Third Novel | Take Me Home | Available as a paperback and eBook 6/27/2023
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Second novel | Here, There, & Everything | Available in paperback
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Debut novel | (un/learned) | Available as a Paperback and eBook
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http://katherine-mandzak.wixsite.com/author
Seeking readers to get a feel of The Vibe. Synopsis below:
Will Taylor is the poster child for betrayal: The dictionary definition of being dealt an abysmal hand of cards. All he has to show for his 22 years on planet earth is a fear of good and the knowledge that he is not worth the skin he occupies.
Then along comes Sam Tasker, the pinnacle of sweet persistence. Slowly but surely he chips away at the impenetrable concrete armor Will has constructed to protect himself from relentless hardship, allowing Will to breathe in a way he never has before. Maybe life can be good. Maybe he can be worth decent things. Maybe he isn’t destined for continuous disappointment and abuse.
Idk, just had to share my mother's day message to my MIL who is struggling with feeling like after a lifetime of taking care of other people, everyone is self-sufficient and the meaning of existence is gone.
Summary: A journal, written by Will Taylor in second person, breaks down the 1,344 hours from the beginning of the end to that very end. The hours are spent shooting the breeze with best friend Sam Tasker as they telling stories of their friendship, revealing secrets as Will's normal slowly unravels.
Context: On day 68 of the story, the boys meet one of the final hurdles and it hurts like hell.
Day 68
Dear Sam,
“Mrgh?” It wasn’t even a word but any sort of noise was now considered a win. I had ditched hope. Hope was no good. Not anymore.
“Sam?”
“Who ‘re ‘ou?”
“What was that?”
“Who are you?” The words were slow, eternal. We were here. I never thought we would reach the point where you no longer recognized my face.
“It’s me, Will,” I introduced myself to my favorite person. “Remember me? We’ve known each other for…. I… I love you, Sam.” My hand shook against your cheek. “Do you remember?”
“You smell familiar.”
“Of course I do. You know me.”
“And your smell.”
“And my smell,” I managed with a laugh. “Here.” I shimmied out of your red jacket and lay it across your chest. “It used to be yours but it stopped smelling like you weeks ago.”
“Will.” You found my name and my stomach dropped. “Will. I remember you now.”
“Good.” Bubbles stuck in my throat. “I’m glad.”
“You sound weird. What… is happening? Who… is that? Who is that, Will? In the corner over there? Is that Dad?”
There was no one in the corner and I knew you were stuck between this life and the next.
“Yeah. Yeah, Sam, that’s your dad. Say hi for me, will you?”
“Hey,” you whispered. “It’s been awh-.” Sentences ended mid-thought. “Is that Helen?”
“Yeah. What do you want to say to her?”
“I’ll miss you and all the advice you-.” Your eyes were glassy within your gradually caving face, beautiful as always. “Will I never told you s-.”
“What didn’t you tell me?”
“I sign-. Bef- you came back.”
“You signed? Signed what?”
“DN-.”
“A what?”
“A DNR. Don’t keep me alive if I die, okay? I don’t want to keep doing th-. This. I don’t rememb- a lot but- I remember yo-. Is that Aaron?”
I wanted to throw up and run away. I wanted to wake up. I wanted a lot of things.
“Yeah. What do you want to say to him?”
“You fucker. I hate yo-. I hate that you bro-. You broke the one man I’ve loved an-. And I hope you bur- in hell.”
“Well said.”
“I thought so too. There’s no one else there, right?”
“No, Sam. No, there isn’t.”
“Good.”
“Do you feel better now?”
“Not yet but I think I wi-. I think I will soon.”
Summary: A journal, written by Will Taylor in second person, breaks down the 1,344 hours from the beginning of the end to that very end. The hours are spent shooting the breeze with best friend Sam Tasker as they telling stories of their friendship, revealing secrets as Will's normal slowly unravels.
Context: On day 34 of the story, Will has to explain with great shame to his best friend that he has kicked his dating app boyfriend out after an instance of DV. We also read a journal entry where he explains the events that led him into the foster care system.
Day 86
lay here until you can feel me
“Is that you out there? Hurry up and get inside, I have a pressing topic to cover today.”
Bruised and aching in more ways than one, I had lost the ability to put on a façade and take life for what it was. The mask was broken and scattered around the townhome I had kicked Aaron out of the night before. Not even an energized Sam voice could ease my rattled brain.
