Folks, the time is almost upon us! If all goes to plan, the book should drop in the next two weeks.
As a teaser, I wanted to share the opening from "Full Tank," one of the five tales featured in
It Follows.
I hope you dig it.
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As David Fenris
pissed, the smell of the men’s restroom on I-75 halfway between Bowling Green
and Jacksonville threatened to overwhelm him.
Though he was skeptical about the assertion that being blind heightened
his other senses, he decided today to simply go with it. Still, David had a hard time believing that
anyone possessing a “normal” sense of smell could withstand a bathroom in such
a repugnant state.
“This has got to
be some kind of health code violation,” David said to nobody in particular.
As he pondered
the possibility of contracting hepatitis by merely breathing, David was
suddenly met by another odor.
Unbelievably, this scent was even stronger than the first. This time, however, it had nothing to do with
human waste.
When David was
eight, his puppy ran away. At least
that’s what everyone initially thought.
Come to find out: the dog had actually been struck by a car. Somehow, despite being nearly torn in half,
Milo managed to drag himself into the crawlspace beneath the kitchen to die in
some semblance of peace. For weeks,
unbeknownst to the Fenris family, little Milo festered underneath the
house. The fact that it was mid-summer in
Atlanta didn’t help.
After scouring
the kitchen cupboards and refrigerator in search of the source of the heinous
stench, David’s father finally determined it to be somewhere under the
floorboards. Despite his mother’s
protests, David went out back with his father and was less than two feet away
when his Dad crawled out from under the house carrying Milo’s rotting corpse.
He recalled the
exact moment the smell hit him. The
world spun, and David’s legs and stomach betrayed him. He awoke to his father lifting him out of a
pool of stomach bile and the sugarless candy bar he had eaten an hour
before.
David was
fortunate enough not to have actually seen
the decayed corpse of his former canine companion, but the smell provided a
memory that was still horribly vivid twenty-one years later. He had not smelled anything that awful
since.
That is, until
now.
