Excerpt: Beast

Nobody ever imagined a good thing would come from two years in prison, a handful of change stuck between the cushions of a five-year-old couch, a cancer diagnosis, and a headline proclaiming three dead. Prospective good news, at such a point, seemed impossible. And sometimes… sometimes one figures, this really is impossible. Mik just so happened to be one of those people, and life… well. Life did a pretty great job, on a daily basis, of proving his philosophy right. Possible impossibilities were for cinemas, and often he found that lint and paperclips weren’t quite enough to buy him into the matinee showings at the local theater.

Mik’s bookbag slid lazily off his right shoulder, a very presumptuous inanimate object in its own right, a childish metaphor for materialism carelessly weighing society down. Brown eyes narrowed, a pale hand thumping against a book. Life wasn’t fair. And here he was, palm spread across the magazine as if he were swearing on a Bible in a court of law. Life. Death. They didn’t make magazines for corpses, Miguel thought, and probably rightly so. They had obituaries for that—who really reads those, except for patients bored and scared witless in the dentist’s office?—and news about dead celebrities went in any sort of gossiping tabloid, in any case. In fact, he vaguely recalled hearing about the Smurf family’s funeral in Home & Garden, right beside an advertisement for smashingly well placed lawn gnomes.