“We can skip today if you want,” Leah said as she appeared seemingly out of the blue. She seemed more involved than at the beginning, or maybe she was always there and I was finally out of my own ass. “I can tell him.”
“That’ll just make it worse.”
“What worse?”
I was only going to talk about the breakup and violence once and I was definitely not about to have you learn it through a nurse.
Through the door I pushed.
“We need to make sure you aren’t left completely friendless when I’m gone, Tayl-. Holy shit. There’s no way…. Did… did he finally leave?”
If I was going to cry in front of you it was somehow more courteous to do so talking about Aaron’s freak out.
“Kicked him out.” Lip quivers were acceptable in a place and circumstance like mine but there weren’t enough millennia for me to rewrite my personal expectations.
“Really?!” For a second your face lit up with pride and surprise. Even more reason to pretend everything was okay; you deserved good things. “That’s-. Will?” For Sam this was a common test to give. I’d either make eye contact and break, not make eye contact and break. What I wouldn’t be doing was holding myself together. There was no reason to.
“Remember when I told you about meeting Calvin?”
“Yeah of course.”
“And how I ended up living with him?” Your eyes darkened and I could see the gears starting to turn. Maybe you were smarter than I thought and could put it together.
“I remember.”
“I thought it’d be different by now. Experiences like that are supposed to rewire us, right? Why do we go through shit if we can’t take the lessons and make sure it doesn’t happen again? What have I been doing for the last decade if I haven’t learned anything?”
……
Austin knew what he was doing. I’ll stand by my belief that abusive people are also some of the smartest. He only fucked up once. Of course it wound up saving my life.
He begged and cried the morning it happened, trying every trick in his arsenal of manipulative phrases to guilt me into keeping his lapse in judgement a secret. He knew he was about to face the music. He knew that he unfortunately raised a smart son.
The begging and crying – voidless, tearless, feeling-less – stopped when it was clear he wouldn’t get his way. Instead it flipped to more anger. More anger, more threats, more gaslighting. Blame, shame, guilt… the Wheel of Fortune ticker spun round and round until I said the words that told him he won.
“I have to go to school. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”
He must have been having a bad day outside of what was going down with me because he let me go. He had a history of not letting me go to school after he fell off the deep end. Again, smart man. Smart men don’t let their victims out of their sight where they can reveal their truths.
Though of course if the victim has been under the thumb of their abuser for their entire living life, the flight risk is far less. I didn’t know what would happen if I disobeyed him. What I did know is that I didn’t ever want to.
As Stockholm Syndrome’d as high school Will was, something sent me straight from the bus to what textbooks call a Trusted Adult. My US Government teacher had been on my case for months, trying to show me that he knew more than I thought and that he could help. The way he spoke of his own shadowy past and difficult childhood told me what he knew as he bared all to try and get a scared kid to realize how not alone he was.
Straight to the classroom I went, where I told Mr. Coulie that it had happened. We were in the front office before I could dig through my brain and remember the reason Austin hit me in the first place.
……
“We were fighting. I don’t even remember what it was about. It was like he woke up yelling. I can’t remember if it was about you or not but then-.”
“Sit,” you interrupted and I obeyed. Your hand grabbed mine, tighter than I thought possible.
“I don’t think I felt it until after. I don’t know if he hit me multiple times. I couldn’t tell you. I just… I’m sore and I can’t believe I’m doing this again. He’s… he was a terrible man. And the fact that I was so, so shitty to you while you were so sick all because I wanted to keep putting myself through his bullshit it’s… it’s shameful and cruel. If I had just told you about him we would have argued before my eyes were opened and I would have been around at the beginning and we wouldn’t have to do all of this.”
“This?”
“You wouldn’t have to tell me all the terrible things because I would have been there with you. For you. And instead I snuck around like some sort of glutton for punishment and…. And I let him! I let him keep me from you. I let him get under my skin and stay there. Maybe unconsciously I knew it would end badly. I want to rage right now but it’s displaced because in the end the only person to blame is myself.”
You pulled me to you and I curled up against your thinning side and wept, large swaths of my arms bruised, my back sore from Aaron’s fury.
“Whether you were a good friend or not, you never deserve to be hit.” Your voice broke on the last word and I shook harder. “Just like whether you were a good son or not, Austin had no right. You’re right that I would have seen through his crap very quickly and you’re also right that I would have been annoying and fought for your safety. But it’s in the past and I don’t want to spend any more time thinking about what a piece of shit Aaron is. He’s taken so much already. You’re safe now.” Your hands held fistfuls of my hair. “So I need you to lay here until you can feel me next to you.”
