The Space Within These Lines Is Not Dedicated

By Bernard Cox

Lucy is having a bad day at work and to top it off a cicada named Lenny just told her she has three days to live. Thus begins a surreal journey of self-discovery, where animals talk, bears play polka, and spiders tango. Over the course of three days Lucy must care for her alcoholic mother, come to terms with the loss of her father, and confront her feelings for her best friend Faye, all while trying to understand what her "potential" is and why a cicada wants it before she dies.

For fans of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, Haruki Murakami, The Alligator Report, and TV series like Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies.

Cover designed by Sabine Krauss

A novelette, approximately 50 print pages.

"Bernard Cox's The Space Within These Lines Is Not Dedicated is a fantasy with a radically inclusive vision. Lucy, a one-time rescuer of animals, confronts her father's death, her mother's despair, a complicated love, a meaningless job, and, as a result, finds herself in an emotional limbo. When the smart-aleck cicada arrives, she has to wonder whether she's losing her mind. Is she facing the inevitable passage of life or the possibility of renewal or both? The progress of this compassionate narrative critiques our society's neglect and abuse of the world and those who inhabit it."--Frank Rogaczewski author of The Fate of Humanity in Verse.

"'Give us your potential.' With that request [The Space Within These Lines Is Not Dedicated], a story that revolves around a woman, her imminent death, her troubled life and lots of talking animals (that she can hear) is off and running. Does it all sound crazy? Well, it is! It's also entertaining. Cox is a great storyteller. There are more of these novellas to come from him and I look forward to them. This is good stuff, all the way around!"--Shelly, Shelly's LGBT Book Review Blog at Shellysbookstore.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bernard Cox
• Release date: Dec 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301597239

Bernard Cox

Bernard M. Cox is a graduate of the MFA Creative Writing program at Roosevelt University. He has taught screenwriting, literature and composition; curated an experimental music concert series called FeedBack; ran a staged reading series for screenwriters; and served on the Board of Directors of the University City Arts League in Philadelphia. He is the former Assistant Artistic Director for the Tamale Hut Café Reading Series in North Riverside—thcreadingseries.wordpress.com. His writing has appeared in A cappella Zoo, Blood and Lullabies, Collective Fallout, Crack the Spine, Red Lightbulbs, and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Transplanted once again, Bernard is currently acclimating to the constant, oppressive San Diego sunlight as he is partial to the part-shade conditions of the East Coast and Midwest. When he is not writing, making music, or reading, he is often wandering the countryside looking for insects and dreaming about Philadelphia. Visit him at bernardmcox.wordpress.com.

Book preview

The Space Within These Lines Is Not Dedicated

by

Bernard M. Cox

Smashwords Edition

Cover designed by Sabine Krauss

Copyright 2011 by Bernard M. Cox

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Fireflies Know Semaphore

The tick, buzz, tick of the printer is soothing and reminds Lucy of the outside. The whirring in the trees; these late September days when the season is cooling down; the last gasps of mating before everything heads underground. She begins to drift into thoughts of her former fieldwork.

She daydreams of scrubbing oil off dying animals; of vast swaths of destruction; of the North Pacific Gyre—a sea of endless trash like a floating scab. She daydreams of the waxy, jaundiced skin of her father. She remembers why she works here, in the drug company’s Internal Review Board, closed up inside, reviewing pharmaceutical experiments. When she looks at reports she tries to forget the tiny deaths behind the numbers. Tries to forget what she once tried to accomplish out in the world—repairing wounds, healing life, being productive.

She reaches across the desk for her mouse and knocks over her half-finished latte which spills across the desk, seeping into the reports and trickling down over the lip of her desk.

Damn it. She takes some tissues from the box and wipes up the ink and cream-colored coffee off her desk and shakes out the reports. She mops up the mess until the tissue runs out.

She leaves the cubicle and heads to the bathroom. As she passes desks people look up at her. She walks past her boss’s office, averts her gaze and ducks inside the bathroom. She grabs paper towels and wets them. She’s a mess. Her curly, shoulder-length, blonde hair is disheveled from running her fingers through it; her blue eyes, glassy; red sweater set, faded and wrinkled; her grey skirt, wrinkled as well, and now with a dark blotch of coffee just above the right hem of her skirt and on the edge of the slip.

Shit. She scrubs the stain with the wad of wet paper towels. Shit, shit, shit! She hurls the mass of towels at the trashcan. It sticks against the wall.

Damn’t! She takes a quick step toward the stuck mess, which then dislodges from the wall and falls into the can.

She straightens her skirt, adjusts her slip and checks in the mirror. The skirt is straight but with a large wet mark on the right side. She grabs another set of towels, wets them and heads out the door.

§§§

Lunch is difficult. People around the microwave murmuring about her ruining important reports prevent her from braving the kitchen to retrieve her lunch from the fridge. She goes to the corner deli. On the street everyone seems to look at her. Her skirt isn’t riding up, her slip doesn’t seem to be showing, and the stain has faded. When she gets to the deli she checks in the mirror to see if she has any schmutz on her face or if her hair is