Neither Here Nor There


​Kim is your typical rebellious black gay nerd, biding her time in college until she can get to her dream job at NASA.
     Returning home from work-study in the biology lab one day, Kim experiences a strange kind of double vision. She can somehow see her “choices” before she makes them. A few days later, Kim is kidnapped. Held in a remote farmhouse, she discovers that her abilities are no accident but that she has been an unwitting subject of an experiment by the professor she is working for at the lab. Confused and overwhelmed, Kim is able to escape using her ability and jumps into a couple of versions of her life and her relationships until she encounters a group of students with the same ability. They have been looking for her.
     Duped and manipulated, the students have been used to re-shape the world for the financial and political gain of the mysterious benefactors who fund them. They convince Kim that she must help them put an end to these devious plans. She joins the group and sets off on a mission to save the world from those who seek to control it for themselves.

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Author's Note

           I really love fruit. Fruit is healthy and good for the kids so I buy in bulk but I really hate fruit flies. They are so tiny and annoying and when you try to kill them (smash them, clap then to death, slam them against the counter), you miss 9 out of 10 times. Sometimes when you are tracking them (hunting them, if we are being honest), they seem to disappear. I started to believe that they must be slipping into another dimension and that’s why they are so hard to kill. Blipping in and out of dimensions, they remained wily, oily and relentlessly annoying. That got me thinking.
             Around the same time, I started reflecting about the choices one makes in life and how different life could be if you decided to do x instead of why, go to medical school, instead of film school, go to a party and meet the love of your life, instead of stay home and chill, make yourself a salad instead of eating that questionable piece of fish from that questionable restaurant. What if you were able to see the consequences of your choices and go back and make a different choice? How different would your life be?  Would you be the same person? 
            With those two ideas floating around in my head, NaNoWriMo rolled around in November of 2015 and under the pressure of a daily word count, the story bloomed. It was so much fun to write, so much fun to research and so much fun to just imagine how to tell a heroic story from the inside, with all the messiness, distractions and doubts of a person who was not at all interested in becoming a hero. 
            The cover art is dope? Yeah, right?! I was celebrating my bestie's birthday down in New Orleans, happened to stroll down this street full of wonderful artists selling their artwork, saw this piece called "Foxy" and fell in love with it. Fortunately, the artist, was open to me licensing the work and I finally had the perfect cover for this complicated story. Here's his info if you want to see more of his work:
ART87JR aka Jason Rodriguez,  [email protected]

An excerpt from Neither Here Nor There ....

 I shut my eyes to block out the reflections of my fellow passengers but I’m not stupid. I keep them closed for just a few seconds of peace. I’m on the subway, the Broad Street Line heading home to West Oak Lane and a lapse in vigilance could be a costly mistake. I stare back out the windows, which look onto nothing but the blurred walls of the tunnel we are rushing through. The train stops with a jerk every 3 minutes or so to let a few people on or off, varying the composition of the car but not the mood. Most of the passengers exude the same public transit vibe: a mix of weariness, wariness and detachment. The subway is like purgatory. You are neither here nor there. It’s too loud for conversation, too jarring for reading, and too busy for quiet meditation. So, you just pause, wait for your stop to get off, and get back to living.

At my stop, I get up careful not to bump anyone, sway to the door as it opens, cross the gap onto the platform, and exhale as the door swishes to a close behind me. Climbing up the grimy station steps, I resume my life as a commuter college student headed home after classes, praying that someone has made dinner because I am starving!
It’s the middle of October and the leaves are just starting to get serious about turning color. The air has lost its humidity and Halloween decorations are popping up here and there. During the two block walk to my house I alternate between admiring the work some have put into their houses and scowling over the equal number of boarded up windows and run-down apartment buildings. My neighborhood has always had these extreme contrasts. Mrs. Harbison’s porch would rival any horticultural display at the Flower Show. Mums and pansies and zinnias, wind chimes and bird feeders and beautiful small statues of the Virgin Mary accompany ferns and palms. There is even a small waterfall over Zen rocks. It should just be a lovely garden, but instead it seems bizarre because right next door to her row home is a house that was owned by a hoarder. It was condemned a month ago, but through the windows, you can see piles of boxes, stacks of chairs, and rows upon rows of thrift store tchotchkes that have not been touched. You can still smell the 37 cats. On the other side, there is no house at all. It collapsed four years ago, the city finally demolished it two years ago and now it’s a vacant lot overrun with scraggly weeds growing among the abandoned slabs of concrete. Too little on one side, too much on the other and Mrs. Harbison in the middle doing her best to incite beauty in her little patch of the world.

I know Mrs. Harbison because she goes to my church. Or, at least, what used to be my church. I went there my whole life, but my mother got married there seven years ago. Now it’s my mother’s church that she goes to with her new husband. In junior high school, I used to go with them even though I felt like a third wheel. I didn’t care. Going made me feel rebellious. Having discovered my affinity for girls in 8th grade, I knew myself for an outlaw and I knew most sermons to be bullshit. I went anyway, with all my secrets, determined to be seen if not heard. It didn’t last long. My mother could not countenance hypocrisy; consequently, she just stopped reminding me to get dressed, stopped waiting for me, and then stopped mentioning it at all. They would just be gone early on Sundays and I learned how to make a mean French toast and drink coffee in their absence.

​Walking up to my front door, I can see the lights are on and I hear a saxophone solo, Charlie Parker, I think. I imagine the scene inside. My younger brother and sister are sitting at the dining room table, practicing their letters or coloring. My mother is bustling about in the kitchen making some kind of healthy chicken dinner. Her husband is not home yet but eagerly expected any minute. The scene is warm and cozy, a veritable Cosby show episode and here I come, rings cascading down my ears, nose stud sparkling, tattoos peeking out when it gets warm. I mess up the whole picture. I know it and I don’t care. I am an outsider here and yet a small part of me is happy about that. 

Where Can I Get My Copy?

Reviews for Neither Here Nor There

The Black Lesbian Literary Review
​The Lesbian Review

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