“Not enough….”
“Hmm?”
“Not enough time.”
“I think we have just enough. I have just enough.”
Synopsis: A journal, written by Will Taylor in second person, breaks down the 1,344 hours from the beginning of the end to that very end. The hours are spent shooting the breeze with best friend Sam Tasker as they telling stories of their friendship, revealing secrets as Will's normal slowly unravels.
But not everything is what it seems.
Context: Mere days after the men discover their secret love of the other, another complicated memory breaks Will's heart
Recommended Listening: If it Makes you Happy - Sheryl Crow
Excerpt:
Day 71
“I’m scared.”
Almost 50 days in and there they were. There were the words I knew would hit the airwaves. Only now it was complicated. Hand holds meant more, eye locks meant more.
Each kiss meant more than the last. There was something I never thought I would say.
“I know,” I said uselessly. “Do I need to get Leah?”
“Maybe. Don’t know…. Come here.” Down on the bed I sat. “Tell me something.”
Months-old, stale thoughts hanging in the back of my head dusted themselves off.
“I do need to know something.”
“What?”
I tasted iron as my bottom teeth bit through my upper lip.
“Why didn’t you try and get a hold of me before you went to the ER?”
“I went to Urgent-Med first. Thought I had another sinus infection or something. And then I called.”
“No you didn’t?”
“But I did. I did call you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I did call you the day I went to the doc because I wasn’t feeling good. I called you to see if you could come to the hospital with me because they told me they wanted me to get an x-ray. I had to leave a voicemail.” Your tone split at the word. “So I texted you. Hey call me back, it’s important. I waited 30 minutes before I drove myself there. You never replied.
“I was annoyed. Figured I’d make a big deal about it when the exams and scans and tests showed nothing more than maybe bronchitis or something. I wanted you to be mad at yourself for not picking up the phone. And then….”
Each word out of your mouth twisted the knife in my stomach, the splinters beneath my fingernails, the wooden stake through my heart.
“Then the results came back and I knew I’d have to tell you. I figured I’d meet with you and Helen… break the news to both of you at once. But when I came to the office that morning I heard you talking to her. Something about your weekend spent with Aaron. I already knew about him, Taylor. You did your best to keep him separate but I guess I know you too well. I didn’t want you to be concerned because you knew I was so sick. I wanted you to be concerned in the way you were for most of the time I’ve known you.”
“Did you tell Helen that day?”
“No, but I put a meeting request in for the next morning when I knew you’d be meeting with the client from uptown. I told her then.”
“Did she ask why I wasn’t there?”
Whether your head was nodding or shaking, it wasn’t possible to tell behind the haze of uncontrollable tears.
Context: In a Tim-narrated chapter, we see just how in love a man can be with a woman
The distinctive sound of Lily’s door opening and closing, followed by her rehearsal bag dropping to the floor, had me up and at my own door in seconds. It was the first time since meeting on our balconies that we went more than a few daylight hours without some form of contact. I missed her.
My hand was on the knob, the door actively opening, and standing on my doormat was Lily, fist in the air, poised to knock.
“Lily-.” Words that even I was unsure would make sense were stifled as she cut me off, reaching up and throwing her arms around my neck, hanging her head over my shoulder heavily. Slowly and keenly aware of the action I returned her embrace, hands pulling at the cloth of her shirt as I brought her close. For a brief moment Blake and Brandon didn’t exist. My mother didn’t exist. It was me and Lily on my stoop.
“I’ve missed this,” I heard her say as I continued to hold on. “I’ve missed coming home from a long day to someone I know cares about me.”
I was fresh out of words in the wake of the day and it’s events and I didn’t have it in me to dissect and deep dive her thoughts. Normally I chomped at the bit to overthink, nothing pulling me from the endless cycle of questions. But Lily smelled of theater and Tic Tac’s and roses and the cycle didn’t stand a chance.
We remained entwined for a bit longer, though time always seemed to stop when I got to be so close to her. Classmates with nothing better to do had teased me relentlessly in high school for never being as tall as the other boys and performing couple numbers on stage was always a bit of an adventure as Lily seemed to never stop growing. Come the summer between ninth and tenth grade and suddenly she stood nearly half a foot taller than me and that was without the help of shoes. It did nothing for my social status – not that I had had much of one. I had always been quiet offstage, ‘too soft’ for a boy, or at least according to those same students always looking for trouble to cause.
