Excerpt:
As the sun
rose over Duelham, a pair of brown leather boots stepped off the curb and onto
the road. Cut from a long-dead cow, turned inside out, cleaned and stitched
onto a foot, they walked down the grey-gold street and through the gates to
Mingum’s Mill: a seemingly abandoned mill which towered over the rest of the
town and imposed a certain enormity on the suburb. Previously home to rats,
drunks, youths, and young drunk rats, Mingum’s Mill had recently opened its
doors to a new venture. Though the youths, rats and the drunkards hadn’t been
entirely evicted, “Medicine” was open for business and Henry, the owner of the
boots, had the telegraph-pole advertisement to prove it.
Entering
the abandoned mill’s front office, Henry passed the security guard fiddling
with his phone and approached the receptionist, a young woman in a smart white
blouse and navy-blue skirt. She looked up at Henry, who stared into her amber
eyes with a steely look of determination.
Henry’s
hand moved slowly but steadily to his breast pocket, his eyes never leaving the
receptionist’s. Her heart beat faster. Henry could hear it. His hand
disappeared into his jacket and promptly returned, not with a gun, but with a
piece of paper: an advertisement, yellowed and weather-bleached.
Henry
slammed it on the table in front of her. “I’d like to do it,” he said. Then
remembering his manners, “Please.”
The
receptionist looked across her desk to the paper she was presented with. She
picked it up and studied it once more before returning her gaze to Henry. “Do
you understand all the risks?”
“There’s
understanding and there’s accepting,” Henry said with a gritty resolve, “and I
see no reason to need both.”
The pair
remained locked in their stranglehold gazes, neither willing to be the first to
look away, to give in, to show weakness. The security guard watched on, his
hand resting on his taser, ready for action but unsure of what action to take.
Finally,
the increasingly tense silence was broken as the receptionist offered Henry a
standard ballpoint pen. “Sign here.”
Henry
cocked his head and smiled briefly. “The name’s Henry,” he said as he signed
the document with that very name. Then, raising the pen to his mouth as if he
was blowing smoke from a recently fired pistol, Henry pursed his lips and blew.
“What are
you doing?” asked the receptionist, confused by his inappropriate and
disease-spreading behaviour. That was her pen; she had to use that pen.
Henry’s
gritty resolve dropped; his awkward self-awareness returned. It was as though
he had suddenly sobered up at a party and realised he wasn’t actually having
fun. An overwhelming sense of average took over his entire body and his mind
went blank. Gone were his delusions of grandeur. He felt like a child in a
world of adults. “I was just …” He stammered, unsure of what to say. “I was
just blowing the pen.”
The
receptionist leaned forwards in her chair. “Don’t.” She snatched the pen back
from him.
Henry,
shaken, feeling small, his voice almost a whisper, replied, “Sorry, I’ll take a—”
“Take a
seat,” she said.
He was no
cowboy, no western hero. He was just a man with a signature, a name, and little
else. Henry took a seat and, fighting off a blush, picked up a magazine. It was
a celebrity gossip magazine. Sometimes, it seemed, Henry couldn’t win anything.
BLURB:
Henry
Madison is an apathetic young man with little to no ambition. When he loses his
job and his girlfriend in one day, he is destitute and signs up for paid
medical testing. The doctor creates clones of Henry and when these clones
escape and start causing havoc in Henry's life, he is hired in secret by the
strange doctor and trained to hunt the clones down one by one and kill them.
Henry soon
finds out, however, that personality isn't genetic but made of the experiences
you have, and as time progresses, his clones become less carbon copied than he
was lead to believe, growing their own identities and challenging Henry's
perception of what it means to be Henry Madison and of what it is right and
what is wrong.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Seaton has
written for The Roast on ABC2, Lost Pilots on FBi Radio, and is a regular
performer of stand up comedy. Currently he is Head Writer at Paper Moose, a
film and design collective based in Sydney.
You can
get in touch with Seaton on Twitter. @seatonks
Buy Link:
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