LIKE WINGS,
YOUR HANDS
a novel
Elizabeth Earley
Like Wings, Your Hands
Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Earley
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Book Design by Mark E. Cull
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Earley, Elizabeth, 1977– author.
Title: Like wings, your hands : a novel / Elizabeth Earley.
Description: First edition. | Pasadena, CA : Red Hen Press, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019018068 (print) | LCCN 2019020074 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597098069 | ISBN 9781597098236 (print)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.
Classification: LCC PS3605.A7586 (ebook) | LCC PS3605.A7586 L55 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018068
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.
First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book and its characters have spent so many years (seven now) in my head and the manuscript has taken many forms. So many people along the way have helped shape it. Thank you to my family—Biliana, Nico, Michael, Jerel, Cora, and Jude—for your daily doses of inspiration. Thank you to early readers of this manuscript: Carol Davies, Susan Evans, Michael Sullivan, Corinne Gartner, Carly Leahy, Mary Earley (aka, Mom), Heather Outlaw (aka, bestie), Iudita Harlan, and Caroline Zimmerman. And thank you to that psychic in Sedona who told me that I should re-read Bid Time Return and that it would be an important influence on the final revision. Thank you to my ex-spouse and current friend, Lucy, who had my back during the years I spent conceiving and writing this story. And thank you for your maturity and forgiveness that allows us to harmoniously co-parent. Thanks, too, to my generous blurbers: Gina Frangello, Peter Nichols, Lily Hoang, and Gayle Brandeis.
Thank you ultimately and eternally to Aimee Bender, who judged this book the winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize. I am humbled and deeply honored.
Thank you to Kate Gale, Tobi Harper, Monica Fernandez, Natasha McClellan, and the rest of the team at Red Hen Press for your hard work and dedication.
Thank you to Rosalie Morales Kearns for being a kick-ass publicist and all-around coach for the business side of writing.
Many unending thanks to Seth Fischer for being a brilliant editor. Thank you for being my secret sauce/ secret guru/ secret weapon who tears my shit up and helps me take it to the next level and then the next—to the level of just killing it.
And never least, thank you to the love of my life—my soul mate, my seal mate, my best friend—Biliana Angelova, for everything (every single thing).
for Biliana
1. May 13, 2015: 20,000 feet
On the plane to Bulgaria, Marko’s mom had to catheterize him in his seat. She placed a blanket over his lap for privacy. Marko was watching baseball on his iPad but only the games he had saved on the device because he didn’t have Wi-Fi. Sitting beside his mom, he was careful to avoid opening the secret folder where he had his private links and files. Marko noticed how tense and nervous his mom was when she catheterized him. She moved quickly, like a bird. Marko didn’t like to watch her thread the tube into the tip of his penis. He was always disturbed by how far she seemed to push it inside his body—was there really that much space in there?
Watching made math happen in his head, unwilled. Sometimes he could see sounds, smell colors, taste shapes. And sometimes, when he saw the unfeeling parts of his own body interact with anything—his own hands, his mom’s, objects, the outside world—the math happened. It wasn’t just math; it was a vivid, visceral, sometimes painful experience of numbers. The numbers moved in his mind. Sometimes they’d fly fast—that’s when they hurt. But sometimes they were slow. They could be dark, almost black, or they could be blindingly bright, or somewhere in between. Each number was a three-dimensional shape with a color and a texture. The number seventeen, for example, was mostly blue, a little yellow, round but not perfectly round—more like an ellipsoid—and it had a smooth texture like marble. Nine thousand and fourteen was rough and dry but also soft like wool, diamond shaped, and beige. Every number between zero and ten thousand had color and shape and texture. And because every feeling Marko experienced, physical or emotional, also had shape and color, each corresponded to a number or a set of numbers. So sometimes, when Marko didn’t know what he was feeling in words, he would know in numbers. He would think: I’m feeling 4,372, which is a yellowish-brown, sharp-edged asymmetrical triangle.
The math happened when his unfeeling parts came in contact with anything that had to do with spatial navigation in the half of his body whose boundaries he couldn’t sense. The numbers came together to give him the perception of the precise location of each point in space where his body ended and another thing began.
Marko pressed his face into his mom’s hair: long, straight and black threaded with gray. He inhaled her smell—which he associated with home—leaned back, and looked at her. He could see his reflection in her eyes: two tiny hims staring back. His face was long and narrow, his wire-rimmed glasses perpetually slipping down the bridge of his nose. His voice was deeper now that he was fourteen and his pubic hair was thicker. He had a single brown mole sprouting two coarse hairs on one pale cheek, matching similar moles on his mom’s neck and body. His hair was dark blonde and fine, unlike his mom’s thick, black mane. He changed his focus from his reflection to her eyes, their colors like autumn in New England: brown and burnt orange and yellowish green.
Being 20,000 feet in the sky, trapped inside a metal tube, hurtling forward at hundreds of miles per hour gave Marko an uneasy feeling in his stomach. It wasn’t quite sick but almost. Any time there was turbulence, Marko imagined a gust of strong wind flipping the plane and sending it spiraling down to crash into the ocean below. At this speed the surface tension of water would be the same as that of pavement—he knew because he had looked it up—and he imagined the plane as it smashed apart, all the scraps and all of the people and limbs and Marko’s wheelchair would sink to the bottom of the ocean floor, catching in the dense foliage of kelp