The Bridge

by J.S. Breukelaar

Genres: Dark Fantasy; Occult & Supernatural; Coming of Age; Horror

Synopsis

"I was raised by three sisters, one a witch, one an assassin and the third just batshit crazy." And so begins The Bridge, from Shirley Jackson Award, Aurealis Award, Shadows Award, and Wonderland Award finalist, J.S. Breukelaar. Meera and her twin sister Kai are among thousands of hybrid women—called Mades—bred by the Father in his Blood Temple cult. Meera is rescued by a mysterious healer and storyteller, Narn, but her sister, Kai, does not survive the Father's "unmaking." Years later, when the cult is discovered and abolished, Meera, still racked with guilt and grief, enrolls in college to take advantage of the government's generous new Redress Program. There she can only dream of ever being real, of ever being whole again without her twin. When Narn's conjure stories buy Meera a free ride to a notorious horror reading series, she is soon the darling of the lit set, feted by the other students, finally whole, finally free of the idea that she should have died instead of her sister. But college is not all it seems—there is a price to pay for belonging to something that you don't understand. Narn has lost a sister too, and Meera agrees to try and find her if Narn will keep feed.

Release date: June 22, 2021

Publisher: Meerkat Press

Print pages: 250

Sample

I was raised by three sisters, one a witch, one an assassin and the third just batshit crazy. By the time I left their place deep in the Starveling Hills I’d met the middle one, Tiff, only once in person, and I never told the others. She’d run off or something, and they didn’t talk about her much, and maybe it was for that reason that she was my favorite—her absence having as big an impact on my growing up as the others’ presence. By the time I’d escaped the Father and came to live in the Hills, carrying my own dead twin in my arms, Tiff was already gone, leaving behind nothing but bad blood and a trunk filled with old clothes from across the ages. Among them were a pair of Roman sandals that fell apart in my hands, some rusted crinolines and a moldy cat o’nine-tails, concert T-shirts and even a diary whose discolored parchment pages could have been the skin of one of her victims, for all I knew. The pages were scribbled in illegible symbols which gave me a funny feeling in my lady-bits, and convinced me, from day one, that ‘Aunty’ Tiff wanted me, and only me, to find her.

In time Narn, the eldest sister, sent me away. To what seemed like the ends of the earth, may as well have been. To college. I lay awake in the Tower Village dorm room, at Wellsburgh College in Upper Slant, too sick to go to class, wondering why I was here. The damp pillow case chaffed my cheek, the weary thwack of a campus security pod overhead tangled in the jerky drum of my heart. I tried to push thoughts of the Father’s birds away, couldn’t help wonder how far I had really come from all that—the three crazy sisters and my own dead twin, buried under a bloodwood tree high in the Starveling Hills? I tried not to. I tried not to ask myself if it would ever be far enough.