Dangling High will be debuting on November 1st in paperback and on Kindle, including the Kindle Unlimited service! In celebration of the upcoming launch, I wanted to go ahead and share Chapter One, which explains the novel’s authoritarian, dystopian landscape, as well as the traumatic reasons Ezra turned to a desperate life on the fringe.

Trigger warning: this preview contains violence against a marginalized character, though it isn’t glorified or overly graphic. Rather, it is necessary for the course of the rest of the story, and written with that in mind.

In The Beginning

In the beginning, there were four: the father, the mother, the sister, and the brother. A nuclear, average, typical family in the territory formerly known as the state of Idaho in a country that no longer is. What remains is an alliance of land, mostly desert, interspersed with what little forest endured within and around the disbanded Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The states that would’ve been included in this modern territory – the one affectionately dubbed the New Old West – consist of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, with the inland, dusty portions of Washington, Oregon, and California peppered in. To the west and east of these boundaries lies the remainder of what used to be the U.S., now dubbed the Liberal Alliance of Democratic States, with structures very different from what exists in this barren place.

It’s the way people like it, though. At least, so anyone is brave enough to say. The L.A.D.S. can keep their ways – what the people dubbed as “wokeness” during the Second Civil War of the 21st Century, though it has since evolved, or perhaps devolved, into the old-school categorization of sin. So any lips will say. So anyone can say.

In the New Old West of the early 3000s, the people do things a bit differently from the godless L.A.D.S. Here, the population is small and tightly managed. Only a select few, the folks with the very best genetics, are spared sterilization and allowed to reproduce up to two children per couple. If business is going to forge ahead sustainably, population control is about the only way to do it. While the L.A.D.S. harps on their conservation, their science, their land and wildlife management, the N.O.W. lays no such restrictions on Capitalism’s tried and true economics. It’s much easier to industrialize through a carefully regulated population than it is to withhold resources. Progress always requires some degree of sacrifice.

Which is where Ezra comes into play.

Ida and Charles Smith were two people selected to further the territory’s most precious growth, with the missus giving life to Rebecca Sue first and Ezra Josiah second. In the eyes of their parents, the two of them were perfect, bright little stars in an otherwise endless night. They were the reasons Ida and Charles knew to keep their heads down, too. It was easy. They could play the part, effortlessly weaving themselves into the local church and becoming pillars of their small community. They were members of one of the more affluent parts of the N.O.W., settled near the Snake River just west of what used to be the Palisades Reservoir.

Although the forest around it pales in comparison to what it was before the fascist takeover of the early 21st Century, a brief era of progressive creativity, scientific innovation, and a veritable Renaissance of artistry led to some hope and recovery. Though the old-growth forests are limited to the farthest, most uninhabitable regions of the former Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, new-growth forests have since overtaken a substantial portion of their haunts.

Which is much to say that Ida and Charles were blessed to occupy the particularly lush green land of Swan Valley. It could be harsh in the Winter, but their town was considered the Capital of the New Old West, and as such, they enjoyed the benefits of its status. It never did hurt to be too close to the rich and powerful back in those days, particularly because the Territory’s leader, President Jesse Musslin, was another mainstay in the community. The town was called Paradise, an apt name if there ever was one, and though it was and still remains the biggest in the region, it fell short of qualifying as a city. Such things simply don’t exist in the New Old West. Cities are a problem best left to the L.A.D.S.

Not that the N.O.W.’s towns didn’t have their problems. The dust. The god-forsaken, endless, windblown dust – the kind that crept into babies’ lungs and stole their lives, claimed older children who weren’t responsible enough to keep their bandanas wet, and slowly scratched adults until they coughed droplets of muddy blood.

Paradise wasn’t like that, though. There was too much water and plenty of trees to protect its people from that.

Of course, to Ezra Smith, despite the lovely running river, whispering aspens, and prickly pines, church on Sunday mornings had a way of feeling like the sandy blood he never knew. That’s how it was the morning his life changed forever.

At the time, it was an ordinary thing. He was squirmy in the uncomfortable pews despite the fact that he was old enough to behave. Back then, he was known for his boyish charm and excessive energy. The town affectionately excused his outbursts and eccentricities because he was a devilish mixture of good looks and charisma. He knew it, too. Even being so young, Ezra knew how to play the people around him like a fiddle.

