Excerpt: Untitled

 I woke up on the sofa with the book on my lap. It was late afternoon and I’d been asleep most of the day. Yawning, I sat up and only then realized that somebody was sitting at the table across the room from me. “Stephanie?” I said, because I couldn’t imagine who the hell else it would be.
The figure looked up. I had a second or two to realize that the person was female before a cold feeling gripped me. This person was the same person I’d seen at the Zen center, the half-second or so before Gandalf Aragorn came down the stairs. The woman who wasn’t all there. And she didn’t have a face. Where her face should have been, between her shoulders, was a clotof darkness that seemed to suck the light from the room.
“Oh Jesus Buddha Haploid Siddhartha Christ,” I said and scrambled to my feet.