Stranger Will
Synopsis:
William Lowson has less than two months until fatherhood - a state he abhors, existing in this world governed by the limit of a human lifespan. To birth is to ultimately kill. His admittedly pessimistic view comes as a result of his work as a Human Remains Removal Specialist - professionally cleaning the stains left from dead bodies.
As his fiancée nears term William becomes increasingly desperate for a solution to, what he calls, “this fault of human ego.” His friend and mentor, Mrs. Rose, an elementary school principal, nurtures and sympathizes with his cynicism, blaming his dilemma on an imperfect world. But she has a plan around this impediment: a group of strangers-a devout collection of kindred minds who have dedicated their lives to cultivating a unique idea of perfection, and she wants William to join.
But once he is in can he get out?
Praise for Stranger Will:
“As someone who teaches, edits and reads for a living, I’m always looking for the scene, the character, the story I haven’t read a thousand times over and over. Something with the spark of originality and the courage to be different. When I see that something new, it’s always a joy. And, thanks to Caleb Ross and his STRANGER WILL, I had those moments of joy repeatedly throughout the book. This is an original—unlike anything you’ve ever read before."
-Rob Roberge, author of More Than They Could Chew and Drive
“[Caleb] is gifted, in that his characters exhibit grotesqueries that somehow seem encoded with the same flaws of the world they inhabit, as if they are not constructs, but victims: the fruits of a tree growing upside down.”
–Jason Kane,Oxyfication.net
“More nihilistic than a chainsaw-wielding midget who wants to be the tallest man on Earth.”
-Bradley Sands, author of It Came from Below the Belt and editor of Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens
Book Excerpt:
Chapter One:
An army of confident homeless walk the streets of Brackenwood.
He’d never seen a homeless man with white teeth before moving here, clean hair too. He’d never seen many homeless people to at all, but this town bred them like flies. Their white teeth they flaunt for strangers, a life on the street warranting that kind of pride. They are ornamental staples, decorating the benches and parks of Brackenwood.
William moved his fiancée here just months ago citing its high death rate as promise to a more lucrative life for him, her, and their impending child. He removes the left behind stains of dead bodies for a living, from roads, from homes, from ditches, everywhere they happen to fall. Just the dying homeless alone—encouraged by disease, cold winters, or fatal neglect—he thought would be enough to keep their growing family fed; though food wasn’t his initial concern after learning of his expanding family.
The phenyl under his fingernails, pressed into his fingerprint crevasses warps every bite of food into fire. Fingerprints develop within the first twenty-four weeks of pregnancy, he’s read. The olfactory lobes—the scent glands—form as early as six weeks. He didn’t know any of this until week ten when Julie finally revealed her pregnancy. By that time he’d already been inadvertently bathing the fetus in cleaning vapors, ammonia, too much peroxide, fumes he’d neglect washing from his clothes, letting them contaminate the air, fall into Julie’s mouth, down her throat, and into the amniotic fluid flowing through the fetus’s oral and nasal cavities. Scientists used to believe that smell depended on access to air. Now they could blame William should anything happen, could blame the bodies he cleans from the road as the source of his child’s any imperfections.
He’s read every book available at the modest Brackenwood library, searching for a possible loophole, a reason to believe that this child will be the one to outlive the trauma of a human lifespan. So far, nothing.
The heavy fumes distort the air. Julie pushes William’s hands back, tells William to wash with hot water before getting near her stomach. “The fumes could change it,” she says. “Could take years off its life.”
It doesn’t matter. Someone like me will be cleaning this child from the streets someday, anyway.
He read in one of their parenting books that infants crave touch, that the sensation of new skin to the surviving skin of a middle-aged father does something to an infant, like a formaldehyde high might when cleaning out a burned building. The book mentioned specifically endorphins, but formaldehyde, nothing calms the way breathing a biological preservative deep into one’s lungs can.
With each phenyl breath William wishes the inhaled fumes were formaldehyde, solidifying his insides; making him capable of just a few more years, a reason to think he could mutate his genes to give any children a few more days than God could.
The child, he loves it already. He’s a realist, though, and keeps himself grounded by the logic of human duration. The child, he loves. The idea of a child, he’s beginning to understand, is where everything will go wrong.
Topics/Categories:
Children, Elementary School, Fatherhood, Human Remains, Waste Removal
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