New Adult – Literary – Contemporary fiction – Women’s fiction
Date Published:10-20-2023
Publisher: Mapleton Press
This novel about friendship, nostalgia, and finding oneself is funny and tender, moving and poetic, while standing firmly in hope and love. The characters are thinkers, overthinkers really, who are trying to find their way by asking the deep questions of life with wide-eyed wonder and talking through life's uncertainties. They fearlessly confront the choices they've made, examining their desires and their mistakes. The result is a smart, engaging novel depicting a young woman's search for the people and place she will call home.
Excerpt:
I walked over to the pink rock as Dylan set up our campsite for kooks.
Letting my eyes drift to a brilliant sky, I wondered aloud, “Why do you think we can’t get to other worlds?”
Dylan jumped down from his truck bed, holding a shovel. “Because people love pain.”
Pink light seeped from the edges of the hole.
I stared right at Dylan. “Sometimes you slay it with one sentence. One sentence. You need your own YouTube channel.”
Dylan winked. “Pythagoras got along just fine without the internet.”
Feeling one upped, I changed the subject. “What have you been doing out here all these years?”
“Trying to figure out how to get all the things I thought I’d get but didn’t.”
I turned to face him. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember laying out on the hood of this very truck, watching planes take off, and wanting something?”
“Like a tube of all-day-wearable matte lipstick, or winning a million dollars?”
“Either,” he huffed. “Both. At some point in your life, didn’t you want something, and weren’t you pissed when you didn’t get it?”
Clouds passed in front of the late afternoon sun. “Okay, what do you want?”
I could tell he’d been anticipating the question. “I want to make a connection.”
“You’re out here trying to find God?”
“God is for amateurs. I wanna find something real.”
“That is crystal-clutching, turn of the century, Bush era bullshit.”
“You’re always trying to reestablish the same connection. I’m talking about risking a new connection with that thing that might totally fry your circuits. The sooner you figure that out, the closer you’ll be to finding your path.”
The rumble of a car engine made my whole body tense. In the middle of nowhere, people peddled in bull semen and black-market organs. Attached to my kidneys, I felt around in my bag for mace. Dylan stood and waved his arms in the air like he was landing a plane.
“What are you doing?”
“Making sure Trevor doesn’t run over us.”
“What?” I stood so fast I actually tripped over my own feet.
“I called him before you woke up.” He shrugged. “He has a chisel, I don’t.”
“He can’t see me like this,” I hissed, turning desperately to find an escape.
“Like what?” Dylan whispered.
“I don’t know,” I squeaked. “Unshowered. Unemployed. Confused.”
Like a true friend, Dylan threw his arm over my shoulder. “You say that like this is different than any other time in your life.”
Trevor slammed his truck to a stop and got out wearing knee-high socks, cut off shorts, and combat boots. He handed Dylan a super-sized pack of candy bars.
Dylan laughed, “What’s this?”
“You told me to bring a supersized Kit Kat.”
Dylan dug his phone out of his pocket. “Fricking autocorrect. I wanted a six pack.”
“I thought it was an odd request,” Trevor said, before turning his attention to me. “Hey, Skye. Dylan didn’t tell me he had company.”
Trevor caused me to have huge lapses in reason. I’d spent my entire senior year making out with him in the very same truck now parked inches away. The action the front seat had seen was epic. I’d sat on the tailgate drinking malt liquor instead of making good college choices. The tattoo of a dragon curved up Trevor’s neck, and my tongue went with it. He was one of the last people to still have a lip piercing. A metal hoop I chipped my tooth on. We were like two molecules of dust, full of surface tension. One second in his hands, and I’d change from solid to liquid, evaporating in his palms.
My punk rock cowboy derailed my train hurtling down memory lane. “I looked for you on Myspace for a couple of years,” he said, turning so that his mohawk was silhouetted against the setting sun.
“I didn’t really join the internet community. It doesn’t strike me as innovative. It’s more like everyone screaming all at once.”
“Huh.” Trevor popped the cap on a soda. “Fair enough.” Sunlight glistened over the back of his head, perched on the horizon, watching us. “You could have called. They still have phones out east, right? The wonky ones that plug into the wall?”
Dylan slapped his shoulder, “God, you’re good with the guilt.”
