratory therapy staff when they inevitably had problems breathing. Read More…

Those of you keeping up with the first draft of my WIP, a YA novel about time traveling with trans themes, I’m posting another excerpt today. All excerpts have been posted in order, so to go back and read any earlier episodes, just click on the Parallax tag on the left side of the screen. Enjoy!

I couldn’t let my isolation get the best of me. I determined to push through whatever this was, find out if there was a way to save both mothers and my friends who were in danger.

Looking up again, I saw Jeannine start her engine. I was going to miss her and then not have a way home, 20 miles away.

I leaped up and raced into the parking lot, waving my arms, and saw the flash of Jeannine’s brake lights. She backed up and reached over to unlock the passenger door.

“What the hell, Jack?”

“Can I get a ride?” Each word came out with a pant in between. Read More…