Augie

Page 1



Augie Lohtech

& the Hole Between the Worlds

by

Mackenzie Cole

Missoula, MT


Copyright Š2016 by Mackenzie Cole All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the permission of the author. Cover image by Elizabeth Boheim Book layout and design by Mackenzie Cole For information, email: mackenzie@deadfallsandsnares.com My website: www.deadfallsandsnares.com Kindle link: http://amzn.com/B01A1PP38W My patreon: www.patreon.com/canner Augie on Facebook: www.facebook.com/augiebook


For Simon and who he helped me to be through his words.


Please note this is a book of verse and was designed with specific line breaks in mind. You can read it as such on font size 1 on your kindle. Other sizes will look odd! Did you find a mistake? I’ll be updating this document regularly, please feel free to let me know: mackenzie@ deadfallsandsnares.com. Thanks! This the first release of this book, but there’s a longer version available right now for Kindle! What does that mean? Be sure and read the “Afterword” to find out more.


This book made possible by Caffeine and Melancholy



Contents Prologue 1 Bear woman 18 Afterword 38 Acknowledgements 40



Prologue Long have I watched for crows. Once or twice an hour an aluminum can will bob by in the stream and knock along the roots of the cottonwoods on the banks. The water runs past all day, which isn’t too remarkable until you really ponder it. Like most things. Along the bank the slick lichen contends with the moss for the stones or lays in tatters where Augie had run or peeled off a hunk of rock to toss into the water. The sound of the froth, the splashing of the stones as they sink sticks, the occasional burble of the stream, all wander back into the shadows where I’ve been laying, eyes half closed to feign sleep, and keep me. Sometimes I’d feel like I was sinking into the black earth, gently. For years this is how things have passed in the world: most warm afternoons down by the stream, 1


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counting the ever rising deluge of cans as surest signs of human progress. Each afternoon, Augie re-imagines this patch of cottonwoods. In sweltering late summers it’s become a dry carcass-ridden surface of a distant dead sun where she’d mine diamonds while fending off seven legged ant monstrosities. If it had rained, she’d crawl through the red puddles between the trees, snarling, an older language trickling up. In the winter, she’d pile the snow and leap from a tree, crash-landing on a comet with only a day’s oxygen and her wits to get her back to earth. And each day I’d wait for the crows that were sure to come, that had to come. Eventually, I started to wonder if my life before were some dream I had long ago, and this would be the only life for me now: another few small years until my hips gave-out or my heart couldn’t take the beating anymore. Or the cataracts set in and I wouldn’t be able to see. Would that have ended my onus? Could I have gotten off on a technicality and go searching for another way back? Sometimes, getting out of a charge was as easy as finding a misplaced word. But the council was more careful than that. Their words bound me, and echoed in me under all the other noises. Now I miss those days lazing beside the irrigation ditch under the flickering willow 2


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leaves, where then I missed being here. I suppose that is who I am: the one who remembers all the other worlds that may have been. The summer she was ten, Augie started tying rope between the upper branches of the willows and into the cotton woods. Until this point I remember thinking her an unremarkable child. I suppose most children aren’t that remarkable until they are ten, except to their parents, who are blinded by oxytocin. She’d been climbing as long as I could remember. It started with the willows, pretending to be an elf ambushing a stray party of orcs, or a monkey throwing poop at tourists. After a few months, she mastered the bark of the cottonwoods, clinging to the ridges with her toned fingers, jamming her feet into the splits, her wiry frame going a few feet higher each day until she was no more afraid of fifty feet up than she was of four. That, of course, concerned me. And I would shout at her, and she’d retort “stop that yapping you silly old dog”. I’m not sure which bothered me more, her calling me a dog or silly. Then came the ropes. It began simple enough: her father had tossed some frayed climbing rope in the trash. She found it as she was rolling the can to the road, stowed it in a bush and then gathered it the next day after school, like some grand deception. When we got to the willow patch there was a glimmer to her beyond the usual day-dreaming cloudiness. It had the shine – was somehow clearer, less foggy 3


