Description
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About the author:
Uvi writes across a variety of genres: My Own Voice, The White Piano, and Apart From Love (literary fiction), The Music of Us and Dancing with Air (romance), The David Chronicles, Rise to Power, A Peek at Bathsheba, and The Edge of Revolt ((historical fiction), A Favorite Son (biblical fiction), Home (poetry), Twisted (horror) Now I Am Paper and Jess and Wiggle (children’s book.)
What inspired you to write your book?
A few months ago, a pile of bones captured my fascination. Scattered across my desk, they were ashen, rather small, and of fanciful shapes. I was unable to identify the animals whose remains these were, nor could I name their skeletal parts. Which left me free to mine—out of these crumbling, fragile relics—an entirely new presence. Coming to life on brown paper with with a few stokes of white, red, and brown pencils, there she was: my Bone Princess. Set upon a patch of scorching desert sand, she casts a one-eyed look at you, which masks how vulnerable she really is. Her soft flesh is shielded—and in places, nearly crushed—by her armor of bones. She is damaged: no arms, no legs, yet she accepts her pain with pride, and with regal grace. Inside and out, she carries a sense of morbidity. As all creations, she became an independent spirit. As such, she made me wonder what had happened to her. I imagined her turning to me, with the elegant, elongated lines of her neck, to tell me her story. This was how my novella, the first story in my upcoming collection—I Am What I Am—came to be. Twisted.
Here is a short sample from the book:
Within a second, the earthen walls grew immensely higher, they were vaulting over us and there we were—there in my grave—in a free fall—
Rising, somehow, to a shaky stand I popped my eyes open. Still, all I could see in the mounting darkness is the quick flash of her teeth. She bared them in a smile.
I turned my gaze away, noting the walls around us. I had seen an elevator once, when Job had taken me to a hotel, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. He had booked the honeymoon suite up there at the very top, knowing it would impress a simple village girl like me. But now, this here was like no elevator I had ever seen before.
How can I begin to describe it to you? Space was tight. In distress I looked up—perhaps by force of habit—to cry, to say a prayer. Stones, torn roots, autumn leaves, most of them already rotten, even tiny lizards and worms were soaring over us in a big swirl, bouncing from time to time off the walls, and then being blown up and away with a big spit, straight off the top of this thing.
After a while you could breathe again, if you were so inclined. I was not. In the shadows, if you dared brush your fingers around you, you might feel the mud slipping upward along the walls as we went on falling.
Then came various outlines, various shells and pebbles and hairy seaweed, all floating across a layer of damp air. From time to time a fish skeleton swam by, lit from inside, like the neon signs at the top of that hotel in Jerusalem. And then, puff! The skeleton hit the elevator wall and crumbled to dust.
Layer after layer rose away. Water, vapor, gas; cold, hot, toasty. All the while the floor kept accumulating hairy strands of algae, crumpled insect wings, chopped off lizard tails, split-open pebbles, coal dust…
In the mounting pressure I could see particles start to crystalize. Here and there something seemed to glitter underfoot. My companion would swoop down greedily—before I could move a finger—and snatch it. A diamond.
Sigh. I cannot stand this woman. What a bitch.
The elevator sank deeper and deeper, farther and farther into an abyss, shaking violently as it went through its paces, giving out loud creaking noises.
Then, with an abrupt thud, it came to a stop. A zigzag fissure appeared along the wall, and before it cracked open I knew: On this side, darkness. On the other—the unknown.
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