J. Eric Laing

–yet another excerpt from the upcoming, The SINGULARITY of SASHA

Most days Sasha felt like a knotted chain. Not something delicate and precious sought by hopeful fingers from a beloved box lined in pink and attended by a twirling plastic ballerina, but more akin to the angry and heavy spool of an upturned ship at the bottom of the sea. Barnacles. Long-legged denizens of the deep clambering over her disjointed links.

She’d once had such a box. Some nights, when sleep was a nervous thing that darted and kept itself at a shadowy distance, she thought about her old possessions. She recalled her jewelry box and the things it kept.

A fish. A paper fish. A day with father and a man behind a counter who fashioned her fish from paper. Right before her eyes. She saw that day that no one should be dismissed. A simple man she thought was nothing, he proved in ten seconds that he could nimble paper into fins.

But that was a life ago.

Someone from another room, her dream father maybe, told her to ‘turn that damned idiot box off.’ She closed her jewelry box lid. Silenced her ballerina. She ran from the room of lopsided walls where the cathode ray tube struggled in one corner with its role of being recovered technology.

She tried to silence herself.

Not much good that did.

She could not do it and no one would have noticed if she succeeded. The first point was a struggle long in the understanding, and the latter was a revelation that came like new breath after a dive deep into a place where the bottom shimmered with promises and mysteries much more fantastical than that refuse left behind on dry ground. Down there, between the ink, there lay coins and precious things long-lost; there swam creatures seldom–if not ever–seen. It would be better to drown in their pursuit than wallow upstairs in the thick of going nowhere.

And then the madness congealed.

The world fell apart.

She had another dream…was it a dream? Babies cried as things flew from windows but did not fall down. Newton was denied. School lessons well-learned be damned. Into the sky the detritus of panicked mankind flew and took wing. Not in a swirl as though caught on a wind. No…just away. Like Mother’s angry inhalation took them up. Too many scattered toys needing to be put in some proper place. Put away for the night.

Sasha had wrestled with herself for many years now, determined to defeat the reality of her past. The victor would be the lie that rewrote history to say it had all been a dream. That moment. The dark change.

So much for that.

There would be no silence.

The world had unfolded like that pretty origami fish. Just flat paper now. Creased with the memory of the fine thing it once was. A broken and bland thing, suited for nothing but discarding, like so many toys a child cherishes and then forgets.

No difference did four thousand odd days make. Time had healed no wounds. The truth, a bitch of a goddess, she had festered like another fish, this origami beauty tired of bottom-feeding, squirming up through the veins and muscle of worry to break surface and catch a glimpse of the sun. But never interrupting the surface. No. Instead she joins. Becomes one. Spreading. Neither succeeding nor defeated. Floating to mate with the surface like a lily pad. Just another part of the whole. A link in the organism.

Or so Sasha dreams.

If I must make war, let it be noble.

But more than that fine and much hoped for state, let it be waged fierce and unrelenting. Let my enemies fall in death or trembling.

I will not meet the exchange of life for life with any weaker measure.

Make me the food that feeds his fear. Let me be the comfort of defeat and capitulation that embraces his breast and unfurls his hand letting weapons slip away.

And once my enemy is spent and drawn, weak and weary of war…

Let me be his brother again. Let us be broken parts made whole.

–an excerpt from the upcoming, The SINGULARITY of SASHA

“I’m sorry to lean in so close.”

His words were muffled things, like caged birds flitting behind his crooked teeth. She sent a half-glance his way, a bird itself, darting and then dying someplace between the scratches of the countertop to confirm what she’d already been certain of; he was not her type.

The diner was loud and steeped with everything that made people say ‘greasy spoon.’

It might have been called something clever. It wasn’t.

A glass hit something too hard. A toddler fidgeted into a scolding. In one corner men grumbled in sour voices that suggested they hated their wives or their bosses or both. In the other corner of that place that seemed forever growing with crevices, a man who might have been a woman, or a woman who might have been a man, seemed preoccupied with something beyond the window where he or she sat alone. Closer scrutiny likely would have revealed more, but this was a place where scrutiny was best left undone.

Hoping to be self-same ignored, or studied by lost, unseeing eyes, Sasha considered the salt shaker. It quick became a carny’s game to guess its contents.

When she finally drummed her mind into ranks enough to acknowledge the near at hand, the man, the one who’d spoke too close to the hairs of her neck, he was back at his end of the counter sharing his halitosis with another nodding, glassy-eyed, fat-more-than-anything-else who easily could have been described in a rushed witness’s recounting of the scene as a twin brother.

“Fucking lesbians,” one of them said, as if Sasha was fortunate enough to not be alone.

Doing her best to understand the here and now of them and her, she studied the mirror behind the counter that seemed to frame the universe, and troubled it for more. Heat birthed a mirage of distortions. Weird things gamboled in the myriad reflections of glass and metal as if the parking lot outside—beyond—was a place of dimensions both tight and unfurled.

Sasha watched that portal-scape for a moment. She was almost lost again. A foot—her own, she came to realize—fell from its mooring on the bar stool rung. It hit with an audible thunk. A few heads might have turned to look. Or, were they always watching?

Looking back to the glass, to see what waited, Sasha almost hoped to find the thing that had been pursuing her.

Some stories are best heard from someone you’ve never met….

Murder, sex, magic, and ancient Rome.

A serial killer preys upon those who are truly the most dangerous game…the gladiators. As the killer collects macabre trophies, it falls to the Prefect of the Night Watch to end the madness.

But this is Rome, where blood spills like wine, and dreams…they are all too often nightmares.

Stories…some short, others not quite. A few whimsical…others don’t play so nice.

Madness at the edge of the world. Greed at the heart of England.

The lost Franklin expedition, an endeavor by the British to find the fabled Northwest Passage, damned before they ever left port.

Kirkus Reviews did me the honor of naming my novel Cicada among their “Best Indie Books of 2012.”

When Conner Connley was six years old he killed a man…or so he was made to believe.

From that lie is born a lonely life of homeless drifting and hardship on the road.  A story at turns heartbreaking and humorous, bleak and then blooming with life, love, and hope.

The Crooked Man’s Mile…one man’s epic journey to learn the truth and discover himself.

Tweed is the ultimate slacker.  He has zilch in the way of plans. But he’s about to learn how fast zero can go negative.

High school’s out, summer’s afoot, and Tweed’s content to do the usual…hang-out with friends, drink beer, get stoned, and steady bomb the neighborhood with graffiti.  Yeah, he’s got nothing much else in the works and that’s just the way he likes it.

That lasts about half a day.  Soon enough Tweed is upside down and in over his head. He’s falling for Chloe, his best friend’s girl.  Hot though she may be, that one has a few issues of her own.  And then there’s some gang-bangers out to thump his head.  Not enough? Tweed’s grandfather, the man who raised him, is getting harder and harder to keep nailed down.  Until ol’ Pops goes all broken arrow and off the reservation entirely, that is.

Yup.  Whether Tweed is ready for it or not, the time has come for a boy coming of age.