Ya-ya's Return: Escape Hatch Series, #0

By K. A. Keener

"Lively prose that puts you on the streets and subways and stoops of NYC during the scary opening months of the pandemic." KM, Five Star Review

"This quick read accurately captured the NYC scene during the early days of COVID... I felt immediately invested in the characters." EM, Five Star Review

.Prequel to the Escape Hatch Series.

What happens when a…city shuts down…a company folds… a generation is lost

It's New York City and the early days of the pandemic have upended everyone's life. But Thalia didn't have much of a life to upend--so she thought.
Meet Thalia: A travel agent who never travels, a young woman who moves from lover to lover, a person who keeps looking for signs, but finding her own apathy instead.
COVID changes all of that. As the city shuts down, she loses her job, her apartment and any ground towards adulthood she had haphazardly gained. Moving in with her grandmother, she begins to discover her next bold move.
Will she be able to break out of her arrested development? Will COVID transform or break her?
Read this short prequel to explore the genesis of Thalia's adventures as a digital nomad.

• Language: English
• Publisher: K. A. Keener
• Release date: Mar 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201343309

Book preview

COPYRIGHT PAGE

FOLLOW THALIA’S JOURNEY on Instagram @nomadthalia.

Join the newsletter at EscapeHatchSeries.com.

Next up… Pigeon in the Canaries, the first volume of the Escape Hatch Series

set in the Canary Islands.

Copyright © 2021 K. A. Keener

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: www.EscapeHatchSeries.com.

FOLLOW THALIA’S JOURNEY on Instagram @nomadthalia.

Join the newsletter at EscapeHatchSeries.com.

Next up… Pigeon in the Canaries, the first volume of the Escape Hatch Series

set in the Canary Islands.

HORIZON DESTINATIONS

EACH DAY ON her subway commute, Thalia counted the number of people in her subway car. The second week of March, the number had decreased by a third each day from Monday to Friday. On Wednesday, she easily scored a seat. On Friday, no one was standing and everyone was a bit freaked out— even the rush hour trains had that keep-your-eyes-open-and-headphones-off vibe. A teenager with a longboard was using a sharpie to tag one of the orange seat molds in the middle of the morning rush hour as if they were on a train at 2 a.m.

She stopped counting as the express train slid past the local stops in Harlem, the Upper East Side, Midtown, Union Square…certainly today would be the day she would be told to stay home, she’d thought. But the call hadn’t come. That morning she checked her phone between each step of her routine. Between the bathroom and showering. Between make-up and dressing. Still, nothing. She chose layers, knowing outside it was still cold and inside the overheated office was always sweltering. She knew she looked frumpy when anything obscured the taper of her waist. Also, she’d eaten too much over the holidays and now felt like a slightly over-inflated version of herself. Baby fat, people called it, but she hadn’t had a baby nor even had much chubbiness as a child. She kept her hair in a black braid, like a short rope arcing from her head. She checked her email again. Each time, the spam kept building, but no message from Toula, her boss, the owner of Horizon Destinations Travel Agency. Thalia exited the train and climbed the stairs at Wall Street.

Again, there was maybe a tenth of the normal crush of people on the stairs. The news said, Asian virus, and exponential growth, but now the virus had been found in New York. So far, they had just closed down some town in the suburbs where they’d found cases and some sort of super-spreader event. Then, there were rumors of how hospital beds could reach emergency capacity levels. More people testing positive. More people leaving the city for their vacation homes.

She passed small shops in Chinatown, where workers were rolling out trays to fill with ice and fish and vegetables. A miniature schnauzer tried to drink water from a small bucket with swimming baby turtles swimming until his owner admonished him. She could smell salty air from wherever the fish had lived and urine from the homeless population that seemed to be gaining. She stopped at her favorite street vendor, Ling’s Sweet Mini Cakes.

Good morning, an Asian woman said