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than typical imaginings. She had, for the first time, conjured a world she could make real. She clambered up a central tree, looped the rope around the trunk where some other limbs formed a crook that would keep it from slipping down. Then she shimmied back to the ground, went up a smaller cottonwood on the outskirts of the patch and looped the rope around this trunk at a point roughly parallel. She tied it off, looped it again, and tied it a couple of feet over the last one. When she dropped the rope the end formed a small pile on the ground. She went down and was walking it back to the first trunk when she hit the end of the line and realized it wouldn’t span the diagonal needed to get it tied up high. For a moment then I saw the glimmer in her flickering. It was like watching a leaf lose moisture and go to brown, or maybe like watching an ant some bastard had tossed into a fire shrivel and collapse on itself. But it didn’t last. She headed back to the second tree, took the end of the rope between her teeth and flung herself to the crook. She hesitated for a moment. I imagine she was wondering, like I was, if she could trust her knots. Then, she grabbed onto the rope and slowly hooked her heels so that they locked on, and sea-sawing a little side to side, she shimmied over and tied it off. She tested the lines, climbing up another tree and stepping out a few inches, pulling on the top line, bouncing a foot on the lower. When she was satisfied the rope was holding, she walked out on the lower rope, hands clinging to 4


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the rope above, her heel pressed into the toes of her other foot at each step, and soon she was halfway across, the ropes arcing down under her weight. When she reached the other side, she turned and tightroped back – arms out and no hand on the upper rope. She lost her footing there and my mind leapt to her head smashed on the ground below but before I could even shout at her she had caught a branch and righted herself. For the rest of that afternoon she walked those ropes, a little faster each time, and I knew that now she had found herself a world f rom which she wouldn’t soon return. By the next day, she was experimenting with not falling, catching herself on the top rope or the lower one, each time I thought she might fall to her death. I couldn’t watch it. All the things I’d seen in this realm and others and watching Augie play with her young life was too much. I went behind a cottonwood, dug myself a little hole, and laid down to hide near the stream, counting cans. Over that Summer and into the Fall, Augie’s rope-work became a village in the patch of trees, winding-out like fine spiderweb between the willows and way up into the cottonwoods. Any money she could finagle went to rope. The lighter kinds she used as supports, bolstering the lower ropes or spanning gaps where she could use them as runners for her hands in a pinch. After a few months her parents took notice of her keen interest in all things rope and used it as a new way 5


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to compete with each other. Her father bought her twenty feet of paracord from Ace. Her stepfather quickly got her a book on knot-tying called Nodeology and a fine reach of cotton rope. She spent a week tying a hammock. Her father countered with a hundred feet of nylon. Her mother got into it then and bought her a black cargo net, which she tethered fifteen-feet up under the most harried sections of her rope village. At the first snow, Augie disassembled the network. But all that winter, as she tromped through the snow or made deep piles to fling herself into, I could tell she was missing her ropes. Christmas brought: two full climbing ropes, a set of industrial pulleys, a swing, hundreds of feet of nylon cord, and a harness that quickly ended up in the back corner of her closet. She wallowed away the last few months of winter constructing massive nets in her room that she could fold into small bundles and learning all the knots from her now several books. Everywhere she went she carried a small length of rope. In a flash she could tie together her friends’ hands. In a daring moment, she sealed her math teacher’s desk drawers while he went to use the bathroom during a quiz. For a few weeks, she even tied intricate Celtic knots that suggested diamonds inside of squares with gargoyles at the corners or the elongated bodies of some dragon, but she soon tired 6


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of these for their lack of practicality. Spring came again and we would head to the cottonwood patch most days after school. She constructed a new village of rope in the trees that could have served a hundred yerths, or even 5 daws. But it only held one girl and all her half-alive dreams. There was no way I was going up there. Then, after school on her 11th birthday, Augie heard a song coming from down by her patch of trees as she got off the bus. No one but me noticed her walking from the bus stop down the block, cutting through a half-constructed home at the edge of the suburb and jogging to her village below the canopy. The words were slow and dazed, as if someone was singing in their sleep. The tune was muffled, radiating from an old gnarl in the cottonwood that linch-pinned her forest home. She had woke up early in the morning humming the ghost of the melody and gotten dressed. She was lean, wore her pants a bit loose and had, over the winter, acquired the habit of dressing in long sleeved shirts with a black peacoat overtop and a dirty brown plaid golf cap from which her brown curls protruded. Perhaps this was why I was her only friend. She wasn’t really aware of it, but she’d been imitating a scene from Marry Poppins since she was four. Because it was her birthday and her parents hadn’t gotten up yet, she packed a black knapsack 7


