August Prather Is Not Dead Yet , livre ebook

August Prather Is Not Dead Yet


Danielle K. Roux
Copyright © 2018 by Danielle K. Roux
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Edited by Mithlia Karnik & David Rochelero
Art by Shayne Leighton
The Parliament House
www.parliamenthouse.com
Created with Vellum
Contents



December 2nd

Copy


Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

December 28th

Mortality

Alive

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

December 30th

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

January 2nd

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

January 3rd

Fortune

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

January 5th

January 7th

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

January 10th

Chapter 24

Chapter 25


January 12th

January 13th

January 14th

Eternity

January 20th

The Parliament House

Afterword

About the Author
December 2nd

I don’t remember thinking I was crazy.
It just wasn’t something that occurred to me.
I think I missed something important.
Some time, at some point, people began to click on certain switches and click off others in their brains. It’s supposed to start with childhood. You pick likes and dislikes. My favorite color is blue. My favorite food is macaroni and cheese. That usually leads to picking favorite writers, favorite television shows, music, hobbies, jobs, careers, friends, spouses . . . and that’s your life.
That’s who you are, so that’s your life. These choices.
Some of it you’re born with. Hair color, eye color, skin color. Body type. Family history. That’s what you get. No choice.
Sometimes, your family, they make those choices for you and you get pushed along with them. You’re a boy, of course you like trucks and sports and dirt. You’re a girl, of course you like ballet and unicorns and baby dolls.
Then you get older and there’s a small amount of self-expression. I am this kind of person, I wear these kind of clothes, I like this kind of activity. I’m a jock or a slut or a cheerleader or a nerd or queer or a loser or a stoner or a hipster or goth.
And as an adult you choose a career and hobbies and a house and a family and you become an architect or a fighter pilot or a supermodel or a dishwasher or a clown. And you live in a yurt or a palace or a split-level ranch. You have X number of kids. You spend time doing Y on the weekends and wish there was always time for Z.
I don’t like the choices. They trap me. I don’t know if I don’t like anything or if I like everything just the same. Either way, it’s a trap.
I don’t seem to see the point in a lot of things. I just do them. There isn’t a point in not doing them, because you should do something.
I live without purpose. Without reason. But I don’t really want my reason for living to be that my favorite color is blue.
People.
People are a reason for living.
But I don’t really have any people to live for.
I have parents. They haven’t ever done anything atrocious. They just don’t like me. I used to care about them. I don’t hate them. But it’s hard to care about people who don’t care about you. Over time, the relationship becomes just that phone call once a week, where you talk about the weather and who from the old neighborhood died.
I don’t have real friends. I have people I go places with. We just talk about movies and sports and other pointless things that make people infinitely happy. We never talk about anything that matters. Anything real.
I once had someone who wanted to marry me. She liked the color green and cheesecake. But she never really liked me. She liked the idea of being married to me. But she didn’t like me. She didn’t really know me. And I didn’t really know her, either.
I could have chosen to marry her. With her, I would have had purpose. But that’s a heavy burden for someone else to carry, being someone someone else’s purpose. I don’t think I’m worth all that. I knew once I said no that she would find another person.
So, I said no. She got married last week.
I don’t usually regret my decisions. But I feel empty. I always feel empty.
My therapist told me that I should try to picture what I feel an ideal world would be and then try and achieve that for myself. That is bound to give me purpose. I tried it.
In an ideal world, I would have nothing. Just a comfortable, calm nothingness. Like dreamless sleep. Like a sensory deprivation tank.
Then I wouldn’t have to worry about what I liked or didn’t like; or what clothes I wore, what shape my body was, what gender, what job I did, how much money I made, or whether I wanted kids.
And I would just be.
Copy

“Who is this?”
“It’s me.”
“God, Kate, what time is it?”
“I’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
“The next best-seller . . . you ready for it?” Katherine Garnet sat at her desk, swerving back and forth in her chair and chewing on her pen cap.
“Sure.”
“John Ruskin,” she said.
“Who?”
“He was this famous architecture critic . . . writer . . . poet person.”
“Yeah, okay, go on.”
“I’ll use Ruskin,” Garnet continued.
“For what?”
“For the book.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s a murder mystery, of course,” she told him.
“So . . . is Ruskin the killer or the victim?”
“I’m not sure yet. That’s why I called you.”
“Well, tell me about him. What did he do?” he implored.
“He was a critic. He didn’t like some of the other Victorian thinkers. He hated Viollet-le-Duc. The architect.”
“Okay, would he have killed him?”
“No . . . he just didn’t like the work that was being done by le-Duc,” she tried to explain.
“What work?”
“Cathedrals. He worked on restoring cathedrals. Like Notre Dame.”
“Notre Dame is good. It’s historical enough without teaching people anything. You have Ruskin involved in a murder in Notre Dame and you’ve got your book. What did Ruskin not like about Notre Dame?” he wondered.
“It was restored to what le-Duc thought it had looked like at the very beginning of its completion. But the thing is, cathedral construction takes hundreds of years. And le-Duc was making up a lot of the early medieval architecture. It was inauthentic. Ruskin thought that by restoring a building, you destroyed the authentic meaning of its architecture. That design is meant to be temporal, and we should be allowing buildings to be reworked and repurposed but never restored, because restoration is inauthentic by its very definition. Change is a constant, and there is no return to anything before this moment. Isn’t that beautiful?”
“Too deep, too boring. Was Ruskin involved in any love affairs?”
“He never slept with his wife. He wrote love letters to a young girl . . .”
“He was a pedophile?”
“We don’t really know,” she sighed.
“Do you want him to be a pedophile?”
“You mean for the story or, like, for kicks?”
“For the story. Jesus, Kate.”
“Probably not.”
“Could be motivation.”
“For what?”
“The murder.”
“So . . . Ruskin kills someone who finds out he’s a pedophile in Notre Dame?”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s fine,” his voice on the other line assured her.
“What have you heard lately about that new writer?”
“August Prather? She hasn’t put the book out yet. She’s still writing it. But if it’s anything like her others then it’s got to be good.”
“The last review said her third novel was . . . what was the phrase?”
“Earth-shattering,” the phone said.
“Yeah. Only I’m still here. I read the thing, it obviously didn’t shatter me.”
“It was good.”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t.” Garnet put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. “I’m just saying. The Earth—it didn’t really shatter.”
“You’re biased.”
“Hey, who do you work for anyway, Tim?” Garnet took a drag on her cigarette and blew smoke out into the world outside. “I can’t write like that anymore. People don’t want you to write like that anymore.”
“You wrote that one story. If you wanted to make money, you should have made the deal. Then the scandal would have died down and she could have sold the rights. You could have gotten a cut.”
“I didn’t want some corny cinematic spectacle. That story meant something,” she licked red lipstick off her teeth and sucked on the cigarette again.
“What did it mean, Kate?”
“I don’t know anymore,” she uncrossed her legs and smoothed down her skirt.
“People don’t want meaning, Kate.”
“They want August Prather.”
“You’re really hung up on her, aren’t you?”
“She’s only twenty-six. And I . . . I won’t be twenty-eight anymore. In a month, I’ll be twenty-nine. And that’s almost thirty. She looks like she’s the spirit of youth with that pink hair and the tattoos . . . ”
“And she’s, you know, Creole or something.”
“Is she?”