The Dusts (excerpt)

Setting can make all the difference in setting the tone of a story. I'm a visual person and often write stories inspired by landscape. This piece of speculative fiction is mostly about Ethan, the narrator's long-dead brother, but the landscape is almost a character in its own right. The dim, dusty backdrop sets the stage for the siblings formative years. 

The Years of Night. That's what we called them. Although it wasn't the kind of night we knew years ago, when I was a small child. It was more like a permanent haze, an erasure of stars. One day the Big Star forgot to rise. The next day it did the same. After that, crops failed. The forests suffocated, struggling onward, trees stunted, foliage brownish gold. At least, that’s what happened here, in the mid-continent.

My mother had picture books, made before. She spent hours reading them to Ethan and me as children. In the books, the trees are garish, painted bright, bright green. The skies unnatural blue. There is the Big Star, of course. The lost sun, not a bulb behind a dusty pane, but hanging there, often drawn with a smile or wearing a pair of goggles. No, that's not right. We called them sunglasses.

The world wasn’t like those pictures. I was there, and though it was a long time ago and I was very little, I would remember colours like that. The sun didn't wear glasses of course. But the people did. Sunglasses. Like spectacles, only the lenses were tinted. Can you imagine? The Big Star was that bright! And the colours were infinite, so bountiful that they were taken for granted, many left unnamed.

With The Dusts, the landscapes lost their crisp corners and contrast. The blacks bled into white, greens into reds, indigos into yellows, until everything was soaked and brown. Everything we observed, everything we knew, was filtered through The Dusts. Forests eventually turned into clumps of standing spears, rampikes ready for lightening to burn.

Ethan was nine and I was six when the crops were moved indoor so that the growings could be done in shelters. All the grown-ups complained: dreary, they said. My brother and I adapted. Ethan taught me what my parents could not. We approached our world with fascination when all the adults could see was entropy.

That was the thing about Ethan. Curiosity was his defining feature. It ruled everything he did. When you have that kind of thirst, it leaves no room for the baser levels of personality: ignorance, judgement, bitterness, lethargy. Sometimes it made it seem as though he cared more for ideas than for people. That wasn’t the case. He was simply preoccupied.

I had friends at school, for Ethan it was harder. Something about him spelled difference, and children are like animals, they scent difference from a great distance. He was never disliked outright, only gently cast out, which he never noticed or minded. His mind was on broader things: the movements of the invisible stars, the echo of molecules, the polarities of the earth and the jigsaw of numbers that hummed a foreign language in his synapses. As for me, life was simple. I kept an eye out for beauty and I kept my hands busy. I’ll tell you this: I always enjoyed my brother’s company best.

Abandoned: Excerpt from Novel In Progress by Jennifer McAuley

Abandoned Places (excerpt from a work-in-progress) by Jennifer McAuley

We all think of the west coast as the land of perpetual grey. Swollen clouds and weeping skies, puddles you can fall into and sink so deep you end up in an alternate dimension. I think when you grow up there, when you’re a child, you take it all with a grain of salt. I don’t remember my formative years as particularly wet, in fact I think, maybe because the drip, drip, dripping becomes a sort of soothing metronome drumming out the beats of time, it becomes as normal and reassuring as a heart beat. It’s the blood softly circulating in your veins, you take the rain for granted.

In 93, David Duchovny was probably hanging out at the Orange, watching strippers, between shooting scenes for the Xfiles and Robert Pickton was dropping body parts in the wetlands across the highway from the Ruskin gas station. I’m sure it rained a lot, like it always does, but I remember that year as warm and sunny. That was the year I fell in love with Aaron. If there was rain it was drowned out by the pounding in my chest as we practiced being together for the rest of our lives, though we didn’t have a clue and didn’t bother worrying about forever because we were so young.

Aaron wasn’t the kind of guy I usually noticed. He was quiet, at least until you took the time to get to know him. He dressed and moved and spoke in a way that made him invisible, nondescript. There are people like that in high school, when you think back. They don’t stand out, they blend in. There is a magic and an art to this trick, to this blending. Not everyone can do it. The bullies and opposite sex miss them completely, it’s as though they lack some vital pheromone that alerts predators.  When you finally do notice them, when they reach out, a hand slipping between the folds on their invisibility cloak to touch you, it’s doubly shocking. Not only because of the shiver of electric energy ripping down your body, but because all of sudden you become aware of your own festering myopia. 

It was like that with Aaron. When I finally looked at him, really looked at him, it was a revelation. He was blinding and beautiful. He was the sun. And when you grow up on the West Coast you get a punch drunk on sun, let’s be honest. On sunny days you skip school to wipe the water from the neglected park benches and bask lizard-like in the sun. Out of the 354 days each year you see it, what, maybe 90? Most of the time we were curled up like embryos listening to precipitative heartbeat of the mother ship but on sunny days we were born, again and again. Maybe that’s why I remember my childhood as mostly sunny.