Deep Breath Hold Tight by Jason Gurley

Sub Genre: Short Stories

Release Date: May 13, 2014

ABOUT Deep Breath Hold Tight:

"Jason Gurley will be a household name one day." – Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of Wool

A new father on a forever-long journey in the wrong direction. The last stowaway at the end of the world. A woman who witnesses mankind's last day. A man whose breath is ice-cold, though it's the depths of summer. An agent hunting for a woman at the edge of the solar system. A reluctant widower who leaves his home to become an astronaut. A boy who turns into a wolf as civilization crumbles around him.

Deep Breath Hold Tight is a collection of powerful short stories about humans facing the end of everything.

~ EXCERPT ~

THEN
I caught her.
The doctor gave me a textured blue wrap. Frannie looked alarmed and said, “No, no, skin — skin-to-skin, I want skin-to-skin,” and the doctor assured her that this was only for me, so that I wouldn’t drop her. I lost track of what I was supposed to feel, and I bent over the bed, only dimly aware of Frannie’s feet near my head, her toes splayed wide as she fought. I heard her scream like I’d never heard her do anything before. It was primal, and I felt like a hunter on the savannah, standing over my kill, like a warrior, head thrown back and the taste of blood in my mouth.

And then she came to me, like a child on a water slide into my arms, slippery and dark and blue, and I caught her, and her tiny face looked like the wrinkles of my knee, almost featureless in her surprise, and she bawled rapidly. She pierced my heart and my ears with her cries, and a nurse clamped and clipped the cord, and I carried her to Frannie and laid our daughter on her breast.

She wailed and clung to her mother, her tiny fingers opening and closing against Frannie’s skin, and Frannie breathed heavily and said, “Elle.”

I didn’t want to look away from either of them — Frannie dripping with sweat, her hair in damp rings on her face, and Elle, pushing against her mother’s skin like a fresh piglet — but the movement at the door caught my eye, and I did, I looked up, and for the rest of my life I wished that I hadn’t.

Frannie saw, and looked, too.

The man in the doorway smiled regretfully, and waggled his fingers at me, and nodded.

I met Frannie’s dark eyes, and watched the tears well up, and I felt my heart pull out of my chest and stay behind in that beautiful room, the most wonderful place that had ever been made. I kissed Frannie, but she kissed me back, harder, and then I nuzzled Elle’s tiny soft ear with my nose, and kissed her head everywhere, and her small hands. I would have stayed in the room forever if I could have.

But I followed the man out of the room, my ears ringing with sadness, an enormous hole in my head and my heart, and that was that. We both knew that it had to happen, but we pretended it wasn’t going to. And then it did.

I followed his dark suit through the hospital corridor. I couldn’t feel my hands. My feet moved on their own.

He said something, but I don’t know what it was.

We stepped out of the building and into the light, and the cold wind turned my tears to ice.

NOW
Elle taps the camera, and I watch her fingertip, large enough to crush worlds, grow dark and obscure my view. I laugh, and she giggles, and this makes her laugh harder, and then she begins to hiccup wildly. She rocks back on her bottom and puts her hands on the floor behind her, and reclines and stares at me, hiccuping and laughing, and I laugh with her.

“You’re silly,” I say to her. “Silly, silly Elle.”

She babbles at me, and in the stream of muddled sounds I hear something that sounds like a-da, and I say, “Frannie!”

Frannie turns the camera on herself, and her smile is big and bright and threatens to push her eyes off of her face. “We’ve been working on it all week,” she says. “She can’t quite make the sound work, so all we’ve got is, except, you know, it’s more like atha, atha.”

I turn away from the camera and wipe at my eyes.

“Daddy’s crying,” Frannie says. I look back to see her turn the camera to Elle, who thinks this is hilarious. She pats her round tummy and laughs harder, and then the hiccups take over in a big way, and a moment later Elle burps up breakfast.

“Oh, uh-oh! Uh-oh!” Frannie sing-songs, and she says to me, “We’ll be right back, Daddy!” and puts the camera down.

I watch Frannie’s feet, then she scoops up Elle and whisks her out of frame.

I sigh and push off of the wall and turn in a slow flip, waiting.

Sarah comes in through the research wing hatch and sees the camera and says, “Oh, shit — I mean — oh, goddammit, I — fuck! Shit.”

I laugh at her and tell her it’s fine. “Elle spit up,” I say. “Commercial break.”

Her face relaxes. “Whew. Okay. I don’t want to corrupt your little girl or anything.”

“Did I forget to flip the sign?”

Sarah turns around and leans out of sight. “Well — nope, no, you did,” she says, leaning back in and holding up the little handwritten recording sign. “I wasn’t even looking, I guess.”

“What did you need?”

She looks around, scatter-brained, gathering her thoughts. Then Frannie comes back into the room with Elle, singing a bit, and she sees Sarah on the display and says, “Sarah! Hi!”

Sarah looks up at the screen and smiles sheepishly. “Hi, Francine,” she says. “Everything okay?” Frannie asks me.

“Everything’s fine,” I say.

“I was — I shouldn’t be in here,” Sarah says, making a slow turn towards the hatch. “I’m sorry. Nice to see you, Francine.”

“Bye, Sarah,” Frannie says. She lifts Elle’s small hand and flaps it at the camera. “Say ‘Bye, Sarah!’”

Elle yawns.

“Bye, sweetie,” Sarah says, then shakes her head at herself and looks at me. “Really, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I should’ve checked first.”

“Not a big deal,” I say, and then Sarah floats back into the research module and presses the hatch shut behind her.

“It’s not like we were having phone sex,” Frannie says, chuckling. “Make sure she knows it’s fine.”

