So the date of my anthology is fast approaching and I made promises that I must keep!
The anthology is measuring up to just above 30,000 words with over half a dozen stories! Two of these stories I can confirm are brand new and never seen before!
(Except for these excerpts! If you’d like to read more, remember that A Caffeinated Collection of Curious Accounts will be available January 28th!)
Mama makes Myrtie’s bones out of howlite, carves the soft stone into fingers and toes and fixes her skull onto her neck with a mix of Himalayan salt and willpower. She rubs her femurs down with rosemary, curls long strips of white willow bark around her vertebrae, secrets leaves of lavender in hinge and socket joints.
“She’ll be good,” Mama mutters, clawing chunks of clay out of the basin at her side. “This one will be good.” She wraps the clay around the ragged ball of quartz that will serve as Myrtie’s heart and begins to fashion veins and arteries out of it.
Honor, standing by the door, knows better than to speak. She silently offers Mama another bowl of salt, freshly ground, and then fades to the back of the room. Her bones ache all the time these days, endless pain, but she knows that her fate will come that much quicker if she says anything.
Beneath the floorboards, down in the basement, her brothers’ bones, hematite and tiger’s eye, hum agreement.
The thing is: Betony is twenty-three and running. Her heart is made of paper these days and it buckles in her chest under the weight of half-remembered stained glass, smears of red and yellow and green, and the feeling of being home and Not Forgotten. These things are slipping away from her now, slipping as she forgets what color looks like when it’s not smeared across her skin.
A lover tells her that she looks wounded. They drag their fingers across swirls of purple and yellow, of green and blue, and contort their full mouth into a caricature of a pout. That’s what Betony loves about them. Art follows life but they’re art and art through, familiar and alien from what she’s running from all at once.
“Yeah,” Betony says and abruptly feels the way that their skin is welded together, heat and sweat and Not Love. She disentangles herself and hunches in the too big bed, staring at the stains that hide her skin. The nightstand is an orange globe that does little in the way of light but, through it, the places where the colors meet look like an abyss. Like her skin is not just hidden but missing. “I guess you could say that.”
