An excerpt from The Dream of Doctor Bantam | VOL 1 BROOKLYN →

And maybe you don’t even know how to be alive and happy in the first place, she said. God, I don’t know what I’m saying. It’d just be nice to be outside of time for a little while. Just to stop and look around and notice things. Just to figure out where to go. Just not to exist for a little while.

She looked down at the lingonberries, smiled again, and started to eat the butter and fruit off of the top.

I mean, do you ever think like that? she asked.

Julie remembered all of a sudden when she had been seven, and Tabitha had been ten, and they’d gotten lost on the way home from the park, and Tabitha had carried her on her shoulders as they walked along the frontage road of the highway home: the cars came roaring at them like trumpets greeting kings, and Julie held on tighter and tighter, her sister’s scent rising from the back of her tiny neck.

No, she said. I think that’s a pretty twisted way to think, actually.

[Read the first chapter here]

8 months ago  /  3 notes