STORIES NOW AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS
A Long Walk, With Only Chalk to Mark the Way and A Tree or a Person or a Wall are both uncollected long short stories (although both were previously published, in Redivider and The Lifted Brow, respectively). Now available as eBooks, each story can be purchased either at the Amazon Kindle store, or directly from this website (where they're a dollar cheaper, and come in DRM-free formats that will work on any e-reader that can handle either .mobi or .epub files).
A LONG WALK, WITH ONLY CHALK TO MARK THE WAY
In A Long Walk, With Only Chalk to Mark the Way, a widowed father considers his sick son, who will probably never leave the hospital again, and decides that he too will not leave, that he will remain at his son's side until the boy is well or until his fatherhood is ended. To pass their time, the father reads to the son from the mother's once-favorite book, a story of a hero and a maze and also the monster that lives inside that maze. Soon the father and the son are reenacting that book, marching the hallways of the hospital day and night, searching for the center of the long labyrinth they've found themselves in, and also what answers might be waiting there at its end.
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A TREE OR A PERSON OR A WALL
In A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a young boy is held prisoner by "the man with rough hands," who traps the boy in a locked room with an albino ape, his only companion and a seeming conspirator in his captivity. As the boy attempts to befriend this animal, begging for its help, he also loses his tenuous grasp on reality, until all that remains is a terrible sound, began upon the ape's lips and now screeching through the boy's skull, and also some unclear object seen through a distant dirty window, a tree or a person or a wall that might or might not hold the clue to his escape.
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TECHNICAL NOTES
Almost any e-reader device or software should be able to read one of the two formats you'll receive if you purchase directly. The Kindle uses .mobi files exclusively, and these can be loaded over USB to your device, or through iTunes if you're using the Kindle app on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, or on your desktop with Kindle for Mac or Windows. (For a full list of Kindle-compatible devices, click here.) For other devices or apps, you will most likely need to use the .epub version. If you have any difficulties loading your purchase, please email me at mdbell79@gmail.com.