But on that day, the soft boy stood in harmony with the most beautiful woman he knew he’d ever meet and there was a comfort… a solace in her presence. In the warm softness of her shoulder and rhythmic swells of her breathing, I found myself thankful for the accident that led to our reunion.
I be loving these sentences from THE NIGHT WE COLLIDED [draft 4]
Synposis: 15 years after graduating high school and parting ways, theater geeks and best friends Lily Clarion and Tim O'Connor are very different versions of themselves. When they wind up on neighboring apartment balconies in New York, sporting fake names and scars from their pasts, will the feelings resurface or will their senses of self-worth and an unexpected connection keep them apart?
Recommended listing: Soundtrack for Gigi & Nate
I was a canyon, the years of water running over the same spot eroding anything that I used to claim as mine. New York and singledom were the top of the precipice; little old me feebly tossed shovelfuls of red sand into the thousand-foot-deep chasm and then wondered why it didn’t seem to be getting less deep. Every possible reminder was a person in the depths driving their own dump truck and hauling pounds of progress out of sight.
||
But Harrison and his slow and gradual breaking of my spirit made the childhood concept of two steps forward, one step back look like a two-piece puzzle that fit together no matter the direction or mental acuity of the solver. If the first eighteen years of life and growth and happiness could be boiled down to two steps it was as if each day of my ten-year marriage was a step back. 3,650 steps in the wrong direction.
||
He didn’t mean to set my teeth on edge but in that moment all he was doing was hauling dirt out of my canyon and undoing steps 3,650-3,600. I could repeat a mantra over and over – Lee isn’t Harrison, Lee isn’t Harrison– and my subconscious would still throw up the pyres and barbed wire and gatling guns in preparation for an all-out blood bath to protect its host from subtle destruction.
Context - Sam has a dissociative/suicidal ideation episode.
I wanted to rip my hand out of Will’s and run out into oncoming traffic. I wanted to run over to the lawn care service three units down and douse myself in their gasoline before setting myself on fire. I wanted to find the nearest standing body of water and lay face-first until it took me over completely. I wanted to be anywhere but alive. Living meant I had to remain aware of all the ways in which I had caused pain in another’s life, intentional or not. I had to keep the memories of Cassie and Chance and my mother and the people who had come and gone without leaving much of an impact at all but who still weighed me down like the stones in Virginia Woolfe’s coat pockets. I longed for a way to kill the synapses that connected me to those who I cared for but that would leave my physical body intact. Maybe I didn’t want to kill myself. Maybe I just wanted to kill the parts of me that made living unbearable.
I wasn’t living in that kind of world, though. I wasn’t living in an episode of Futurama in the year 3000 where doctors could simply go in and laser the connections between the conscious and unconscious with no repercussions or consequences. I was living in the present and it was excruciating. Every movement, whether I was aware of it or not, was working to pull an aching anchor through Mariana’s Trench depths and sunless silt. With each new notch in my belt of life’s experiences came another anchor, and with each anchor came the increase in required effort not to merely remain in motion but simply to keep my head from going under. I was in a constant fight to not let the dark sides of me win.
A bolt cutter snipped one of the heavy chains, allowing for buoyancy as I managed to lift my head out of the unrelenting waves. I was in a living room – whose I didn’t know – and overwhelming anger rose quickly. Why couldn’t I just get it together? Why did I remain so out of control when I could identify y demons? What was I missing? I couldn’t start healing until I found that tray piece of the puzzle. I was starting to think I’d never see it again.
“You’re safe.” I retched at the words. Safe. What did that even mean? Safe was gone – dead in the water. “I promise. You don’t believe me but you are.”
A firm pressure wrapped around my upper body and I prayed it was Death at last giving me the greatest gift of my ‘life’. After all, there were no recollections of what it felt like to die out in the living world. For all we knew it felt like the truest, deepest love from a person who cared for us unconditionally. So appealing it was; so inviting was the idea of death – and better yet seeing Cass and Mom again – that I found myself relaxing into the warm arms of the End of Times.
“There you go.” The Grim Reaper was speaking to me, drawing me in, the grip tightening and crawling up my spine to the nape of my neck. “You’re safe.” Coming from the mouth of the Afterworld, Will’s sentiment was a source of otherworldly understanding. “Sam?”
