Book Title: Earnest Ink
Author: Alex Hall
Publisher: Nine Star Press
Published: October 14, 2019
Cover Artist: Natasha Snow
Genre/s: Queer Spec Fic, Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Thriller/Suspense
Warning: Depictions of Trauma, Blood, Violence, Murder,
Eating disorders, Body hatred, Transphobia, PTSD, War
Length: 72 100 words/244 pages
It is a standalone book.
Blurb
While twenty-year-old FTM Hemingway is making an excellent living as a tattoo artist in a near-future version of Hell’s Kitchen, the rest of the country is splintered and struggling in the wake of a war gone on for too long. Technology has collapsed, borders rise and fall overnight, and magic has awakened without rhyme, reason, or rule, turning average unwitting citizens into wielders of strange and specific strands of magic.
Hemingway’s particular brand of magic has made him a household name. Not only is he a talented artist, but his work comes to life. Literally.
When NYC’s most infamous serial killer—the East River Ripper—abducts Hemingway’s best friend, Grace, he has only days to save her. Hemingway teams up with his stoic cop roommate to hunt for the killer and rescue Grace before she becomes the Ripper’s latest victim. But as the duo chase clues to the serial killer’s identity, Hemingway begins to fear the magic he and the Ripper share might eventually corrupt him too.
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Earnest Ink
Alex Hall © 2019
All Rights Reserved
I wasn’t the only one who became magical seemingly overnight.
There was a woman in Galway who popped up briefly on YouTube soon after I took over Twitter. Suddenly she could turn flat water into beer and Perrier into champagne simply by sticking one finger into the drink. There was an ex-solicitor in London who claimed he could dream the future. He proved it by winning an astounding series of Lotto Max draws; his face and winnings record were on the cover of the last issue of the Daily Mail we ever had out of the United Kingdom. A family in Kyoto reported that their youngest daughter woke up at dawn the day after Tokyo went black, walked into their backyard, and sang the sun up with the birds—literally, in inhuman, piping song. For a short while, the family posted their daughter’s pictures all over Facebook: a tiny, dark-haired figure covered head to shoulders with pigeons, doves, and cuckoos, a goose squatting at her feet. I remember the captions read like some sort of bizarre fairy tale : Airi and the birds share supper. Airi dances with the swan. Airi swims with spot-billed mallards.
I also remember that in the pictures, Airi looked miserable. Later the family closed their Facebook account. A few months after, I read somewhere that Airi, robbed of human language in exchange for birdsong, had become a wild, angry creature better kept in a hospital than at home.
The ex-solicitor gave his Lotto winnings to Oxfam and then stepped off Beachy Head in East Sussex. I’m not surprised that whatever he saw in his dreams sent him over the cliff’s edge. If I’d known ahead of time what the end of 2020 would bring, I might have done the same.
The granny in Galway opened a pub, called it the Miracle, and was on her way to amassing a healthy fortune before an electromagnetic pulse loosed above Dublin put an end to her YouTube Channel and news stopped coming out of Ireland altogether. Granny looked tough as nails, though, and I like to think she’s still at it, turning water into alcohol while the world burns.
In January 2021, there were rumors of a strong man out in Fresno, California, and a kid who could talk to ghosts in Missouri, and another who could spit spider-silk on command, but by then borders were going up across the nation as states seceded or disappeared altogether, and thaumaturgy, as President Shannon hastily labeled our new strangeness, was a far less pressing issue than water rights in California or airspace over Dominion Surry.
My own unusual ability seemed the most frivolous of talents when many of my contemporaries were marching off to war. Tank Tattoo closed in March. In April I bought a fake ID from a forger working out of a truck behind the local Kmart, and over my dad’s faint protests took myself three counties over to Idaho Recruitment.
I think my dad knew they wouldn’t take me even though the false ID was prime. I didn’t look the sixteen I pretended to be; I was small even for my age. I had iron pins in my leg and still walked with a limp. I suffered from dreams of drowning almost every night, and it showed on my face whenever I steeled myself to glance in the bathroom mirror.
When the recruitment officer called my first name and looked from me to my paperwork, I could see from the set of his mouth that I wouldn’t get away with it.
“Aren’t you that kid?” he said, frowning. “That one I’ve seen in all those pictures from Seattle?”
“No,” I said through a faltering sneer. “I live in Ketchum.”
He sighed, shook his head, and passed my paperwork back over the counter. “You know fingerprinting is part of the process, right? Come back when you’re sixteen and bring a doctor’s note with you or there’s no point. You may live in Ketchum, but I remember your face and the metal sticking out of your leg—Idaho won’t draft without a physician’s clearance.”
I tried Montana next, then Wyoming, but I was too well known. By the time I left Cheyenne, my bad leg was a constant cramp from too much time spent on a Greyhound bus. I was beginning to accept that maybe the draft wasn’t for me.
When I walked back through our front door, tired and hungry and sore and heartsick, my dad was reading a week-old addition of the New York Times over his dinner. He got up to fetch me pot roast and a glass of red wine, setting his tablet down near his chair. I took his place, rubbing the ache in my thigh, close to tears, and stared dully at the screen. The headlines were all bad, but beneath the wartime bulletins, in a much smaller font, a caption caught my notice: Mind over Medicine! Midtown Youth Heals Hundreds!
“Magical healing,” my dad said, setting a plate in front of me and a hand on my head. “Isn’t that something? Maybe God’s not given up on us after all.”
Two days later I purchased a travel visa with my false ID and left Ketchum for Manhattan.
Sarah Remy/Alex Hall is a nonbinary, animal-loving, proud gamer Geek.
Their work can be found in a variety of cool places, including HarperVoyager, EDGE and NineStar Press.
Author Links
Blog/Website | Twitter: @sarahremywrites
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