The Hollow Earth: Mangs and Rangs: The Hollow Earth Theory, #1

By Amy Dorkson

Centuries ago, the two Earths split apart to eventually have very different geography, history, and philosophy. Blue collar witch Tabitha Walker doesn't know about any of this and is just trying to earn enough money so she can retire to be a housewife. Unfortunately, life keeps throwing adventure her way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amy Dorkson
• Release date: Mar 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215780671

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Housewife’s name was Tabitha Walker, in case you were to ever run into her, now you know her name so she won’t look at you funny for having called her The Housewife. She’d had a long line of illustrious careers and was currently doing one as a housewife, and doing a series of side-gigs. Technically, she was the queen of Gargantua, an ex-monarchy just above Irroria, which was the more metropolitan radical democracy. Though in reality she was a lower middle-class descendant of much richer monarchs, and while she had the title as queen, she preferred to be known as a housewife, on account of preferring her head attached to her body, as opposed to the alternative. Which would be decapitation.

She’d worked on her simple housewife routine and was very entertained that so many people bought it! The fact that she was a queen was something that even her sweetheart absent-minded husband, didn’t know. (His name’s Frankfurt. Very nice man, balding. Technically a king, not that he knew it, the king of a radically anti-monarchist ex-monarchy.) But that people bought simple! She loved that.

Anyway, she had a bit of a complex about being so under-accomplished by comparison to her relatives. She was 34 years old and felt older. Her mother died when she was 22, by beheading, and Tabitha was only a very small child back then, so she was understandably educated into being as fade-into-the-background as possible, by The Dishwasher, who’d passed her off as her own daughter. Admittedly, the two looked as if they could be mother and daughter. They both had blue-black hair and opalescent blue-violet irised eyes, which was a common coloring where they were from, and they were both pretty, which they both attributed to copious amounts of ultra-clarified kitchen grease, amongst other things. Tabitha’s father was in hiding, and apparently living it up with parties and spacecapades.

Tabitha used to be a dishwasher, herself. It was frankly not her favorite thing since the government enforced what was locally known as The River of Life dishwater lightly filtering system, which had actually been an idea of her biological father’s, who’d had good intentions, though the idea itself was objectively flawed and far better than any Petri Dish for the growth of monocellular colony living life, pretty much exclusively the many kinds that make you sick. The Dishwasher’s name by the way is Aneska Dishwasher, married to Herbert Dishwasher, whom she met, you guessed it, at church, and later in a dish-pit where the two of them, amongst many others, worked for the previous monarchs, and later the biasedly useless government officials. (To be fair, they’d yet to actually have a system of government where the government decision-makers weren’t entirely useless people in an official capacity who were too paralyzed with fear to make good decisions.)

Politics in Gargantua were at a height in terror. Aneska had advised Tabitha to forget that she was ever a princess and got her a wink-wink-nudge-nudge birth certificate from the midwifery. Tabitha was legally Tabitha Dishwasher, until she was Tabitha Walker. Her husband, Frankfurt Walker, was an anti-monarchist himself, though admittedly one of the milder ones.

To quote Frankfurt on the subject, But really I think instead of beheading, the more humane option would be deportation. To which Tabitha agreed. She’d much rather be deported, than beheaded. Though she also preferred not to be deported. She couldn’t help her birth circumstances. It would have been better not to have been born a queen of a radical ex-monarchy; if she’d had a choice, she’d have chosen that.

Anyway, after the dishpit and the variety of other jobs and illustrious careers, and the births of five children, Tabitha was very happy to have some time to spend making her house look nice. This was not the first time she’d attempted being a housewife. Now she was better at it. Her house used to be a disaster area and now people regularly called it very clean, which was by far superior to the former loving interventions that used to take place about her disaster area house and apparent lack of cleaning and life skills.

To be clear, they really couldn’t afford for her to be a housewife, which was unfortunate, because she’d observed others living this lifestyle and felt it was really optimal for her. And furthermore, if she was a man, she’d have felt the same way. Hilariously enough, Frankfurt also wanted to be the housespouse, and so they both vied for this position while juggling home jobs from the current post-revolution gig economy. She also did a lot of pretending to work so that her peers wouldn’t think she was lazy. She felt that society had really given lazy people the boot unfairly; wasn’t like they were hurting people by being lazy, in her opinion. She could be a great employee and often was, but she was tired.

Anyway, keeping the house nice was an excellent job for her. For example, many of her previous jobs included cleaning, so why not take that skill home and lead the comfortable life? Frankfurt and the children (Tom, Jon, Marissa, Tobey, and baby Penelope) didn’t seem to mind and sometimes they helped.

Baby Penelope was the prettiest baby on this part of the universe. There were debates over who were the prettiest babies by the sixth dimensional humanoids who watch these things, and 8 to 10, Baby Penelope was the prettiest baby. Other 2 out of 10 had poor vision and were biased; those were facts.

To describe her, she had downy blue-black hair and wildly violet eyes and lil’ eyelashes that went all the way to her nearly non-existent baby eyebrows, and since she was only 3 months old, she didn’t have any visible teeth yet, only drooley gummies, and everyone was predicting she would have teeth soon, because apparently that was a thing on the Born-Walker side.