By name I was being beckoned.
“Can you look at me?”
I didn’t dare open my eyes and behold that which welcomed me without extraneous commentary.
“No.”
“That’s okay. Follow me, then.”
I did so willingly, enthusiastically even, blindly led into a space no more or less dark as I didn’t dare to open my eyes but with a refreshing chill that reined in my heartbeat. I would be calm and relaxed for my introduction to whatever was awaiting me on the other side…. The first thing to go right in a long time. So far out of myself was I that it never occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t fully aware of my sense of being.
“Sit.” I obeyed. “Take this.” Instinctively I lifted my hands and grasped at something unknown. “Drink.” The tip of a straw flitted across my tongue and with the stream of cold liquid came a sledgehammer to my throat as I was clotheslined by realty and realized that I wasn’t dead but instead sitting on a foreign couch in a foreign place with a barely-discernible face staring down at me. The featureless pale oval could have belonged to anyone; Cass, Chance, Mom… hell, even Dad or the cryptid Slenderman. Was Death faceless?
The figure moved and with it the surroundings shifted into focus. I wasn’t dead. I was gripping a glass of water so tightly my knuckles were pale, my chest heaving, and my eyes staring straight into those of Will as he crouched in front of me with his hands on my knees.
It was the first time I’d come out the other side of hell to find the person from Before still around.
Premise: Army medic Sam Taylor (narrator) loses his best friend and is left with a letter revealing secrets about her life. Said secrets lead to Sam landing in New Orleans to complete a mission; a mission that will turn into a journey of mutual healing as common threads between two trouble men blend seamlessly with their growing feelings.
"I was on the Formula One racetrack to nowhere for what felt like both minutes and lifetimes and when I finally hit the wall, I was on the sidewalk running in front of a small row of attached townhomes. If my life depended on giving directions to my current location, I’d be hung out by my heels and shot, and that would have been a welcome alternative to the real world."
"There was something horrifyingly stagnant in the knowledge and sensation that I was simply nowhere and nothing. What was life, and who was I, and why hadn’t I died instead of Cass, and why was I too much of a coward to put myself out of my own misery? I didn’t deserve to be alive."
"It was as if I no longer held the rights to my own bones."
"'Do you dissociate a lot? It’s nothing to be ashamed of,' he added quickly. 'It’s just a way to keep parts of you safe. It’s you protecting you in the only way that seems to work.' Will was staring straight ahead as if he hadn’t just encapsulated my yo-yo-ing brain in such a simple and clear way. 'It probably feels like everyone is watching but in the end we know who we are and taking care of yourself to the tune of others music will only muffle yours.'"
"Part of the programming of my childhood – intentional or not – was that only I could fix my problems and that the easy way was most likely a shortcut. You wouldn’t follow XYZ off a cliff, would you? Maybe not, but if I’m on an island that’s ablaze and there’s a boat at the bottom of the cliff, I’d rather live."
"I hated Cassie’s last few moments but I would have rather shouted them from the mountaintops than think about the version of me that would never set foot in the US again."
"The weight had dropped and all I could do was sit and be clung to by a man drowning in the finality of what a complete stranger had thrown into his life."
"J burst into sobs so gut wrenching I felt nauseous. They weren’t the cries of a dying soldier passing me his valuables so they could be sent to his partner. They weren’t the wails of a spouse who flew a distance to ID their loved one. These were the sounds of a man lit on fire; a man so distraught I wished I had snuck a gun into the ER so I could put him out of his misery."
"Being raised by a narcissist did a number on my childhood, namely that I never really had one. Being constantly forced into a mold meant I never found my default self. Add my unstable and impressionable mother with her own demons and I was a parentified child by my teens. No matter the issue, I was expected to find a solution and impartially execute. No fix equaled failure. Failure equaled blame. Blame laid the foundation and expectation and realty that any negative connections to said lack of fix was therefore my fault.
Adults have the experience and mental acuity to find the most effective fixes and the best ways to apply them. Ten-year-old's don’t."
"There was no doubt in my mind that combat had royally fucked me up. Beyond the injuries resulting from an ambush on our makeshift base, the range of ways in which every aspect of my existence was a barren wasteland terrified me. The Army had given me a place and purpose after a not-so-stellar childhood. The fact that something I held so close was also the reason I’d never feel comfortable in my own skin again broke my heart. It was all I had had and all I would ever have."
