Obscura Burning by Suzanne van Rooyen - December 7th 2012 / Etopia Press
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The world's going to end in fire…and it's all Kyle's fault.
Kyle Wolfe's
world is about to crash and burn. Just weeks away from graduation, a
fire kills Kyle's two best friends and leaves him permanently scarred. A
fire that Kyle accidentally set the night he cheated on his boyfriend
Danny with their female friend, Shira. That same day, a strange
new planet, Obscura, appears in the sky. And suddenly Kyle's friends
aren't all that dead anymore.
Each time Kyle goes to sleep, he
awakens to two different realities. In one, his boyfriend Danny is still
alive, but Shira is dead. In the other, it's Shira who's alive...and
now they're friends with benefits. Shifting between realities is slowly
killing him, and he's not the only one dying. The world is dying with
him. He's pretty sure Obscura has something to do with it, but with his
parents' marriage imploding and realities shifting each time he closes
his eyes, Kyle has problems enough without being the one in charge of
saving the world...
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A Quick Excerpt From The Book
Scrabbling under my bed, I retrieve
an A3 drawing book and bag of colored pens. The first few pages are
half-finished comics, a story yet unfinished waiting for my imagination. Then
there’s a multicolored map scrawled across several pages, denoting my life:
pages filled with boxes, each dated and timed, connected by lines as I try to
make sense of what’s happening to me.
With a ruler and green pen, I draw a
new box, jotting down the details since waking up at Shira’s.
I glance at my watch just to be
sure. Tuesday, 21:47, June 26.
The map is a spaghetti mess of
interweaving lines and text boxes. I’m not sure when my life got so
complicated. Maybe when I was bandaged in the hospital, delirious in an
opiate-induced haze, or maybe in those first few days after Danny’s spinal
fusion, days I spent pacing the halls waiting to find out if he’d ever walk
again.
My starting point is marked in red.
April 6. The night of the fire.
I stash the book under my bed and
strip naked. The stink of sex clings to my skin. Girls smell different, ripe
and cloying. It’s a smell that gets everywhere. Even my hair reeks of
girl-musk.
The tiles are cool against my back
as I stand beneath a jet of cold water. Although my burns have healed, the
scars are still sensitive. If the water is warmer than tepid it feels like I’m
on fire all over again.
Running a hand over my mangled
flesh, it’s as if I’m feeling the strange surface of some weird planet.
Caressing Obscura perhaps. Her cratered and shale-smeared crust probably looks
a lot like my skin. At first it was terrifying, the bubbles and swaths of too
smooth flesh, the pink knots and swollen ridges slithering down my belly. Now
it’s fascinating, all the warped shapes and odd textures. Surreal really, like
it’s not my body that got deep-fried.
Not sure what the big deal is about
me not being able to have kids. My left ball only looks a little more wrinkled
than before, less hairy and more like a prune. The plumbing works just fine.
Sex doesn’t feel the same, but then with a girl, how could it?
My face is a different matter
entirely. I used to be cute, with matching dimples. Danny loved them; he’d tell
me the crappiest jokes just to make me smile, and in the other life, he still
does. In this reality, my smile just makes children cry.
AUTHOR BIO
Suzanne van Rooyen:
Suzanne
is a freelance writer and author from South Africa. She currently lives
in Finland and finds the cold, dark forests nothing if not inspiring.
Suzanne is the author of the cyberpunk novel Dragon’s Teeth (Divertir),
the YA science fiction novel Obscura Burning (Etopia) and has
had several short stories published by Golden Visions Magazine, Space
and Time and Niteblade. Niteblade nominated her short story Where dreams
are grown for the Pushcart Prize. Her non-fiction articles on travel,
music and other topics can be found scattered throughout
the Internet. Although she has a Master’s degree in music, Suzanne
prefers conjuring strange worlds and creating quirky characters. When
not writing you can find her teaching dance to ninth graders or playing
in the snow with her shiba inu.
Suzanne is represented by Jordy Albert of the Booker Albert Agency.
Author Links:
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