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with an old buck knife that had a Lakota man in a Sun Dance engraved on both sides, and added a stuffed hairy dinosaur with fading eyes and mismatched feet and a little dog who had lost his fur and an ear to posterity, a handkerchief, a pair of climbing shoes with which she picked her way into the upper branches of the cottonwood trees. “Put a feather to her nose.” As she tied the knapsack taught, the lyrics came out, unbidden, from her mouth like a wind through an open window. They were there. They were gone. She dropped the knapsack by the front door, went to the fridge and got out some turkey and mayo mustard, a tomato, some olives and some bread from the counter. While she cut and slapped and spread and wrapped she also made and ate a bowl of cereal in the way that comes with habit. She washed her bowel in the sink and put it away, then threw her lunch in her pack and got an egg out of the fridge. For me. She went to the front door and found me waiting on her. Augie opened the door and I looked up, stretched, and walked over to lap up the egg in the bowl on the floor of the kitchen. She sung “and when that feather never rose I cried, I cried, I cried.” I found it odd, but no odder than anything she did. On Saint Patrick’s day three years ago, I’d been shot by a rancher as I herded a flock of sheep for kicks. 8


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Augie’s mom found me in a field. I stumbled into the road as she was driving by and collapsed. She took me to a vet, but he managed to patch me up alright, and when she came back to check on me, Augie was there, insisting I came home with them to rest up. I wasn’t the kind to turn away free food or a warm place to sleep. In fact, I’m still not the kind. If you set a place for me, I’ll likely be at your table. Augie watched me finish the egg and headed out the door. I followed her. There was a flavor in the air and I knew that today we weren’t just heading to the bus. It was 7:30AM. Her parents wouldn’t get up for another half hour at least. It was her birthday, but no one had mentioned it and I was sure that they had forgotten again, like the year before. Augie did most things for herself. She deserved a day off from the tedium of watching the other kids learn to read and multiply. That and something was dragging at her, pulling her past the bus stop where no one else was waiting. She was the only kid for three blocks as she tugged me down the block, through the half-constructed houses that framed the edges of her neighborhood and into the last patch of the old woods that once covered the valley for miles. Her patch. “I set a branch of leaves against her hand” she sang. She’d stacked up rocks and twigs to make miniature houses where she imagined gnomes lived, protected from the crows and snakes that might otherwise threaten them. She tucked them among 9


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the roots and cobbled them into the branches. She went about checking on the houses, replacing a rock on the roof of one, remaking the wall of another where a branch had fallen onto it in the wind the night before. Augie knew the gnomes were invisible to humans unless it happened to be just the right light, or a person found a six-leafed clover. I, however, could see them just fine. They were lewd little people, often naked and very proud of gastrointestinal extrusion, which they took pride in releasing, into my face or the face of anyone who fell asleep around their homes. They also kept their effects invisible, so the only evidence that they were actually living in the houses was the odd changes to them Augie occasionally found: sometimes there would be a plank of wood sized perfectly for a door where she’d left an open hole. Occasionally, the houses would be fixed back up where some unknown disaster had fallen on them while she was away for a few days. The gnomes never left her anything or acknowledged her help in any way, but she figured they were a lot like humans and came to take for granted anything she did to help them along, just as most people expected the roads, postal service, and internet to go on functioning and were bothered by any routine maintenance or lost package in what was really a rather remarkable and cheap service. She kept on helping the gnomes and building ever more impressive villas because she liked knowing something no one else knew, she liked being a part of their secret. 10


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“I put that branch in the fingers of her hand” She sang as she set the houses to rights. After fixing up the houses she put on her climbing shoes and began scaling the thick bark of the fattest of the cottonwoods. I was laying off to the side and gave a little moan. Augie’s climbing still made me anxious. There were enough adventures to be had on the ground. But Augie had grown tremendous callouses on her fingers from climbing the rough trees and now she rarely scraped her hands. When she’d started climbing the trees a year ago it was a different story. It took a month of trying just to reach the top of what was now the easiest of the trees for her to scale. Partly, she had trouble with the fear of falling after she had gotten more than four feet off the ground. She got over it though after falling while reaching for a branch and feeling it crack as she clutched it dropping for what seemed like a minute and landed hard, but only managed to bruise her butt. Something changed in her then, having fallen and come out all right. She no longer trembled when she went higher up. Maybe the gnomes had helped her, or maybe realizing her fear had made it less scary. The other problem she was having was her tennis-shoes. They slid right off the bark of the trees at the worst times. She’d be about to get good hold on a high branch and then her shoes went soft and sent her sliding down the tree leaving a raspberry on her arm and her stomach, sometimes ripping her shirt. Then she’d thought to bring the climbing shoes her step-dad had bought for her in a failed attempt to win some points 11


