A.K. Butler's Blog

It is with immense excitement and equally immense exhaustion that I am finally able to announce that a major project that has taken up most of my life and health and emotional reserve for the past several months is finished! I have officially re-released The Burning of Cherry Hill, my science fiction novel, on Amazon, complete with re-edits and a new cover.It is free to read with Amazon Prime Lending or Kindle Unlimited, and only $2.99 to buy. For less than a small coffee at Starbucks you can...

Those of you who follow this little blog may have noticed my absence the past week or so. I have been working on what is (for me) a quite exciting announcement I will be able to make in the next few days. For now, please enjoy my guest blog post over at Guelph Write Now. They are doing an “ABCs of Writing” challenge, and I picked “X”. Why did I pick X? Because I’m a masochist and wanted to see if I could do it.

Here is the first little bit:

Xenogenesis is the laboratory creation of an organis...

I sit on the hard plastic chair, the blue one with shiny legs that was clearly designed by someone who had never sat before in their lives, the front plastic digging uncomfortably into my bouncing thighs, the cold metal chilling my arms with an impersonal touch. I can’t stop shaking my legs, my heart is pounding and has no sign of slowing, my palms are damp. In my right hand I hold a bouquet of roses; in my left, a first edition Winnie the Pooh.

God, I hope I don’t thro...

It has been five days and they still haven’t arrived.

I sit on the wraparound porch, weathered by decades of storms, spiral winds from the south and icy blasts from the north wreaking havoc on the flimsy shelter we call our home. I watch the horizon, past the fields of our farm that haven’t yielded a full crop in a decade, past the barn that collapsed into a pile of smoked and rotten wood after the fire, and am...

I like the lapping sound the water makes as it swishes around the boats, stuck in the sand, paint crumbling like icing off a stale cake. I crouch next to it, put my ear close, listen.

Lap, lap, lap, like that. The sea is licking the boats clean. She’s hungry.

Lap, lap, lap.

“Brandon, where are you?”

I hear my name but don’t answer for a moment. I want to hear the hungry ocean.

Lap. Lap. Lap.

“Brandon?”

“Here, Papa,” I say, and stand so he can see me...

My mother used to tell me bedtime stories before I would fall asleep each night.

Sometimes they were good stories, about unicorns that flew over rainbows and sang songs made out of glitter. I liked those. They were good when I was sad or scared or lonely.

But sometimes I was happy, and content, and safe, and warm, and wanted a scary story. I wanted something to make my heart beat faster, to make the pulse race through my fingertips a...

“Caden?” Her voice at first was only curious, a bit playful, as she jumped behind trees making funny faces and looked under bushes.

“Caaaaa-den?” She sung his name, enticing him. He can’t have got far, she thought, for the swing was still swaying with the memory of his presence, and the park stretched on for farther than his little legs could have carried him.

“Caden? Baby, it’s time to come out now.” Hide-And-Seek-That-Only-I-Know-About was his favorite game, as it is...

“What’s that?”

The old man looked down at the young girl, perhaps six, maybe seven, with dark curly hair haphazardly tied back with a blue ribbon that was coming loose. Her bike was pink, and dirty, and a pink balloon was tied to the handle. The man blinked, and she was still there.

“What’s that thing?”

The old man turned away from her and sighed. The most sophisticated technology in the entire world and they couldn’t keep a little girl...

“Storm’s comin,” I say.

“Yep,” says Oak.

We are cold, but we won’t build a fire. We are hungry, but we won’t hunt.

“How long?” I say.

“No tellin’,” says Oak.

He sits on a wet log in the middle of a field, as far from trees and what used to be utility poles as he can get. I sit next to him. He’s older than me, and more experienced, and higher ranking, but at this point, it doesn’t fucking matter.

He has taken his rifle apart six times...

I received the cat from my mother.

She received the cat from her mother.

She received the cat from a street merchant who used to sit by the stone steps around the well in the middle of the town square and sell hand-carved trinkets, and toys that danced when you pulled little levers, and painted brooches, and tiny glass animals. He was old and dirty and the cat would sit in his lap and keep him warm in the winter, and hunt mice for supper in the...