Literary Fiction
Date Published: May 14, 2026
Publisher: Manhattan Book Group
In the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning of 2020, two unlikely friends are forced to confront what home really means.
A young Black man and a middle-aged White man meet through the Indianapolis tech company where they both work. Though separated by age, race, and life experience, they discover a powerful connection through music, poetry, and the emotional landscapes that have shaped them. What begins as an unusual friendship becomes something deeper as both men find themselves questioning the world around them—and their place within it.
Disillusioned by their state’s response to the pandemic and shaken by the racial strife unfolding across the country, the two men leave Indianapolis on a transformative journey. Against the eerie backdrop of a fractured America, they face isolation, grief, uncertainty, and the complicated truths that define love, loyalty, friendship, and identity.
As the road carries them away from everything familiar, they begin to reevaluate their beliefs, their histories, and the meaning of belonging. Through shared adversity, conversation, art, and memory, they forge a bond that challenges them to see themselves—and each other—with greater honesty and compassion.
The Edge of Motherland by Michael Leppert is a moving work of cultural heritage fiction for readers who appreciate character-driven literary fiction, contemporary historical fiction, stories of unlikely friendship, and novels that explore race, resilience, connection, and hope during uncertain times.
CHAPTER 1
February 24, 2020
In an oversize room full of disheveled-looking, youthful and
youngish-looking men, the cubicle jungle seems to exist only for the purpose of
encouraging the chaos that dominates most days there. This Monday afternoon is
no different. “Work” looks a little like a party.
Even in February in Indianapolis, the bearded,
flip-flop-wearing team at Skylight Solutions is dressed for the beach. Or a
rock-and-roll festival. Or a tailgate party. Anyplace where there are no rules,
no protocols, no stuffy decorum to limit their creative energy.
Creative energy. That’s what they want it to be.
“Cleared for takeoff!” is loudly growled through a megaphone
on the far side of the room. About thirty bearded tech workers, who were just
hanging around making noise with each other, all go silent. There are enough
cubicles to accommodate all of them, and maybe a few more. The megaphoned words
are still hanging in the air as the new silence turns into panic. They
immediately disperse into cubes and duck down below the tops of the walls.
They are hiding, taking cover.
It’s a little after three o’clock in the afternoon.
The once crowded, lively room from five seconds ago has
cleared. The noisy, chaotic gathering of these young men standing around
shooting the breeze transforms into a tension-filled, dead quiet in an instant.
It looks like a drill. Every last one of them disappears. Anyone at the main entry
to the large room would think it is unoccupied. No one is visible, not even the
tops of their heads.
A few seconds pass. No one is making a sound. Then the
megaphone appears above the cube wall from the same cube near the main entry to
the jungle. The same booming voice announces:
“Lift off in ten… nine… eight…”
Desktops and drawers start rattling. Grown men begin
crawling from one cube to the next, making sure to stay out of sight. They can
be heard rattling and shuffling around, apparently in search of something,
anything.
“ …seven… six… five… ”
The rattling noises coming from the still-invisible,
full-grown children grow. Then some gasps are made, followed by some
teeth-grinding curses, then a voice yells out, “Wait, wait, wait! I’m not
ready!”
“ …four … three… two…”
“Oh shit! I’m not gonna make it!” is yelled out from across
the way, still with no face to go with the voice.
“ …one … zero… ignition… liftoff!”
And with that last announcement, the first half-dozen,
homemade paper and cardboard airplanes are thrown from the megaphone corner of
the room. As the elaborate aircraft float through the air to the middle of the
room, the incoming rubber bands, projectile paper clips, and spitballs are
fired at them. Contact is made on one of the large leading planes.
“Yes! That’s me! That’s me! Die, sucker!” is yelled from the
floor.
“Liftoff!” is yelled out of the megaphone again, and another
half-dozen planes are launched.
This time, they float through the room unscathed by the
second, third, and fourth rounds of office missiles.
“Danger zone! Ha, ha, ha!” comes through the megaphone.
Celebrating an apparent victory. That brief and sinister proclamation is then
immediately followed by “Final liftoff!”
Then the last fleet of planes is launched. One is hit
immediately by a slingshot paper clip, knocking the paper bomber almost to the
fifteen-foot-high ceiling. Groans of “Whoa” come from those who actually saw
it, and the men all rise to their feet and manually knock the remaining planes
out of the air with their hands, yelling “Woooo! Woooo! Eject! Eject! Man
down!”
The room explodes into laughter and cheers in celebration of
the tightly contested surface-to-air battle that had been threatened and
expected since lunchtime.
The air raid party is at its peak; high-fives, hoots, and
hollers drone on for a few seconds when the first of the grown children notices
her standing in the doorway with her arms crossed and a scowl on her face.