Although Tabitha did her best to remain incognito, thanks the dawning of social media, like TruthTab, her royal cousins and cousin’s cousins kept in touch and sometimes swooped into her life like a nerve-wracking wrecking ball of joyful opulence. She’d had them lying to Frankfurt and the kids about it for quite some time now. She and Frankfurt were an item since they were teenagers. Now they were in their thirties. That’s how long her cousins and her cousins’ cousins had been lying on her (and their own) accounts of being royalty. They all lived in actual monarchies and had been royally consulted on how to look like Poors, so they could visit Poor Cousin Tabitha The Housewife. (And if they were being totally honest, The Wannabe Housewife and Small-Time Entrepreneur.)

Anyway, she enjoyed visits from her cousins. Okay, she did. She would never lie about that (though she certainly would lie and happily so, about them being royals). They slipped her money (more than she’d ever ask for) just for being herself and living so humbly that they felt embarrassed not giving money to her. Just for the sake of appearances, she’d say, Aw, you don’t have to do that, and they’d say, It’s a gift. Housewivery should be government subsidized and in my kingdom, it will be, one day, one day, and she’d take the money with the most minimal amount of embarrassment, talking about her various entrepreneurial ventures, which were largely fictitious in nature.

She also had gotten into the habit of traveling once a week to see her father, the king, Henry the 15th. Of course, he lived pretty far off, in the knightsdom of Whalery, but Frankfurt and she spent some time employed as chefs on airplanes, and she’d ran into him (the king) by chance while off without Frankfurt and loe and behold, they’d recognized each other.

It was unlikely that they would recognize each other. Tabitha was a three-year-old toddler when they were separated. She didn’t even remember what he’d looked like. But she saw him, at the age of 30 (she was 30, not the king, in case that wasn’t obvious), walked up to him, and said, You wouldn’t happen to be the former king of Gargantua, King Henry the 15th? And his face whitened and his blue eyes widened (by then, he was a fully white-haired man), and then he squinted at her and he said, You wouldn’t happen to be baby Tabitha, would you? And they both laughed boisterously and hugged for a full half-minute, and frankly Herbert Dishwasher, the man she’d called Dad all those years, was jealous when he heard about it later. He didn’t mean to be jealous. He knew that love was not supposed to be jealous. Still, where the heck was the king that whole time while Herbert was raising his daughter? In Whalery, living the good life and eating grapes and bread and drinking wine and beer, every day. Apparently engaging in unexpectedly indiscriminatory relations of an amorous nature, prolifically.

Not that Tabitha was holding it against him. She’d gone through a phase like that, before she and Frankfurt had decided that they would settle down. And it wasn’t like her poor mother was still alive to be faithful to. And she’d explained to Herbert, Dad, you’re my dad, and he’s just the poor guy who’d had to run off to skip execution and let his daughter get adopted by the dishwashers, who were and are known to be the best parents ever, proving his good judgment.

Tabitha had an unusual skill for flattery, which could be used in almost any situation. Once she was kidnapped for ransom by some late professional kidnappers who had not gotten the memo that Gargantua was now an ex-monarchy. In that time, she’d studiously flattered her kidnappers, got them talking about themselves, and sadly informed them that Gargantua was an ex-monarchy and was freed before they could find out that there was an official bounty on the heads of all local royalty, ex or otherwise.

She was slippery in this way. She’d been jailed and sentenced to execution in a few nearby cities and towns (trying to visit her cousins, see, you know, ‘scape.) And she’d walked out of the jails like she walked in, except without handcuffs and in nicer clothes. Exploiting the human element of computer security, she’d even gotten her records wiped clean.

And Frankfurt knew none of this stuff. She’d tell him sometimes, but he’d laugh and ask how her stories were doing. She also wrote stories. This wasn’t an uncommon pastime where she was from, especially amongst the women. Frankfurt also wrote stories. Two of her five kids fancied themselves Story Craftsmen. So, when Tabitha told Frankfurt stories of having been to jail and sentenced to execution and then somehow magically found herself walking out wearing nicer clothes than she’d come in with, he thought she was talking about her stories. Admittedly, sometimes she was. She let him think this because that was better than him knowing too much. Security through obscurity.

Another one of her illustrious careers in her long line of illustrious careers was witching. She was a professional witch. She’d gone through the apprenticeship and everything, and had a supposedly advanced knowledge of herbage, but she was also very accident prone and with a tendency to mix up herbs, usages, and side-effects.

They said you could take the witch off of the broomstick, but you couldn’t take the broomstick off of the witch. Though nowadays, Tabitha mostly used the broom for sweeping (and occasional ride-sharing). Frankfurt had worked very hard in the ditches of the ex-kingdom for months to get a home with nice varnished hardwood flooring, and Tabitha would be gosh-damned if she was going to let the floor be a target for the very real demon of wear and tear. Occasionally, to be romantic, Tabitha would take Frankfurt out for broomstick rides on full moon midnights (you really needed a full moon for that, otherwise you’d be flying into stuff and other things would be flying into you, and you could do it during the daytime but the traffic was inopportune).

She and Frankfurt had a very healthy relationship. As probably obvious by their having five kids (and all of them being quite obviously Frankfurt’s biological children!) They had strong banter game with each other.

Would you still love me if I was a witch? Tabitha had asked.

"Of course, I would, and you are a