"Bark" excerpt from Further Out

     This story is cheap. If a movie, sandy Etch A Sketch waves would separate episodes dredged from a murky blindness. This is the past. But then everything is past. Or nothing is?

     Ooh, that’s a big thought swimming in a small brain.

     Erin must have put a cramp in someone’s style because she is away at bible camp on a sponsorship for underprivileged kids. How they got under in the first place is an unsolved mystery. Even worse than camp is her first period. Stop. Bleeding through all her clothes is so natural no one talks about it. Except, they let her use the counselors’ bathroom to rinse out her panties each night. Aside from this repeat cycle, she is a regular Jane. See Jane run, jump, climb, swim. Funny, funny Jane. Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, said Spot.

     That’s a lie. She does none of those things and is not regular. Mostly, she reads on her bunk and the other kids avoid her. Blood must spell trouble. A girl in her cabin says she talks different, like a grown-up.

     “What’s wrong with you, anyway?” Megan says, screwing up her face.

     “What’s wrong with you, sourpuss?” Erin shoots back.

     Megan keeps her comments to herself after that.

     In truth, she has been a bit isolated lately. Sylvie wasn’t letting any kids come by, and now, all of a sudden, she’s surrounded. What do kids even talk about? She tried to bring up Justine, even though she doesn’t like her much, but a boy just called her bizarro girl, and the conversation never went anywhere after that.

     No one wants to bunk above her. They say she smells like compost. She wants to tell them it’s just the food she’s saving under her mattress, but it’s a secret. Monkey says it’s weird to hoard food, but Erin knew that already. More and more they think just the same.

     But then her cabin leader finds the hoard anyway, adds that to her weight and odd behavior, and reports them. Sylvie’s case worker, Marg, mutates from a voice at the end of a crisis line into something mobile and making house calls. 
posted by Aleks

"Kid Store" excerpt from Further Out

     Inside Erin’s fridge is a Tupperware container half full of gasoline-polystyrene gel, mixed for her animal rescue operations, but transferrable to other situations. She tears off a hunk, plops it into a bread bag, and packs it, along with some matches, in her shoulder bag.
     As she scuttles through the alleyways past midnight, all is quiet except for the odd scrape of feet on gravel. Other miscreants out on nefarious errands, no doubt. She approaches his place from the back, nestles the glob of gel against his garage, then, crouching into the fence for wind break, strikes and tosses matches until one catches fuel to set the structure ablaze.

     Fire is an immediate pay-off. Back home she curls, toasty, into a bed of cats.

     Two nights later, bolstered and impatient, she decides to take a leap, cautious increments be damned.

     Utensils in hand, she wears the familiar path to his back gate where no dog is his best friend. Just a chain link, a popped basement window, and she’s in. Street lights outline stairs, a door leading into a dingy livingroom, its heavy curtains drawn. What’s he hiding? As if she didn’t know. She passes through the bedroom doorway, starting to feel him out in a frenzy, feral claws digging earth for bone. And when they finally connect, she is lost and found. Is it fever that wets her hands?

     When the cops arrive (alerted by who?), they have to drag her, kicking-feet-first out of a closet she doesn’t remember crawling into. Enraged, Erin spits in the face of the nearest one.

     “I’m diseased and now you are too.”

     The older cop leverages behind her, pulling her wrists together and forcing on cuffs as the now-diseased cop puts her legs in a choke hold. In this way they haul her out, body thrashing against the immanent fact of being reeled in. 

     Having neutralized her in the squad car, rookie goes back in. She waits as no bodies are brought out and no yellow tape is applied. There must be a forensics crew that does this. She doesn’t really know how it works, not being a fan of cop shows.

     “What a mess," rookie says, getting back into the car. Then, in a lower voice: “Hey, do you think she was telling the truth . . . about being sick? Should I get myself checked out?”

     “Guess you better. We’ll get her a work-up too when we get to the hospital.”

     Hospital? 

 posted by Aleks

A Synopsis for Further Out

Steeped in the milieu of Regina’s inner city, Further Out’s somewhat unlinear narrative tracks Erin, Wanda and Reese (Blue Eyes) as their archs converge in a final violent act. Its antiheroine, Erin, is a young woman cut adrift from a childhood drowning in her mother’s “oceanic despair” into an equally tumultuous adulthood. Lacking moral anchor, driven by an antipathy for authorities, her obsession with the animal abusers and sexual predators she sees everywhere turns to vigilantism. After one such escapade goes wrong and lands her on a psychiatric ward, she meets Wanda, a 16-year-old punk-influenced Métis misfit. The two form a bond, at first opportunistic on Erin’s part, that joins them in the quest for justice. It is in opposition to Reese, the brother of a childhood friend and perpetrator of animal cruelty, that Erin first comes to identify with the weak. And so it is fated that they should meet again.

While its subject matter will be too boring for some (lovers of gore and cruelty) and not boring enough for others (haters of “mature” subject matter, e.g. violence, profanity), hopefully someone will have a Goldilocks moment and find it exactly the right amount of boring.