On that morning, light filtered into the wooden building through scratched, foggy glass. Shade from the trees broke into pointed patterns that Ezra ordinarily spent his Sundays studying while Pastor James T. White droned forever about Jesus Christ and sin. Generally, Ezra didn’t listen. Though he wasn’t privy to all that Ida and Charles did behind the parts they played, he was old enough to vaguely understand they were involved with a local branch of The Resistance – a group primarily composed of Shoshone-Bannocks and anyone else who couldn’t fit the cis-gendered, heterosexual, lily-white mold The New Old West favors. Back then and still now, The Resistance occupied what was left of the formerly more expansive Fort Hall Reservation.

Though Ezra was young, he was mature enough to understand the necessity of keeping their sympathies secret. If the Police ever found out, word would funnel from them, through the Evangelical powerhouse, right into the ear of President Jesse Musslin himself. Such things had happened before, and when they did, the offenders wound up in the center of town, heads tilted and mangled between the rope that held them and the ground that let them down.

So, Ezra was guarded as he should be regarding his family’s private affairs. Which was easy enough because, at fifteen, he was somewhere between the innocence of childhood and the fall of adulthood. Unlike his parents, he wasn’t selected to be a breeder, and so as soon as puberty hit, he was shipped to the government hospital and given an excruciating sterilization. They didn’t bother with painkillers, mainly because the N.O.W. didn’t have the industrial resources for such luxuries, and he was laid up in his bed for a week before he felt like he could move.

Bad as it was for him, it was hell for the women. He remembered when his sister came back from hers, ugly, half-hazard stitches in her once pristine belly, making her scream, cry, and beg God for an ounce of mercy. The only medical courtesy she was given was access to antibiotics, solely provided when a procedure was state-mandated. If you came down sick from natural causes, well, that was just God’s mysterious will.

Which had something to do with the sermon’s topic on that cursed day. God’s will as it pertained to two things: the issue of sex in all its deviant forms – out of wedlock, to excess, with multiple partners or, Heaven and God Almighty forbid, homosexual – and the problem of murder. Ezra had heard it all before, plenty in fact, enough to stir a bitter sense of rebellion in his gut. The sexual part bothered him for obvious reasons, but the murder was the thing that was eating at his mind most. Given what he knew about how things operated, the irony of it was almost too much to swallow.

So, instead of studying dust dancing in the pointed slivers of morning sun, Ezra raised his striking blue eyes, stared Pastor White down, and felt something threateningly close to hatred in his throat.

How can you say that when you’re responsible for so much blood?

He remembers feeling hot and shaky, enough so that his mother asked if he was feverish. He mumbled an excuse, and she let him be for the rest of the service. Though he tried his hardest to hide the acidic holes such hypocrisy burned inside his gut, it must’ve been noticed because on his way out, Pastor White and President Musslin took the time to stop him.

The religious leader grasped his thin, childish arm, and the entire family froze. Ezra glanced at his parents; the flicker of fear in both their eyes frightened him, too. He blinked. He looked at the Pastor and then the president, stationary like a buck with a bullet to the heart.

“You seemed like you were paying attention today. It’s about time,” the pastor said through a smile that felt like a threat.

“I always listen,” Ezra remembers lying, “I just don’t like to look.”

Pastor White laughed, throwing everyone off. Charles put his arm around his son’s shoulder, gently pried him from the older man’s grip, and made a plausible excuse. “He just loves to fool around outside. Church can be torture when you’re a boy, don’t you remember?”

There was a genuine feel to his father’s fondness that seemed to diffuse the situation. Still, when the family finally extricated themselves, and Ezra ran through the woods to sit beside the river, he couldn’t help feeling sick. For a long while, he simply stared at the icy, running water, but then Henry joined him, and he left his crowded mind.

Henry sat close, the same as he always did, immediately pulling grass from the earth and tossing it into the river.

“Running high and fast. That’s good. Means there’ll be lots of game this year,” he said.

“Yeah, I can’t wait to get me an elk. I’ve shot a few deer, but my Dad promised this is the year I take down an elk.” Ezra easily slipped into his dreams. “Says he’ll get me doing more ’round the ranch, too!”

Henry laughed and leaned back on his elbows, so Ezra did the same.

“You gotta get you a real cowboy hat, then you’ll be legit, don’t you think?”

“Pssshhhh, a course! All it takes is a hat, don’t ya know?”

Henry cracked up because they both knew there was a lot more to running cattle than wearing a hat. It was the trade of both their families. It was food for the entire town.

“I’m pretty sure I’m better suited to herdin’ chickens. At least, that’s what my Dad says. I know he’s jokin’ a course, but…eh…” Henry sighed, his mood darkening.

“He’s a mean ol’ bastard. I don’t know why you let him get to you,” Ezra rolled to his side, propping up his head and staring at his lifelong friend.

