Foreword:
Hi all.
This is the first chapter and first stage of my novel. I will be posting monthly or semi-monthly chapters for paid subscribers. This is not a search for criticism or advice. You are free to give thoughts and opinions if you wish. I may or may not read them as I don’t want outside influence based on what people may or may not like.
The title is a working title, by the way.
And finally, this is in a draft form. Eventually, I will go back and edit it after the full work is done in my own drive, but this version will remain as is, and I will only be editing the version that I attempt (successfully???) to get published, so you’ll only ever see the perfected version if that happens.
Anyway, here you are! Probably the only foreword I’ll ever do on these. So, enjoy!
— Andrew
As a child, Nicholas was told stories about the tattooed men journeying to Latin America to erase the art from their skins—not that the art was so pervasive in those years. They were said to have bathed in a pool of crude oil that one day, out of the blue, formed in a caldera around an old oil well, sucking down the oilmen who worked the pump as it brought up whatever last barrels it could, leaving only one to survive and tell of his vision. He spoke of historical events that nobody knew of—of the death of a thousand species only today seen in fossilized resin and hardened sap. Some that he described matched no catalog. They grew feathers of the darkest purple, stood at heights that no animal today could. He related the real final words of Trotsky. A whisper that no one heard. For the rest of his short life, before sitting in his garage slowly breathing in the carbon monoxide produced by his sedan, he spent his hours and days drawing candleflame: lit wicks atop molded black wax. He only used acrylic paints. The garage that he died in smelled of solvent and was papered by these many hundreds of works of art, pasted up in haphazard fashion in the same chaotic glyphic pattern of his ranting epiphanic mumblings. His skin was clean, pale, and white. He died with his eyes closed, found only when the stench of solvent mixed with rotting meat and flies.