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by taking her to the rock gym to “connect.” Augie’s mom was always pushing them to “connect”, but the guy was clearly half interested. As soon as her mom wasn’t there, Ross left Augie to do as he pleased and went about flirting with whatever had two legs and tight clothes within gawking distance. “I should have never left her to lay I should have carried her around every second of every day” She half mumbled, half sang cradled up in her hammock. The bark fell like a frozen rain in ridges and thin vertical diamonds along the tree. Augie pressed her toes into the troughs and gripped the ridges. It was almost like climbing a steep ladder, except the bark occasionally came away or cracked, and she’d swing out violently like a barn door in a tornado. She worked her way up the tree, tugging on each new hold before putting her weight to it and making sure that she could support herself with her other hand and feet if her new hold gave way. She reached up and grabbed the first branch and swung her leg up and on, pulling herself into a sitting position with her back against the trunk. She imagined herself sinking through the bark into the marrow of the old cottonwood, slowing as the water and sap oozed through her. She tried to feel her branches bending to the wind and her roots reaching through the earth but couldn’t. Still, she watched some leaves tumble and slide along the dirt, and the branches of the trees bend to the lazy wind. She watched me sleeping against the roots by her backpack and then looked over the network of rope bridges and ladders that crisscrossed between the upper limbs of the canopy. 12


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She found her voice there and sang “but my baby’s lying there right now.” All the ropes had survived the winds from the night before. It’d taken several months and a thousand feet of rope to reconnect all the trees, not to mention a lot of thinking. She stayed up until morning some days imagining new tricks for securing the ropes and spanning the longer of the distances. There was, of course, some trial and error as well, as little as she could manage but still some. She’d tied the first bridge to only one branch on the opposite tree, which cracked one day after she’d walked it enough times to become casual. Luckily, she was only two steps in and managed to hold onto the rope, barely even swinging back into the trunk. It was a good twenty feet and she could only imagine herself with her bones ripping through her calf, or unconscious and bleeding. Or maybe I imagined that. The curse of seeing everyone else’s thoughts is in mixing them with your own so that your memories are never really yours. I stood there feeble until I could tell she was safe and then wandered off to see if I could stalk up on a gopher. She didn’t put her full weight on another rope until she had tied it off to at least three other sturdy branches on each side with good knots. She didn’t have any ropes lower than fifteen feet so that no one who couldn’t climb the trees could get up to the top and fall off. But I knew not to be concerned – there was a reason this patch had escaped what the sprawl and construction that had done-in all the surrounding woods. It was the same reason the gnomes remained here and hadn’t ventured into the hills or gone back to where they came from. The thick old willow at the center of the clump was the heart tree of that forest. Its branches hung lower, its leaves had spotted with the sadness of living 13


to see a vastness of one’s family fall under a great mass of humanity so far removed from empathy as to never think once about it. That tree held a strength that would keep this spot intact. It made it a blind spot to the developers and kept the fitness runners and video game seeking children absent to it’s presence. To them it wasn’t even a blip on their passages by. For Augie, who knew everyone in the subdivision, it was satisfaction enough that no one but herself and the squirrels were able to shimmy up that far. “My baby’s still,” she sung as she crossed to the willow, “lying there now.” She hopped up on a long branch and took a breath. The trunk overhung the stream a bit here and there was nothing but bark to hold on to for five feet. Up until now she’d climbed this part by throwing a rope over an upper branch and then pulling herself one hand over the other as she walked her way up. But she’d been getting better at climbing and over the last month she’d been working the lower overhang – cramming her toes around the branch and wedging her fingers at just the right points to the left and right. She’d climbed a tree that from its base went ten feet up in an over hang ,but she’d also fallen a lot learning to do it. Still, it was her birthday and she felt she needed to challenge herself. She grabbed the bark to the left and right just enough that she could hang back on her arms and still have some room to bring up her legs. She stepped up on her left foot, cramming her toes as far into the bark as they would go, then stepped up with her right. She pulled up and swung her left hand as far up as it would go, then her left foot came up, then her right arm; left hand – feeling a second for a good hold – right foot a little above her 14