Trevor took a swig, belched, and said, “Thanks.”
“Yeah, they have phones, Trevor.”
“Huh,” he said, so jaded and dismissively the guilt actually worked.
He handed Dylan a chisel and a sledgehammer. “Ready to roll, party people?”
The silhouetted image of Trevor handing over a chisel was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. Relaxing his hand so just a few fingers held the long handle made me want to kiss him right there. Climb up his chest and pound my own until the world fell away, strange and scared. The simplest things transform a common act into a holy moment. The sacred, earthy delight of Trevor’s hands on me. All over my body. It made me nuts. In more ways than one. I’d left the desert to get away from those hands. To get away from an uncertain future in dark back rooms full of heavy breathing and the smell of doughnuts. Convinced I’d never have anything or be anything, I’d run east to escape the very thing I wanted more than anything right that moment.
Trevor walked over to me, his cologne filling my lungs. I closed my eyes the way I imagined people do after they fall from a height too high to survive. I felt his breath on my ear, and heard him whisper, “Okay. I’ll be the first to say it. I missed you, Skye.”
I melted like a ship swallowed by a storm. Hannity’s drug store stocked chocolate-covered cherries on an end cap by the checkout. For four bucks, you could have twenty-four luscious, sugary-sweet morsels. I loved how they squirted in my mouth, syrup cascading over my tongue, the cherry suspended in the middle. I’m pretty sure Trevor and I were responsible for any profit the company actually made. We built an entire relationship on junk food. Jars of Peter Pan peanut butter with half a bag of M&Ms stirred in, Pop Tarts, Cap’n Crunch, SweeTarts, a rainbow of Skittles stirred into a tub of orange sherbet.
In South Carolina, when I changed my toxic food ways, introducing flax seed and hand-pressed walnut oil into my diet, I found a box of organic pop tarts at the health food store. Instead of sugar, it was sweetened with fruit juice, and made with organic wheat. I developed a slow addiction. It was like putting a piece of Trevor in my mouth. I thought a lot about the body and blood of Christ. How holy people laid a wafer on the tongue. I’d sit alone at my dinette, laying piece after piece of holy, toasted, strawberry Trevor on my tongue. A box, sometimes two, sat on a shelf with a link to my past. I didn’t think about it in those terms back then. In those days, I could convince myself they were simple food choices. Now, I saw it clearly. Crumbs I left to find my way home.
“We should move to Alaska and build a cabin,” Dylan said, totally off topic, trying to hoist the rock out of the hole.
“Good long-term goal.”
“I still don’t completely understand what we are doing,” I pointed out.
Dylan dropped his sunglasses to the end of his nose. “We’re digging up a rock. It’s not a metaphor, Skye.”
I asked the question no one dared utter, just to be a troublemaker. “What if we dig this rock up and find out that everything is real? Faith, death, love, eternal life, magic. Like an explosion of contradictions happening all at once.”
“Sign me up,” Dylan said.
I did not have the God-given gift to look at something and know it for what it was. That was my sister. I had tenacity. Sheer force to go the distance. Too stupid to give up. That’s how I justified leaving Trevor. Obsession was my superpower. And worry.
Dylan hunched over, staring at the pink, glowing rock like a third grader staring at a bug. Cue New Age music with harps and flutes.
“I mean,” he said, walking around the edge of the hole, “what if this is our chance at destiny?”
“I’m not following you.”
Trevor stepped up behind me, his chest against my back. “What if this rock is a sign?”
“A sign from who?”
Dylan stretched his arms out wide and, judging by the confidence displayed, I knew he’d given this a lot of thought. “The cosmos. Intelligent life. Hell, what if time doesn’t really exist, and there are parallel worlds, and alternate versions of ourselves left this rock here as a message?”
“What’s the message?”
At the edge of the hole, Dylan stopped, put his hands on his hips, and said, “That’s for us to figure out.”
Which was exactly the kind of answer that made me run screaming from New Age spirituality. “If you write ‘help’ in the sand, then help comes, or it doesn’t,” I said. “A message is not ambiguous.”
“In a black and white world,” he shrugged.
“This world is black and white.”
Shaking his head, Dylan said, “No. This world is a complex infinity of choices.”
