I haven’t updated this site for nearly a year now, which feels a bit like being a worshipper who has forgotten to sacrifice enough calves. So here’s my fresh offering: the first chapter of a novel I wrote a few years ago, of which nothing much yet has come. I hope you like it, and if not, don’t worry, I’m still pretty optimistic about my eventual posthumous phase. –> First Chapter.
The Erstwhile Lives of Alek Inch – Chapter 1
Needless to say it had come as a shock to Alek Inch to realise that he had been reincarnated as the entire human race, give or take. He certainly never asked to have existed as you, and as your mother, and as just under 104 billion homo sapiens.
In fact, Alek Inch’s only real hope – other than be left alone – had been that his body would go kaput before his mind.
Like his father’s body, which had been straightforwardly lacerated, punctured, torn and terminated in a car crash involving his yellow Nissan Sunny, on an unremarkable stretch of the M25, near Croydon, where it had been left in assorted warm lumps. As a 10-year-old Alek had seen his father’s body cremated, had declared honest love and gratitude through teary eyes, and was back to school on the Thursday.
Now, at 18, he appreciated the merciful abruptness of his father’s end. His mother – who he loved more than anything else in the world – was by contrast alive, but was operating with a brain that had been under siege for years. Episode after episode, Alek had witnessed her splendid mind being worn down to rubble by the incessant conflict of competing thoughts – the rational and the irrational, memories and dreams, a grotesque battle-royale. “I am broken,” she would say. To which she would often add a little joke, for levity, because she was all Alek had. –> First Chapter
(You will soon realise how much of a mare this is to format, so I apologise I haven’t attempted to blogify it.)
Zeph Auerbach 