Effing Feline offers you a match #8Sunday

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I, Effing Feline, laughed so hard I coughed up not one but two furballs. The joke? The Merriam Webster dictionary, which defines “summer heat” this way:

[image error]As an Arizona cat, let me tell you that seventy-six is not “heat,” it’s the overnight low. For real heat, AZ style, light a match and stick your finger in the flame.

Today I’m changing things around, snippet-wise. The snippet is still from Ed’s WIP, a near-future SFR novel titled Audra Fleeing Audra Finding, but instead of seeing things from Audra’s point of view, today we visit the head of Tal Pelletier, the hero.

Penniless and desperate, Audra has let Tal, a Kwadran construction worker, guide her to a back entrance to Kwadra’s abandoned, underground cities.  In this scene, he ponders the doors to the underground Kwadran city. He had lived there until the island “hopped” from an alternate Earth to our planet, five years previously.

There they were: the gates to the underworld; to his past.

As Tal approached the double doors, he tried to swallow, but couldn’t. His mouth was too dry.

The doors were big enough to allow a Yeo truck to carry repair supplies into the ventilation tunnel. He hadn’t thought of those clunky but indestructible vehicles in years. The gigantic Yeo Corporation had never existed on this Earth.

He had never existed here, either, but then one day he did, and his prior life had instantly become nothing more than an unreal dream of an Earth that had never been. Manon had never existed on this world, nor little Theo, exactly Roxie’s age. But their nonexistent ghosts nonetheless existed here, behind these doors. How could a guy deal with ghosts that never were?

Effing Feline here again. Let me clarify my “real heat” comment up above. I personally have never stuck my paw into a flame. It would set my fur on fire, and the resulting singe mark would be akin to tagging the Mona Lisa.

You humans, being born pitiably naked, don’t have this problem. So go ahead, use the match.