left. She was halfway to the branch, her fingers were starting to numb, and for one second the images of her bone, splintered and flecked with her blood, her flesh like spittle or grease on a chicken breast, pushing through her thigh, the blackness that she thought death would be, overtook her mind. But then some deeper drive flooded her and she pulled up her left foot, her right hand, and her left hand, caught the branch. There was a rhythm her body already knew in swinging up and onto the branch and her mind was no longer involved. She reached out and got ahold of the branch with both hands and hooked her heel out along it, thrusting up. She was trembling as she sunk back into the crook where the trunk and branch met and sweat dampened her hair, sticking it to her forehead. “The leaves have blown off the branch the leaves have withered on the ground� She sat there for several minutes, watching again, not thinking at all, just resting her back against the trunk and letting her legs dangle to either side. A ladybug flew up from below her, arcing drunkly left and right and then hovered for a moment in front of her eyes before deciding to land on her nose. She had a terrible feeling that the insect was trying to warn her and she felt dizzy and then the thinking came back and she was afraid she might lose herself and drift to one side off the branch. She clutched at the trunk behind her and didn’t bother trying to dislodge the ladybug, just hung onto the tree. And then the vertigo was gone and she heard the oddest shrill laughter coming from behind and under her and it took a moment before she recognized it was her own. The ladybug seemed undisturbed and walked 15


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up between her eyebrows, resting there. She could feel it settle its abdomen on the bridge of her nose as if it were sitting for lunch. She fought the urge to flick the bug or to blow it off. Instead, she started to sing and oddly the song found its way out from somewhere somehow behind her, somehow not. It wasn’t her voice. It was a troubled voice, husky and deep, a voice that felt like it came from a time when all voices must have been troubled. And she sang: I laid my baby down so I might cry I put her down in her crib and I cried I put a feather to her nose and when that feather never rose I cried and I cried. I cried. I set a branch of leaves against her hand I put that branch in the fingers of her hand I should have never left her to lay I should have carried her away I regret it every second of every day but my baby’s lying there right now my baby’s still lying there now the leaves have blown off the branch the leaves have withered on the ground I never left her I just walked away my baby’s still dead inside of me Then she began to hum it to herself, her body 16


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easing into the tree, her heart-beat slowing so that it wasn’t so much a beat as a lapping, like waves on the shore of a lake. Her legs dipped into the tree and her arms let go of the trunk but didn’t drop, they just stuck, slipping into to the bark. She felt her skin hardening and her eyelids slid down over her pupils. She could hear a vague knocking, as if she were a long ways off… and then, inexplicably, blackness and hues of purple, and a furious paint-brush sound of wings.

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Bear woman The woman knocked about in the dark of the early day, wildly thunking along. She dipped and swayed as she lumbered around the cabin, a cob pipe clamped to her mouth through the darkness as she grabbed dried sage and crab apples, and willow bark tied into bundles that hung from the rafters. She called out as she thudded through the little house and the walls trembled as she moved like she shoving the air away from her. A thick hair blanketed her arms, an impression of stubble rounded her mouth along a narrow line of stitches that carried on to her ears. Her dress had pumpkins, sunflowers, and roses cobbled together in a pattern seeming to mock both the seasons and the woman beneath. Her cabin clung to the hillside like a barnacle. The chimney was built with river stones and over time they’d crumbled the cement between them. 18


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A small stand of trees companied the chimney on the roof, swaying as she moved about beneath and in the fire place a bundle of wood smoldered more than burned, and the smoke wafted up never daring to pull in the moon. A recliner, torn flannel fabric, the tea, the unimaginable things shoved deep under tables or burried near the walls. The woman swung about the kitchen, muttering and took a sack of thorny fruit from the rafters and dunked it three times into the pot and in another staggered step turned and grabbed a wicker broom and then batted the dusty cobwebs from the the corners of the room and in another thunderous motion sunk the broom into the pot and stirred it in slow, strong circles as if she was stirring blackened tar, and then in a blur she rubbed her eye, pinching the crud there into the pot and grabbing another stick from beside the door and sliding it into the fire so that a plume of smoke spit forth and crackled like she’d put a bough of fresh pine needles into it and if you could walk out of the door and onto the hillside where her house lived you’d see that from her place the world grew foggier and blurrier, as if there were less substance to the grass and the dirt, and at a certain point you’d find yourself in a grey thick mist where nothing could be discerned. She gummed her pipe and stirred 19


