First Lines/Excerpts
Below are some first lines and other excerpts from some of my favorite writing. More coming soon!
The Bug House
First lines from The Bug House, as featured in Old Farmhouses of the North
Back then, all the older kids claimed they’d made it a night in The Bug House and they’d hang it over our heads that we hadn’t. They called it a “rite of passage”, which meant nothing to Danny or me at the time, but they sure made it sound like something we should care about. Our parents told us to stay away from it and, even now, my mother begs me to leave the bad memories buried. But thirty years is a long time to be haunted by a place and a person, to fear killing a spider out of thinking it’ll have its revenge. From the day my family and I moved away, I’d been trying to convince myself that The Bug House didn’t exist and that Danny had the same chance I did to grow up and grow old. Countless hours and entire paychecks spent on therapy, all these decades between me and the madness, yet I was unable to save my marriage from a phantom, incapable of stopping the nightmares. Returning to that address is my one remaining option. Maybe that’s what Danny’s spirit has been trying to do all these years, pull me back to confront the past and that godforsaken two-story.
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
An excerpt from one of my favorite stories. Available to read in full in Old Farmhouses of the North
We make the drive up to meet the agent at a listing, getting lost several times because the navigation can’t be convinced that anyone would choose to go where we’re going. The robotic voice demands we make a U-turn at our next convenience, as soon as possible, before it’s too late. Mark yells back there’s only one way North. I silently scream that this is a place to dump bodies not start a family, but forward is forward and whether there’s a forever home or a grave at the end, at least I’ll be able to lie down.
Hulking farm machinery rusts at the far corners of the landscape, holding down the otherwise empty fields as though they might completely blow away in the wind. Just as much a part of the ruins, the barns and stables scream for purpose as the gales smack against the weakening wood. Eventually, the house looms on the gray horizon just behind a battered windbreak of Blue Spruce. I commiserate with the trees, pushed so far in one direction, under pressure to hold everything together.
Wildflower
First lines from Wildflower, the first place winner of the 2017 Crypticon Seattle Writing Contest. Available to read in full in When You Find Out What You’re Made Of
I yearn for those fall days. He’d come in from playing soccer and I’d help peel off his muddy jersey. I remember that fresh and exhausted look. His bright eyes, those rosy cheeks set atop the Pacific Northwest shade of ghost that was the usual color of his skin. I recall him needing things, as children do, and how often I could come through for him. He was ten. I was still one of his heroes.
Day 1
The rash came suddenly, as quickly as the leaves on the tree across the street changed from deep fern to brilliant lemon. He already took his own baths, sometimes showers, but I was still the designated muddy shirt “peeler offer,” as he called me, and filling that need, well, that’s when I noticed the marks.
They spread from his spine and were individually irregular in shape, though nearly rorschach in symmetry from his left to right side. For now they were scarlet, and in glaring contrast to the pasty white of his skin.
I did the usual motherly interrogation, does it hurt? Itch? When did it start? He responded with a quick shrug—a perfect ten-year-oldism—part I don’t know, part I don’t care. I blamed it on the field he kicked ball in, the water, the humid Seattle air. Then, I blamed it on our laundry detergent and the anti- vaxxers, just for good measure. Fault lied somewhere.
On the first day, he wasn’t bothered, nor was he in pain. So I didn’t do a damn thing.
Firesick
First lines from Firesick, leading story of Once Upon a Time, When Things Turned Out Okay
Once upon a time, a man and his family awoke on their farm…
THE HOMESTEAD
They wake and rise before the sun, being rearers of two boisterous children and several animals, and raisers of occasional crops, all of which demand ample and early tending. The man is the first to step outside, in case something more wild than their chickens wanders the yard. He is closest to his grunting and violent ancestors just after sleep and right before the memories of his dreams fade. When the silence greets him and not even the pigs shuffle nervously in the sharp morning air, he understands the area is safe. His feet find the path to the outhouse and his eyes remain closed as his mind enjoys the blissful delirium of having just woken up. Once inside and as he relieves himself of the rank urine that’s waited hours to escape, he opens his eyes to the cool darkness. A spider’s web clings to the wood of the corners in front of his face. He’ll need to move her before she gives birth to many more. Maybe the barn, maybe in the rafters. She wouldn’t be the first to see new life there. His wife bore his youngest, Charlotte, in one of the stalls when she refused to move once labor began.
The Madness Coil
An excerpt, featured in When You Find Out What You’re Made Of
She steps out of the examination room and finds her way through the maze of hallways, avoiding the urge to snoop at other patients’ charts tossed into plexiglass holders along the route. Surely these untouchable breadcrumbs would betray that someone has it worse off than she. In the waiting area, magazines promise her solutions to all life’s banal issues, but there’s no lipstick shade that’ll match her level of losing it, no skirt in this year’s trendy floral quite high-waisted enough to hide her crazy, even if the wound heals without a scar. She settles on a crossword at the back of a gossip magazine and fishes a pen from her purse. Someone before her has taken the same risk, in permanent blue instead of black, but she shakes her head at their incorrect, sloppy inscription. Four letter word for precipice. The cruciverbalist guessed wall, not a bad choice, but it won’t work with the surrounding answers. A pain explodes in her back, which she grimaces through and writes off as healing-related. Edge, that’s the obvious answer, and so she asserts her dominance in black upon black of redrawn letters to hide the mistake.
Nothing is Promised Us, But Death
First Lines from the second place winner of the 2016 Crypticon Seattle Writing Contest
No one knew why the draugen emerged from the sea that day. We’d never seen them before; only heard they might exist, that they might pay our island a visit someday to wreak havoc on dry land. It may have been the death of Lev, when his fishing boat overturned, that tipped the scale. One body too many in that vast, watery grave, spilling the souls over the brim and back into our world. It must have been that, for they wore the faces of those we’d lost to the waves, to Njörðr, but their resemblance to our loved ones ended there.
A thick stench in the air preceded their arrival. The fishermen, haunters of the beaches and as old, crusty, and stuck to the docks as the barnacles, explained away the rank odor as an overabundance of algae. The rotting, briny scent clung to the hair in our noses, climbed down our throats, wove its meaty self in between every strand of hair and cloth on our bodies. We couldn’t wash it out or off. Some claimed it hung so heavy it slowed the wind. There was an otherworldly, green hue to the usually invisible air.
Obachan
An excerpt from Obachan, featured in Last Night While You Were Sleeping
Her grandmother’s ghost was sitting on the small stool on the bathroom floor, a plate of eight steam buns hovered over her lap. “I’ve brought you some buns!”
Miyu lowered her head to hide from her, but the water was too high. There was nowhere to go. She peeked over the side of the soaking tub at the spirit. “Go away, sobo! Okaasan will be very angry that you brought food in the bathroom!”
“Are you yelling at me, your obachan?” the ghost screamed.
Miyu looked to her mother, but Jun was still sleeping. The plate floated to sit atop her mother’s head. Miyu giggled, for it looked like a hat. But then her mother began to sink slowly, lower and lower into the tub. The weight of the plate was forcing her below the surface.
“Okaasan! Wakeup!” Miyu screamed, but Jun did not wake. She shook her mother, but still she slumbered and sunk lower.
“My grandchild, the buns are too heavy. You must eat them to save your mother!” her grandmother said.
Miyu grabbed a bun in each hand and stuffed them into her mouth. She ate six of them, but two buns still sat on the plate. She took them and threw them into the bath water, hoping to dissolve them, but they reappeared on the plate. Miyu tried to lift the plate from her mother’s head, but it was unmovable as though it were attached or a part of her mother’s body.
“You mustn’t waste them. Eat!”
