Project 17 (16 page)
Authors: Eliza Victoria
Max slept soundly on one bed, while Jamie snored on an extra mattress on the floor. Al was on standby mode on a sofa near the windows.
Lillian sat beside Al, tucking her legs underneath her dress, and leaned against him. She glanced at her phone. It would be morning soon. She looked toward the windows and waited for the new day
to arrive.
My deepest thanks to Ms. Nida, Kyra, and the rest of the Visprint team for the love and attention they gave to this book.
My thanks to the readers for the feedback and encouragement, and for giving me reason to believe that I am not just talking to a blank wall.
Writing is a solitary art, but inspiration often dwells in the events pre- and post-writing, and because of this I thank my parents and my siblings, the Lazarte family, and my
friends, whose anecdotes may or may not have ended up in this novel and in my other stories. (Sorry?)
This novel is an expansion (and in some ways, a re-imagination) of the universe presented in “The Mechanic”, a short story published in the Summer 2012 issue of
Kaleidotrope. Thank you to this online quarterly for giving my story a home.
And of course, thanks to Jaykie, who, shortly after my short story collection was published, asked,
Have you ever tried writing a novel?
And here we are.
Eliza Victoria
Makati City, Philippines
2013
Additional thanks
to Honey, Katz, Trizha, Kevin, David, Charles, and the rest of the hardworking folks of Flipside Publishing.
Eliza Victoria’s
fiction and poetry have appeared in various publications and have won prizes in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and the
Philippines Free Press Literary Awards. Her short story collection,
A Bottle of Storm
Clouds,
was published by Visprint in 2012. For more
information, visit
http://elizavictoria.com
.
Also by Eliza Victoria
Lower Myths
The Viewless Dark
A Bottle of Storm Clouds
(short stories)
Apocalypses
(poetry)
Unseen Moon
(short stories)
Copyright © Eliza Victoria 2014
Cover art and design by Kevin Roque
ePub design and production by Flipside team
eISBN 978-971-9640-14-1
This e-book edition published 2014
by Flipside Publishing Services, Inc.
Quezon City, Philippines
