Review by Jen Farr
For UK readers who are looking to inject some variety into their book collection, Your Paper Quest is a monthly subscription box service like no other. Each month, they pick a theme and carefully select two novels by self-published authors to send out to their subscribers. Recently, they were kind enough to send me their March box, which was themed around the phrase, “Catch Me if You Can”.
Early lunch now. The café is packed with students and workers sitting on chairs and chatting across tables. People just finishing a morning in the office or in the classroom. The roar inside is like a seashore, rising and falling, laughter, a hissing Marzocco machine, tinkling spoons and cups, white plates streaming out of the kitchen.
I order the carnitas with watermelon radish, and why not, a glass of prosecco with lunch. Sunlight glints off the river. Pedestrians shiver outside, leaning against lamp posts coated in rust. The wait is long here. It always is. The place is too popular.
The operation had been a success. Moreover, it had been painless, just as Dr. Mayfield had promised. James had been skeptical, seeing as he was going to be awake as they cut into his brain. (James was well aware the brain had no nerves, but the skull surely did.) But Dr. Mayfield had been correct—James had felt nothing beyond a slight pressure. And now, with the chip implanted, James would never feel anything unpleasant ever again.
* * *
The first time James used his new power was the following Friday, during his company’s quarterly earnings review. The chip functioned flawlessly—eight hours of meetings passed in the blink of an eye—and James left the office wearing a large grin. His cube-mate and closest thing to a work friend, Alan, noticed his buoyant disposition.
He’s going Wenera, his path winds endlessly. He’s finding the path hard to follow. It’s very narrow, and it continuously twists and shifts. Sometimes when he sits down and rests, he wakes up and discovers that his path isn’t there anymore. He’s trying to understand the order of things around him, but everything seems arbitrary. Boulders, rifts and high mountains suddenly appear along the way. Now and then he has to walk over them or around them. It’s frustrating, his passage is proving to be excruciatingly exhausting.
Larry Sanchez, a father of two who worked as an operations manager for a pharmaceutical company, woke up at his usual time on Monday. Like every day, he sat at the kitchen table, drank his coffee and ate his bagel, but then, instead of getting up to go to work, he just stood there, thinking of nothing in particular.
He was startled when his sons stormed into the kitchen and grabbed whatever they could find to eat on their way to school. Larry usually left for work before the boys even woke up, although it was not unheard of for him to be a little late to see them off. In less than a minute, they said goodbye to their father and were gone.
Everyone figured she would break up with him. She had a swim scholarship to that big school out west, and did he even get in anywhere, anyway? There were jokes he would follow her to college. Set up a sleeping bag outside her dorm. Nah, they’ll be over well before then, people said.
Graduation came, and in pictures he stood off to the side, unsmiling but just within frame.
As soon as I step out of the car, the strong scent of incense hits me and mingles with the humidity in the gray, rain-heavy air. The smell reminds me of citronella, the mosquito repellent my mom would slather on herself early in the evening, only for it to end up caked under her nails after scratching the bug bites that would inevitably dot her arms and legs. This is where my great-grandparents are buried, where my grandparents are now sealed away behind a slab of engraved stone, in a suburb of the extravagantly sunny Los Angeles next to actors and stuntmen, the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and the former princess of Egypt. This is where home is supposed to be.
‘So no meat, including meat soup, no spreads–’
‘Not even jam?’
‘No, not even jam I’m afraid.’
‘Don’t we buy in the jam?’
‘Well–’
‘If I can just jump in there, Val? As we were discussing in the supervisor meeting last week, the cost of buying in jam is just too much for our budget at the moment. Jam is technically one of our luxury items that we don’t promise to people, it’s just nice to have.’
Before every game, Dalton Kissinger would arrive early and run exactly three laps around the baseball diamond. Following that, he would take his hat and flip it in the air, attempting to move his neck so it landed directly on his head. It normally took around five tries. Last, just before the game began, he would buy an order of fries, sprinkle pepper on them, and eat every last fry. With these three rituals, Dalton Kissinger ensured that he would play a good game.
He got fries from a place up the street and brought them back to the locker room. Dalton kept a pepper shaker in his duffel.