“Where did you even learn to talk like that?”
Rolling his eyes, he pulled a spade out of his back pocket and stooped over. “You’re too literal, Skye. You use literal as a defense to defiantly reject what complicates your life. You reject mystery, and truth is inside the mystery.”
I wanted to punch him in the dick. “So, let me get this straight: you think I’m dodging my life while you’re out here digging up a rock sent to you by God?”
Looking up from the hole, he squinted and smiled at the same time. “God is for amateurs. We had this conversation already.”
He pushed loose dirt away with his spade and pink light glowed up from the ground in golden streams. “Hand me that box.”
Trevor swung his arm around me and handed a box over.
With the patience of a deranged archaeologist, Dylan tried to hoist the rock out. It wouldn’t budge. Trevor and I got on our knees. The light was amazing, intense, like it knew me, like it was in fact trying to tell me something. Give me a long-sought answer. Make sense of my life. If not make sense, then at least point me in the right direction. I shook it off. In reality, I was out at some crash site, sexually attracted to a man in tube socks and Daisy Dukes, with another guy who couldn’t get a rock out of a hole.
Maybe it was the blazing light. Maybe I was exhausted from chasing imaginary things that looked real. Maybe I was just tired of resisting destiny. A large tumbleweed moved lazily across the open space ahead. There were people who knew me, like, really knew me, and I’d abandoned them at the most promising time in our lives for six years across the country that left me no closer to sanity than when I’d left.
In all my life I’d never surrendered. That really bothered me. So there, in the most awkward, weird place I could think of, I closed my eyes, leaned forward, and kissed my high school crush.
Trevor and Skye. Do or die. All or nothing. I loved the feeling of Trevor’s mouth on mine. The lush kiss. I loved how he kissed me like it was the first and last time every time. How he made me feel like I could do anything. Fly to Mars. Hold back tsunamis with my bare hands, strong and delicate, beautiful and fierce.
Praise for Wild Asses of the Mojave Desert
'The best stories begin with wreckage.' Jack London
…a journey away from the familiar and into the desert of discovery…As relationship quandaries, marriage possibilities, and good and harmful emotional connections emerge against the backdrop of the desert environment, readers receive a multifaceted story that connects via both emotional and landscape twists of perspective.
Wild Asses of the Mojave Desert is a novel that pulls at heart and mind alike. Through Skye's journey and process of letting go everything she's held tightly throughout her life, readers receive a compelling saga…
-D. Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
With lyrical prose and philosophical conversation, Skye's relationships light up as fiercely as the streaks marking the desert sky at night. This novel about friendship, nostalgia, and finding oneself is funny and tender, moving and poetic, while standing firmly in hope and love. The characters are thinkers, overthinkers really, who are trying to find their way by asking the deep questions of life with wide-eyed wonder and talking through life's uncertainties. They fearlessly confront the choices they've made, examining their desires and their mistakes. The result is a smart, engaging novel depicting a young woman's search for the people and place she will call home. Returning home is a powerful and effective plot device that, in this author's hands, feels vibrant and new partly because of the fully realized characters and strong dialogue that endow the relationships with wise and vivid truths about life.
-RECOMMENDED by the US Review
About the Author
Lis Anna-Langston was raised along the winding current of the Mississippi River on a steady diet of dog-eared books. She attended a Creative and Performing Arts School from middle school until graduation and went on to study Literature at Webster University. Her novels have won the Parents’ Choice Gold, Moonbeam Book Award, Independent Press Award, Benjamin Franklin Book Award and NYC Big Book Awards. A three-time Pushcart award nominee and Finalist in the Brighthorse Book Prize, William Faulkner Fiction Contest, George Garrett Fiction Prize and Thomas Wolfe Fiction Award, her work has been published in The Literary Review, Emerson Review, The Merrimack Review, Emrys Journal, The MacGuffin, Sand Hill Review and dozens of other literary journals.
Hailed as “an author with a genuine flair for originality” by Midwest Book Review and “a loveable, engaging, original voice…” by Publishers Weekly, you can find her in the wilds of South Carolina plucking stories out of thin air.
Contact Links
Twitter @LisAnnaLangston
Purchase Links
No comments:
Post a Comment