About the Author:
In the third grade, LD Jacobson was struck in the head by an errant dodge ball thrown at mock speed by a friend. His massive cranium bounced off a brick wall and then he collapsed to the pavement where his noggin bonked again. He was whisked away by ambulance and taken to a hospital, ultimately diagnosed with a severe concussion. While in the hospital, he contracted pneumonia and spent a week there. What he saw, as he swam in and out of consciousness, haunts him to this day. Something about the psychedelic effects of eating cat litter… His third-grade teacher, one Alice Swander, threatened to call his father if he didn’t stop blowing spit bubbles in class. It remains a harsh and, quite frankly, unjust threat.
He routinely selects people he knows and gives them bit parts in his books – pray you’re not one of them.
CHILDHOOD FLASHBACKS…
Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, I feared the following things – in no particular order: stepping on a rusty nail in the grass and contracting lockjaw. (Apparently, my father had a habit of throwing old, rusty nails around the yard for us kids to step on.) I was terrified of quicksand, as in that stuff was spreading like crazy, and killer bees were inevitable. Congratulations 2026, for making all of those old horrors seem, well, relatively tame.
I’ve recently developed an addiction for those ‘Maximal Nostalgia’ videos that start out with ‘you know the 80’s miss you, right?’ and end with ‘maybe it’s time you came back.’ They’re painfully authentic and I see myself and my friends in each one. In that heartaching vein, I created my own. (Seriously, it’s my all-time favorite creation.)
In 1979, Evan King’s life changed when a strange girl walking down the road told him to stop singing a particularly bad song. And into his life, walked Dana Elizabeth Marchant – the lead guitarist of a fabulously talented local garage band called the Soft Cloth Biscuit. A garage band that just happened to be looking for a new singer…
For the next few years, Evan and Dana were inseparable – forming a bond built on their growing love for each other and the greatest rock and roll music ever made. But every soundtrack has a haunting ballad, something just a little bit darker than the others, and for Evan and Dana it featured a violent and abusive neighbor whose treatment of one of their friends brought the ugliness front and center.
‘How do we help her?” Evan asked one night. “How do we stop him?”
‘Easy,” Dana said. “We kill him.”
Dana Elizabeth Marchant was a lot of things – whimsical and mercurial – but at times she carried with her a level of understanding and experience far beyond what her tender years would suggest.
Those few years would leave an indelible mark on Evan’s life – a mark made of equal parts love, pain and even betrayal. But to Dana, they were merely a drip in an infinite ocean.
‘Know that we are the timeless ones…’
Forty years later, he receives two pieces of news.
The first is that he’s dying.
The second is that Dana is back – and she’s putting the band back together.
About Doorway Fiction
Doorway Fiction is a site to promote the writing talents and imagination of L.D. Jacobson for the enjoyment of the reader.