manuscripts

When I was a kid, I used to hold my breath and count to ten anytime I passed a graveyard. That was so ghosts didn’t steal the air out of my lungs. Your grandma’s the one who taught me that, and a lot of kids around here still do it. I see them sometimes in the backseats of their parents’ cars while they fill up, holding their noses and squirming around in their seats. But if I ever catch you holding your breath around the dead, I’ll knock the wind out of you myself. 

Recently released from prison for her role in her boyfriend's suicide, a young woman grapples with an unexpected pregnancy. An unflinching meditation on the overlap between the right to life and the right to death, IDK is a jagged, gut-punch of a novel that dares to explore love’s rarest forms.

She had to do it now. Had to stand up out of the water to pull her hair up and back from her face as she turned to where the boys stood making stars with their mouths. "It’s a sweet bike," they would say.  "Sure, it’s okay," she would answer. And she would be all lit up, would actually glow from inside where the river still moved in cold, bright streams under her skin.  

But the square of her vision was vibrating frantically at the far end of the tunnel, and the sun really was sinking, really was painting blood-red the far riverbank where the boys raced to cry out after her as the current took her. And inside the frame, Jason’s eyes crinkled as if to blink. Her bike rolled forward toward the water. And the sun moved suddenly closer, jumped right up close enough to seal shut the far end of the tunnel with an excruciating whiteness, flooding everything like water.

Jason and Gabby are raised like brother and sister, shepherded by their inseparable mothers between their families’ homes in the suburban sprawl of Colorado’s Front Range. But away from their parents for the first time on a middle school camping trip to the Utah desert,  Jason fails to shield Gabby from the sexual aggression of an older boy he shares a tent with, and his guilt incites a devastating disclosure about their families’ friendship that forces a reckoning neither of them is ready for.

Paige pinched her eyes shut against the incursion of the present crisis into her awareness: the tundra of No-Name's jowl just inches from her eyes as the crowd pressed her against him; the incredible shoal of her mother’s caftan suddenly being swallowed by the shark-shaped tips of human shoes trampling it; the slow, downward glide of the feathery tips of No-Name's ears as half a dozen Nextians fought to mount him—pulling him, one jagged shoulder at a time, to the ground. 

Lured by her mother to a spiritual renewal compound in the Oregon desert, Paige participates in a bizarre, week-long "Re-creation Ritual" that forces her to confront uncomfortable truths about her marriage, her motherhood, and the eerie seductiveness of a quasi-charismatic community called Nextus. On an odyssey of reinless trail rides, orgasmic massage, and psychedelic therapy, Paige struggles to decide whether the so-called Nexians orchestrating her journey—her mother included—are crackpots, visionaries, or both. But the further she gets into her re-creation experience, the less it seems to matter, and the harder it becomes to imagine how—or if—she can go back to the life she left behind just a week before.