I look at the readout beside the screen. “Time’s up anyway,” I say.

Frannie’s frown is adorable. “Oh, I’m sorry, dear,” she says. “We wasted so much time cleaning Elle up — I’m so sorry.”

I smile, but I know it’s a sad smile, and I know Frannie can tell. “Kiss her for me,” I say.

Frannie kisses Elle, a big playful smooch that sets Elle’s giggles off again.

“Love,” I say.

“Love,” Frannie answers, and then she squeezes Elle and coos, “Love! Love!”

The screen goes dark, and I sigh, and look around the module. It’s cramped and small, but it’s private, at least until Sarah bumbles in again. I point my hands at the floor and push off with my feet, just enough to reach the lights, and I snap them off. The module goes pitch-black, and then my eyes adjust to the faint light from the porthole. And then I cry, the way I always do. The tears stick to my face like film, and when I’ve cried enough to feel better, I sop them up with my sleeve, and turn on the lights, and get back to work.

This is the way it has to be.

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Jason Gurley is the author of The Man Who Ended the World, Eleanor, and the bestselling novel Greatfall, among other books and short stories. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including John Joseph Adams’s Help Fund My Robot Army!!! He lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.

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Jason Gurley Talks About How He Writes

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1. What are you working on?

At the moment, two projects that couldn't be more different. I'm trying to finish Eleanor, the novel I've been working on since 2001. I'm still a good 30-40,000 words from the end, I think. I'm anxious to finish this story, get it to my editor, and start the hard work of getting it ready for publication.

The other project is a short story that's very different from my usual work. It's told from the point-of-view of a post-apocalyptic baddie – it is, I think, a rare examination of what goes on inside of those guys' heads. You know the guys I mean – every movie or story about the end of the world has them. They run around in battered leather outfits, usually wearing some kind of threatening mask, carrying knives, raping and murdering for no good reason. I think they all shop at the same store – Post-Urban Outfitters or something. But I can't recall ever seeing a story that made these fellows more than two-dimensional threats, so that's what I'm attempting here. It is, however, the single most violent story I've written, and it's full of misogynistic characters who I'm not sure are redeemable in any way, and I'm not sure it's the kind of thing I'll ever publish. I'm still searching for the ending. It may never come. I may just put this one aside and work on something else instead.

Oh – and I'm also taking part in a new anthology, one about time travel. I'm thinking of resurrecting a failed comic script that deals with this very topic. That script was originally called My Father Who Travels Through Time. I don't know if the title will survive or not, but the story just needs a bit of work. It's got real potential, I think. It's delightfully weird.

2. How does your work differ from others in its genre?

I don't often think about this sort of thing, really. I do read a lot of science fiction, and historically I read a lot of horror, though most was Stephen King, and I do find myself accidentally writing horror stories sometimes – but I don't think I often try to hold true to the tropes of the genres I write in. I sometimes think of the stories I write as simple human experiences that take place in a genre environment. The Man Who Ended the World is a story about a deeply flawed man and his simple desire for solitude, just blown up on a grand, terrible scale. The Settlers and The Colonists try to answer questions about what mankind's second and third and fourth acts would look like – how do we change when we leave our home world behind? – but they try to answer them in small, personal ways, using intimacy of characters who exist in a bigger, changed world. Those stories aren't always about the people doing the changing (though sometimes they are).

And Eleanor, may I finish it soon, is one of the more difficult-to-classify things I've ever written. It has elements of the fantastic, elements of science fiction, elements of fable and fairy tale... but it's all woven through a fundamentally sad tale of loss and lost love.

I suppose I just like to write about people, and sometimes they happen to be involved in some pretty strange and mysterious things.

3. Why do you write what you do?

I love to ask questions, and most of my work begins with a question. What would it be like if a closed society fell under the sway of a religious cult? How would a family respond to losing one of its own? What happens when we push our planet past the red line?

For years I wrote novels about human people living human lives right here on a human Earth. My first novel was about a young kid who found success as a published author. (No wish-fulfillment there, right?) My second was a long flashback about the '60s, told by a man who has just set his life on fire. My third was about the penalty for lies, about a boy who ran from his problems and only created more for himself. You might have classified all of those as literary fiction.

Eleanor arose from a very confusing period of my life, one in which I was asking questions about my own choices that I didn't have answers to. That story became a sort of vehicle for me to answer those questions, and because they were big questions for me, they became big questions for the book... and the story became very big to answer them. Over time it transformed into something entirely different – especially as I no longer needed to answer these questions for myself – and so it became my first book that took a small, human story and played it out in a magical way. It was my first real genre story, other than some scattered Twilight Zone-esque short stories I'd written over the years. That shift really informed my work, and taught me that it was okay not to try to write BIg, Important, Great American Novels every time I sat down at the laptop. It was okay to tell a story for the sake of telling a good story.

4. How does your writing process work?

I used to be fairly persnickety about writing. Everything had to be just so – the right light, the right amount of quiet, etc. A person's cough, or the sound of a lawnmower down the block, could tragically end the session. In those days I lived alone, and I wrote whenever I felt moved to do so.

But I think I've grown up as a writer. My life has changed in big ways – I have a wonderful family, a talented and beautiful wife and a smart and funny daughter, and our house is full of light and boisterousness almost around the clock. I've learned to steal any moments I find for writing. I can write without silence, and without solitude. These days, if I have fifteen minutes, I can jam out a couple of thousand words. I write fast out of necessity, and I think it's made me a stronger writer than before.

I'm also less insufferable. I think about the way I approached writing all those years ago, and I was quite a snot about it.
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Jason Gurley on Amazon

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