ARK
Jesse Miller
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Common Deer Press
Date of Publication: May 15, 2018
ISBN: Hardcover ISBN: 978-988761-08-4
Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-988761-07-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-988761-09-1
Number of pages: 162
Word Count: 45k
Cover Artist: Ellie Sipila
About the Book:
Imagine the son of Cinderella and Noah. That's Alabaster Ash, professional window washer and amateur foot fetishist, thrall to his three physically fit, brutally aggressive stepsisters.
After polishing foot after foot of glass in the gingerbread city of Candyland and cleaning up after the “wicked stairmasters,” he haunts the bars and streets looking for love and appreciation -or a really nice pair of feet.
Like it or not, Alabaster finds himself reliving and reimagining his parents' lives as he roams from bar to bar, from thrill ride to stunt show in the linguistic funland that is ARK.
Read an Excerpt:
Ground squirmed
past the windows, shuffling racks of bones and skulls under the soptoil as
clouds crept along the horizon. On the bus, all the windows let in cold air and
hung like a racked row of ice cubes in a tray, but I barely cracked the bottle.
Out I poured
when the doors opened, unable to feel my legs, unable to see the ocean, but I
could smell the salty marsh marching wet blue harridans, swiping and batting
the spit, pushing the blood and saltboxing up fatjuices into my sinuses.
Jammed a kwata
in the belly box and engaged the line.
–Hello?
–I’ve arrived.
I’m here.
–That’s great. I
bet a little walk will feel like a little slice of heaven, eh?
–I suppose.
–Well, I’ll
leave the light on for you, Buddy.
I slid on my
gloves and tried not to flinch at the sudden mustering of prickly discs
skipping to my face. I leaned in hard and clacked through town, blackened and
boarded and unblinking, barely wicklit. Smatter rooms to let. Ingrown hairs.
Offseason. Unseasoned in the savorless in and out drag of the tonguetide. I
dashed through a carless parking lot and into an astralamped glass meadow
jotting down quivering blue starlight ink- puddles into suckshifts of
snowhunchbanks humpbacking the outermost stretch of tideland. To the left, a
skit of cloven unguals stirred it seemed, crunchy, but I only got half an ear
worth and couldn’t noctoscop the goings-on of could be caribou or elk or deer
bowing their head, bowing their head before the almighty peering down hard and
in, like the retractable Polton and Crane lamp in the dentist’s office that
hangs my mouth open.
Inside the
blackness, the stickiting, ricketing pickets of thickets wiggle on their dicot
studs without me seeing, while they shot out the other side and stitched a
black curtain against the edge of the rest of the world. I clacked another mile
stretch as brine wafers tickled my ears and swizzled my nos- trils while
Lawrence Welk drift popping jollyjawdropping orbs uncorked across my field of
vichy.
Estrella’s was a
lighthouse, though not the vertical variety. But it glowed.
Light hung out
over the glass and flabbed fat, hotwhite dough out the sides as I took up her
street. This was another gingerbread house, hundreds of miles from home, though
this one in earshot of the beach. I rang and rang and rang and then just opened
the door.
Meet the Author:
Jesse Miller is the author of Unwrap Your Candy and the forthcoming ARK, both available from Common Deer Press. He is a Visiting Assistant Lecturer in English at the University of New England. He lives in the great city of Portland, Maine with his wife, two cats, and dog. Jesse roots for the Red Sox.
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