Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Excerpt.

Folks, the time is almost upon us!  If all goes to plan, the book should drop in the next two weeks.

As a teaser, I wanted to share the opening from "Full Tank," one of the five tales featured in It Follows.

I hope you dig it.

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     As David Fenris pissed, the smell of the men’s restroom on I-75 halfway between Bowling Green and Jacksonville threatened to overwhelm him.  Though he was skeptical about the assertion that being blind heightened his other senses, he decided today to simply go with it.  Still, David had a hard time believing that anyone possessing a “normal” sense of smell could withstand a bathroom in such a repugnant state.
     “This has got to be some kind of health code violation,” David said to nobody in particular.
     As he pondered the possibility of contracting hepatitis by merely breathing, David was suddenly met by another odor.  Unbelievably, this scent was even stronger than the first.  This time, however, it had nothing to do with human waste.
     When David was eight, his puppy ran away.  At least that’s what everyone initially thought.  Come to find out: the dog had actually been struck by a car.  Somehow, despite being nearly torn in half, Milo managed to drag himself into the crawlspace beneath the kitchen to die in some semblance of peace.  For weeks, unbeknownst to the Fenris family, little Milo festered underneath the house.  The fact that it was mid-summer in Atlanta didn’t help.
     After scouring the kitchen cupboards and refrigerator in search of the source of the heinous stench, David’s father finally determined it to be somewhere under the floorboards.  Despite his mother’s protests, David went out back with his father and was less than two feet away when his Dad crawled out from under the house carrying Milo’s rotting corpse.
     He recalled the exact moment the smell hit him.  The world spun, and David’s legs and stomach betrayed him.  He awoke to his father lifting him out of a pool of stomach bile and the sugarless candy bar he had eaten an hour before.      
     David was fortunate enough not to have actually seen the decayed corpse of his former canine companion, but the smell provided a memory that was still horribly vivid twenty-one years later.  He had not smelled anything that awful since. 
     That is, until now.

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