Quickly, the news of her ominous presence spreads through the ranks. Again, in
about five seconds, the men calm down and start heading toward their cubicles,
where they belong.
The holder of the megaphone turns proudly to her, standing
in the doorway near his launchpad office area, and says with a mischievous
grin, “No one got hurt, Priscilla, except for whoever was flying that last
plane. That pilot died a horrific death; there’s blood and guts everywhere over
there. You should go survey the carnage.”
Priscilla King doesn’t speak to him. She just keeps that
disapproving scowl planted on her face as she slowly saunters through the cube
jungle, scolding all of them with her eyes, particularly those with the nerve
to make eye contact with her.
She’s a forty-something, short Black woman who looks more
like she just walked out of the boardroom, not the fraternity poker room. She’s
wearing a dark-blue business suit-skirt combination and heels; her near
shoulder-length black hair is pulled back tightly. The staff of White hipsters
treat her like the boss, straightening up, quieting down, and getting back to
work. It’s routinely how this crowd reacts when she appears. They literally
treat her as the designated adult in the room.
Priscilla walks through the jungle every couple of hours
during a typical day for that very purpose: to keep things calm. She also
cruises through the chaos for one other reason. Once a day, she will walk from
the main entry to a cubicle on the opposite side to check on the one member of
the team about whom she cares most.
Elvin Jones Girton is a good-looking, six-foot-tall,
twenty-three-year-old Black man. He has the look of someone who plans to be a
CEO, governor or president. Someday. But today he sits in a cubicle on the far
side of the jungle, staring at the two monitors on his desk, a desk that has
absolutely nothing else on it but his phone.
Most people around him, from his bearded colleagues to the
mother he shares a small house on the west side of Indianapolis with, call him
a neat freak. But it’s deeper than that. He has a need for space, the kind of
space that gives him the freedom to move, to think, and to dream—his three
favorite things.
Not only is the top of his desk clean, but the larger,
built-in drawers are empty. He’s never understood why people need the kind of
crap that drawers tend to attract. If he could get rid of them entirely, he
might have a little more leg room. The lack of space he has spent his life
surrounded by has led to his regular search for just a little more—and it also
has led to his disdain for clutter.
As Priscilla approaches his cubicle, he doesn’t notice or
look up from either of the two screens he’s staring at. The airshow from a few
minutes earlier did not distract him either. He had his earbuds in with the
volume up. Jay-Z’s “Moment of Clarity” is booming through them:
“Thank God for granting me
This moment of clarity
This moment of honesty
The world’ll feel my truths
All through my Hard Knock Lifetime
A Gift and a Curse…”
Priscilla looks over the cubicle wall, to the side of his
right monitor, to get his attention, and Elvin finally looks up and pulls the
buds out.
“Oh, hey, Priscilla,” he says to her as he comes out of his
trance.
“Is everything cool over here?” she asks.
“As always,” he replies.
“Did you entirely miss whatever was just happening in here?”
she asks with a hint of surprise.
“I guess I did, but there’ll be something else happening
soon enough,” he replies with an eye roll.
She just tilts her head and smiles at him, knowing he’s not
the type to join the office party and possibly make some friends. She likes
that it’s not his style, but she wishes he and the beards had a chance to get
to know one another, too. It’s nothing she’s going to force, though, and she
quickly proceeds on her keep-things-calm lap through the jungle.
Priscilla is the HR chief of Skylight Solutions, having been
hired a year ago. She had been looking for a way to start when she met Elvin.
The company hired her specifically to modernize the team, the people, and the
face of the company, a face that wasn’t even five years old.
Modernize. That’s a softer, less threatening way to say
“diversify.” Less threatening to the White folks anyway.
As he watches her walk away from his cubicle, slowly
patrolling the jungle, he remembers what she said to him the day she offered
him the job: “Elvin, I need you to take your role here seriously. You need to
be good at what you do for the company and for your own advancement
opportunities. But what I need from you, what I really need from you, is to be
the beginning of the next chapter of growth here. This first year, I want you
to keep track of your entire experience. All of it, not just the daily tasks and
projects, but the entirety of what working here feels like. What it
really feels like in the moment. Write it down, a journal. Just for this first
year. Can you do that?”
The company hired Priscilla, their first woman and their
first Black person, a year ago. Six months later, Elvin was her first hire.
She knew plenty about what he would face, surrounded by the
fifty White and White-looking folks that filled the new company’s roster.
That’s how she came to choose Elvin. He struck her as someone who was prepared
for that challenge.
He thinks about the day she hired him often.
He smiled back at her and replied to her journal request.
“First of all, no one calls me Elvin. As long as I can remember, I have been
either EJ, EG, or oftentimes just Edge.”
