"Nice boots..."

It's been a while since I blogged but my new book, Amphetamine Heart, is about to launch and the build up to it all has been taking up a lot of my time.

When I have had downtime I've been working steadily at PostApoc, the novel that's been my major project all year so far. I am writing and editing it as I go, which is a longer approach. Some days it's not about reaching a specific word count so much as improving on what's already on the page.

This week, though, I've been able to get a lot of new content into it and I'm starting to see different sides to the book's characters. Last time I blogged an excerpt from PostApoc it included a character named Jessie.

This excerpt references an boozecan that was on Portland, south of Queen. I'm not exactly sure if it was closer to Richmond like it is in PostApoc, but it's a place that I often reference or draw influence from in my writing. It was someone's basement apartment and it was filthy and disgusting and kind of creepy. At least that's how I remember it, and of course those memories are pretty hazy.

Here, Jessie gets to bring her perspective on her earliest experiences and reactions to the beginning of the end of the world:

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Jessie:
I chased the flames because they were taking from me; the fire had been stealing my sleep, cutting crescent moons under my eyes. I chased the flames until they became the same colour as the sky.

Black, curls of orange could have filled me in seconds.

Instead: a finger caught in the dip of my throat. Pressed. You have something that used to be mine, he said. Breath on my cheek.

I didn’t have anything anymore.

Pressure on my chest plate. What’s mine is inside you, he said. A brick wall was at my back but I couldn’t tell if we’d stopped walking. The city was only him and the throbbing trail he’d left down the front of me.

An inch of hair covered his head in velvet. You’ve got be able to tell me something, he said. Face close, a crowding of desperation and the colourless apathy of vodka. His finger then, looping through my jeans. Pulling hard enough to almost rip the denim.

Come, he said. You can think of it on the way.

What he showed me: kids living in the old boozecan at Richmond and Portland, mold growing on the baseboards and stained snot greet carpet. The kids had painted their nails with scum and wore striped knee socks and pigtails, tarnished glitter from old parties still hanging onto crevices below their eyes, in their ears.

They were living off their old prescriptions and said their bodies were reacting in neon expulsions.

They greeted me with palms up, skittered offerings. I pinched something hard and white out of one of their hands and swallowed.

Stories, they said.

What? I asked.

Stories. That’s why she’s here, right? They asked, looking to the guy.

I didn’t even know his name.

Think so, he said, and raised his eyebrows at me.

We’re already forgetting, one of them said. It might have been a girl.

Forgetting what? I asked.

Everything. What everything was like.

I told them:

Everything started to SOUND LIKE THIS from behind doors, telephone wires and trees. Everything with its dark air and it had all gone cold, like the city was breathing out from the basement. Temperature misplaced against the heat and the heat and the heat. Something swung shut behind me and I let myself be swallowed because I knew I’d be pulled back up with the string of a song, an old scent. Something. But when there was nothing to follow I made something up. Soon I couldn’t even feel my feet, wasn’t touching the ground anymore. I thought, once, maybe, that a song was finally getting any closer. It was all louder in my head just LIKE THIS, but even after following it for what must have been days it wasn’t closer to being real.

I didn’t know what to say after that, so I put my tongue on the roof of each of their mouths and waited for someone to kiss me back.

When I opened my eyes again the first thing they said to me was NICE BOOTS WANNA FUCK?

I didn’t even know if I still had feet to put boots on. All I could do was find the slope of the floor, headfirst, and stare. Into someone’s eyes.

We waited to be hit by light through a window.