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the rusted cast iron. “Boil, damn you,” and the first bubbles caught along the bottom and then rolled quickly to full boil. “There’s the tucker.” She hacked and some phlegm shot into the water. She undid a sock tied into a knot and dropped it into the pot. Soon the water turned black. She grabbed a ceramic bear and pulled a long tether of honey with the comb then dropped it into the mix, hefted the pot from the stove and staggered to a table, to set it on old magazines, various postage. The table was made of one long slab of wood that still had bark along the sides full of gaps dried and cracked, supported by six of the trees that grew out the floor, through the ceiling. She walked over to the door and threw it open and let loose a great caw that echoed back in. She stepped back and smiled, her thick crusted lips cracking as a swarm of moths, hornets, flys, grasshoppers, thrushes, chickadees, and bees crowded in and set on the pot. “Chow my clickers and hoppers, chow and be fed, and once yous fedled aflight a me und gabble me wha happenstance with the grrlt a we calling ere, the grrlt we needing; the strongly grrlt with the telling ways.” She unthreaded the stitches along her jaw and a lone lady bug sprang up from the pot 20


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and, dazed, flew, bobbing, over to the woman and into her maw. The rest followed, swarming, like a mob of drunks funneling in, or like water spirals into a drain, and without swallowing or gasping, she closed her mouth and belched and said “Gooodly, ya’s goodly done.” A firelight thrashed in her white pupils, and she stilled, opened her mouth and loosed a dark a swarm out into the first cut of dawn coming from some place in the mists.

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Afterword Everyone thinks Augie Lohtech is a weirdo except for her dog – after all, she slips away to work on her lattice of tree forts, dresses like a chimney sweep, and has imaginary adventures after sneaking off from school. But when she dozes off high up in a tree and finds herself falling, something unusual happens – SHE DISCOVERS A SECRET WORLD LONG FORGOTTEN. Thanks for taking the time to meet Augie. If you’ve read this far, maybe you’d like to keep reading more. Well the power is in your hands! The more people who read about Augie, the more of her story I’ll share. So ask your friends to download this book! Want to do something extra nice? You can also visit my patreon page. If you contribute there you can get special stuff, like your name on the acknowledgements page, or even become a character in the book! www.patreon.com/canner Inspired by the novels from my childhood, I’ve put together a rough draft telling Augie’s epic adventure. I’ve tried to fill it with magic – not just the sort that happens on tv, but the strangenesses of those books we loved as children, and also the lessons about how to better live in the world. My goal is to spend the year revising Augie’s story into a crisp and polished book. I think I have something with Augie. She’s brave, and I’ve written her story to encourage younger folks to pay attention to the natural world and be able to discern how certain ways we have of seeing and being now threaten that world. Rather 23


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than pitching her story to publishers, I want to share Augie in a way that engages people as I do it. Rather than relying on men behind the curtain of the publishing world to make a declaration about the appeal of this book, I’ve come up with a new idea that puts my writing in your hands. If people like the story, it continues. If not, oh well. Here’s the plan: I’ll release new sections each month as the same Kindle book based on downloads. If you want to see more of Augie’s world, you can download the latest release and encourage your friends/family/social media connections, etc to do the same. Buying it is a vote for me to keep going and once I get 100 downloads, I’ll re-release the book with the next section by the end of the month. After another hundred, I’ll re-release it with another section and so on (I’m shooting for at least 10+ pages per release). If you want to keep up and you’re not a Kindle Unlimited member, you’ll have to keep buying the book after each release in order to get the new version. However, once I finish, anyone who bought Augie along the way can get a full digital version by going to www.facebook.com/augiebook and messaging me. If you message me, no matter what, I’ll make sure you get the book, however far I take it, for just that initial $1. If people get behind it, by this time next year I should have a complete first draft that I can release in print and you’ll have helped me accomplish a dream, plus Augie’s story will be there to hopefully help push us toward a better way of being. I know that’s a lofty ambition, but I also know this world needs us to cary big dreams if we want to stem the looming disasters ahead of us. With your help, there’s a lot more to come, m 24


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Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following folks for their help and encouragement in producing this manuscript: Elizabeth Boheim Jim Cole (aka Dad) Carl Corder Jimmy Kendall Abigail Marcus Diane Ross (aka Mom) Josh Wagner Meghan Whyte Tammy Yedinak-Bodineck & the Storm Crow for the beer and inspiriation

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