“Unless it really bothers you, I would rather call you
Elvin. There aren’t a lot of ‘Edges’ running things around here,” she flatly
says.
It wasn’t a question. He could tell that she would be
referring to him as Elvin, and that was the end of that. She had a motherly
sternness about her that comforted him and worried him at the same time.
But he still wasn’t excited about keeping track of the
“experience.” How was he supposed to do that exactly? Taking notes like a
doctor, caseworker or even a reporter? Would he feel like some kind of mole or
a plant when he was just trying to blend?
Who was going to read it? Priscilla hadn’t said, and he
hadn’t asked.
He remembers the first journal of this exercise. It actually
happened before the assignment was given. It was a tweet. And someone else
wrote it and tagged him. It read, “These people won’t know what hit ’em. But
they’re about to FAAFO!”
It was a congratulations to him when a friend found out
about his new job. And he retweeted it. It’s the first thing that popped into
his head when she told him to journal. All he had to do was create a new, sort
of anonymous-sounding profile and tweet a few deep thoughts every few days.
Maybe people would see it, perhaps they wouldn’t. And who cared if they did? He
could set it up on mute, fire away the pithy little recap of the day, and walk
away.
That was how he started it anyway. But that was six months
ago. Now, the quips that used to be things like, “They didn’t invite me to
lunch again today,” have grown into elaborate descriptions of why he doesn’t
want to go to lunch with the self-appointed cool kids in the first place. And
why that’s their problem. And how to teach them better. And sometimes, he goes
on and on.
He named it @TechieTweetsIndy. After a few weeks of
sarcastic and short banter, the tweets grew into larger installments. He would
do his new assignment in a Word document, slice it up into a thread of tweets,
and post it. The threads were often like the verses of a poem or song, with a
meter, a tempo, and a point.
And by the time the holidays rolled around, he had grown to
love it. A few hundred others who had happened upon the posts seemed to enjoy
it too, enough to make him feel good about what he was doing and few enough to
comfortably stay anonymous.
But he knew this was not what Priscilla meant.
While the beards were playing with their paper airplanes and
target practice, Elvin had been scrolling through the news. It is what was on
his mind. He watches Priscilla finish her rounds, and then brings his Twitter
feed up on his phone to give it one more look:
THREAD:
There’s something growing out east.
On our bodies it wants to feast.
I wonder who it will come for first?
1/3
It’s a virus, a bug or some kind of disease.
A hunter, a killer, doing it with ease.
My neighbors’ bodies will quench its thirst.
2/3
Can we put up some kind of courageous fight? Or will that
“we” decide to take flight?
We all know the “we” who will get its worst.
3/3.
Tweet.
About the Author
Michael Leppert is an award-winning lecturer, columnist, essayist, and author based in Indianapolis, Indiana. A longtime communicator, public affairs professional, and educator, Leppert brings decades of experience in government, policy, business, and storytelling to his work.
He teaches speech and writing at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and serves as an adjunct professor at IU’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. He earned his B.S. in Public Affairs from Indiana University and his M.S. in Communication from Northwestern University, building a career rooted in the two fields that have shaped his life: government and communication.
Before entering academia and writing, Leppert spent thirteen years in public service for the State of Indiana. His career began at the Indiana Boys School, where he worked for five years and later served as program manager in the Intensive Treatment Unit. He then spent eight years at the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, ultimately serving as Executive Director of the IURC. In that role, he became known for his ability to explain complex and often controversial issues with clarity, insight, and accessibility.
After leaving state government in 2002, Leppert spent two decades as a private-sector lobbyist, public affairs consultant, and communications advisor, working with corporations, nonprofits, government leaders, community organizations, and business executives to help advance strategic priorities. His experience with public policy, political systems, and institutional decision-making has deeply informed his fiction and nonfiction writing.
Leppert began writing a weekly column in 2014, with his work appearing in newspapers throughout Indiana. His first book, Contrary to Popular Belief: A Chronicle of a Progressive in Indiana, was published in 2016. His novel Flipping the Circle, published by Greenleaf Book Group in 2021, is a political thriller that draws from his deep knowledge of Indiana politics, lobbying, and government culture. His fiction explores power, corruption, identity, morality, and the complicated human stories behind public life.
At the heart of Leppert’s work is a passion for helping people understand complicated ideas through story. Whether in the classroom, in public commentary, or on the page, he is driven by the belief that storytelling can bring clarity, challenge assumptions, and create meaningful connection.
Michael lives in a historic neighborhood in downtown Indianapolis with his wife, Amy Levander, and their rescue dog, Birdie. He has two adult children, Alex and Jack. He and Amy are competitive golfers, beach walkers, and enthusiastic lovers of live music, comedy, and theater.
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