An excerpt!

This is an excerpt from "Toppled", my current project. I skipped ahead to something I thought would be more motivating for me. Ichirou and Grace and Greg have "talents" -- strange abilities hidden under the mundane talents they have as prodigies. This gets into talents ethics, and -- well, bumbling attempts at relationships. This is from Ichirou's point of view -- he spent several years in a school that tries to cure hikikomoris, or teenage recluses. Grace's parents put her in residential music schools for most of her life, and she has little parenting as a result. Greg's family was killed in a bombing about 13 years ago. 

Because this is an excerpt from the middle of the book, you may have some questions. Go ahead and ask!

**************

I sat in the copse of trees that the cabin nestled in. I focused on the birds singing to keep the pressure of the air from crushing me. Ayana-sensei taught me how to do that, to keep me from retreating into what she called my own mind. I didn’t correct her – I retreated to a place, not my own mind.

And now I would tell Grace-chan – Gracie in her language -- about this place, and she would doubtless think I was crazy. But I would not be an impostor to her.

I glanced up, and I saw Gracie stroll toward me, tall and lean and poised. She had the perfect demeanor, the perfect body – I stopped the thought there by thinking of the birds, some of which sounded familiar, some not. One bird called “cheer, cheer, cheer!” and I knew I had once heard it in the world I retreated to.

Gracie wore shorts and a t-shirt and a black baseball cap with a white symbol that, after much scrutiny, I realized were initials intertwined. The Yankees, of course. She sat down next to me, unnervingly close, and I smelled a distinctly chemical, un-Gracie smell. She handed me a bottle. “Good. You have a hat. Rub some of this on so the ticks don’t get you.” I did as directed, and I too smelled like cleaning fluid disguised by artificial flower scent.

“So why are we here?” she asked, cocking her head as she peered at me.

“It’s time to tell you something.”

Of course, Gracie’s brow wrinkled at my dramatic choice of words. “Time to tell me what?”

“Where my talent comes from.”

“Comes from?” Gracie would say that, because her talent, or the talent beneath her talent, developed from her childhood need to be listened to and appeared to come from her own subconscious.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath as I felt the slight breeze pushing against my skin. “Your talent comes from something inside you. My talent comes from a place outside of me.”

“What do you mean?” Grace-chan stammered.

“Do you remember the video I showed you the day we met?”

“I can’t forget that –” she snapped. “I spent half an hour with you in a pitch-black lounge watching bunnies turn into flowers and finding all the pain of my childhood – which had no bunnies or flowers – lying dissected in front of me.”

“I miscalculated,” I shrugged. “Too much happy and not enough comforting.” I paused. “But that’s not the point.”

“Not the point,” Gracie echoed.

“The reason I wanted to meet here is because I wanted you to know where my ideas come from.”

“They come from your mind?” Gracie asked, and I couldn’t identify her tone of voice.

“No, Gracie,” I corrected. “There’s this place, and I go there – “

“And the place is in your mind,” she insisted.

“No. I go someplace. Someplace else. When I was a hikikomori, the world would become too much for me to deal with, and I would go to this other place with no sound but pictures flowing like waterfalls, and it would tell me stories in pictures, and I started to retell them. Sometimes it showed me horrible stories that I swore I would never share. But most of the pictures show me things the world needs to see. And I retell them.”

“And you’ve assigned yourself as the arbiter of what people need to see. How conceited of you!” Without another word, she stood up and stalked off.

I sat with my back against my tree and my eyes closed, trying to pay attention to the sounds rather than going back to my world.

“Ichirou, let me give you a piece of advice.” I opened my eyes, and Greg, lanky and unkempt in his second-hand fatigues, squatted next to me. “When dealing with women, it’s best not to dismiss their emotions lest they get angry and stomp away in a huff.”