Did you read Staring Into the Sun? Have you been dangling on the Made in America cliffhanger from Issue 2? If so, I’ve got a sneak peek at Issue 3 that definitely won’t satisfy all of your curiosities, but hopefully it’ll hold you over until Roy lets us continue. (I’m being passive aggressive on purpose, there’s nothing he hates more.) The man is so temperamental though, he won’t even replace his computer until the signs bode well for the purchase. And neither mine nor Max’s computers have the right feel to publish, so here we are. I’m working him though, don’t you worry, Volume II will conclude this summer. Enjoy the peek at Issue 3 and go check out those Interim Shorts, there’s so much cool stuff there.
Excerpt From Made in America Issue 3 – The Inner Aliarumby Wesley Livingston
There are three patients in Eakran’s Aliarum folder. All three are female and had occupied Morris Village in Columbia, SC when Eakran was scouting locations for a summer home and consulting at the treatment center in his spare time. It was there that he met Aile Lang who had shown great promise in her youth as a tennis player, but the stress of realizing the expectations proved to be too much. By the time she was seventeen, she was using drugs to direct her concentration and soon she was addicted to anything that would relieve pain from an ankle injury she suffered in the biggest match of her career at the US Open; a match she would lose but not for lack of dedication. She ignored the pain after rolling her ankle early in the second set and pushed it to three before her opponent was able to exploit her weakness. She was in treatment just before her eighteenth birthday. Elia Alvarado was married to a soldier who died in Iraq early in the war, leaving her with three sons to care for on her own. The boys were close in age and when they left home as they matured into their adulthood, Elia was left with nothing but the memory of her husband. She tried to make a happy life in her empty nest, but she wouldn’t allow herself to stop imagining the life she would have with her husband if he were still alive. She was admitted for treatment at Morris Village by her three sons who worried that she would thin away to nothing because she barely ate or slept, but sat in the living room of her home, imagining her husband sitting near her and smiling at her.
When Eakran came to know Elia and Aile, he knew that they were special just being in their presence. It was as though he could hear them both whispering inside of his mind and the feeling was pleasant, despite the obvious trauma in both their eyes from the years of anguish they had suffered. And when Eakran sat with them each individually, they seemed to know secrets about him, the way they looked at him closely, almost trying to confirm a hidden knowledge about his physical characteristics that took real inspection. Elia seemed to like him a lot and the two conversed freely. Aile seemed to only ever ask him questions and Eakran could tell that she battled her own curiosity that wanted to know more about him even though she hadn’t been communicating much at all since she her time started at the center. When Eakran discovered that the two ate meals together every day, he wandered into the cafeteria to watch them interact. And it was there that he discovered the Alia.
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