Henry pulled some grass and fiddled with it on his belly before looking at Ezra, too.

“It’s because it’s true. I mean, not that I can’t do more…it’s, you know…the thing under it.”

Ezra remembers to this day how his stomach felt when he heard those words. The two of them had been dancing around it all spring and summer. It was a spark of sorts, but it was also something neither was confident enough to say out loud on account of the other’s possible lack of feeling. However, the thing under it…saying that, well, it just stirred that terrible feeling in a way that stole the words straight from their mouths and centered the unspoken much too loudly.

“Is there something under it?” Ezra asked after a proper, disorienting swallow.

Henry’s smile wasn’t confident. Not at all.

“I don’t know, Ezzie…is there?”

Henry’s eyes were dark brown, and so was his hair, mess that it was.

“So there is, then…” Ezra remembers smiling to put his friend at ease.

Henry audibly exhaled and smiled, too. “Okay…so…now what? What do we do then?”

Ezra’s smile slipped into a charming, playful grin. “I reckon we kiss, don’t you think?”

Henry’s face turned a lovely shade of timid red, but he laughed and nodded, saying, “I reckon we do,” before reaching up his hands, lightly holding Ezra’s neck, and pulling him down for the first kiss either one of them would ever have.

Ezra’s first.

Henry’s last, because the lovely feeling wasn’t long. Several months’ worth of skirting reality and pretending it wasn’t there, all for just about nothing. It should’ve been everything.

It should’ve been everything.

The world was supposed to be ours.

But then there was the sound of a crunching branch, the panicked, painful, sudden realization that they weren’t alone.

“No, no…” the words left Ezra’s lips almost involuntarily.

Pastor White was quick, slithering reptile that he was. He snatched Ezra beneath his arms and gripped him hard, dragging him away from Henry. He’s sure they were screaming, but that’s not what he remembers most. What Ezra can’t get out of his mind are the other things – how it felt to watch Jesse Musslin emotionlessly beat Henry; at first, he assumed nearly to death, but it quickly became evident it took him all the way there. Ezra can remember how the blows to Henry’s body sounded beneath Jesse’s flying fists and boots. He can remember what it was like to hear Henry’s pleas for life quiet, how it ached to watch his chest stop rising and falling. The unbelievable, maddening powerlessness he experienced as he tried to escape the pastor’s grip and save his best friend’s life.

He broke away. He did. He broke away and grabbed the first thing he saw — a stick in the ground, snapped and pointed. In that moment of freedom, Ezra screamed from the deepest recesses of his guts, sounding like the man he hadn’t quite grown into yet. He hit Jesse Musslin hard, knocked him to the ground, and stabbed the stick like a dagger right into his ugly, gray eye, not hesitating a moment before yanking it back out, the damn thing stuck, ripped violently from the socket.

The pastor slapped the stick from his hand, grabbed Ezra by the neck, and dragged him a few feet before throwing him to the ground, straddling him, and wrapping his massive hands around his throat.

Ezra begged in his mind, then let that slip away. He couldn’t see so well. His vision was fuzzy from the suffocation, but somewhere between his will to live and resignation to die, he stopped caring. He smiled even, and he could hear how furious the grin made his attacker. It’s one of the most satisfying moments of Ezra’s life to this very day, and it would’ve been the most defiant fuck you imaginable if only Jesse had let him die.

He didn’t, though. Somehow, despite the grisly, permanent injury to his person, Jesse commanded the pastor off of Ezra. He gasped for air, the result of an uncontrollable reflex, before his vision returned, and he found Jesse’s bloody, gored face hovering over him like the Devil himself.

“Some things are worse than death,” he said, and though Ezra didn’t know what it meant at the time, he found out fast.

He was confused when his attackers left him there alone, panting and frantic. At first, he held still for fear they would come back, but then he remembered Henry and crawled like a maniac by his side.

“No…” was all he could say, tears heaving from his chest as he pressed his forehead to Henry’s bloody, matted hair.

He indulged his sorrow, his pain, his soul-destroying guilt until he had no energy left. Exhausted and defiant, he stood, wiping the dirt, tears, and blood from his face and staring just beyond the trees.

You will not cry another tear over this, he remembers thinking before grabbing the stick with Jesse’s eye and walking home, clutching it as though it were the elk he looked so forward to claiming.

Upon arrival, everything appeared in order. It did. There was nothing to tip him off, not until he walked through the front door and heard poor Rebecca sobbing. Borderline deranged and silently traumatized, Ezra stepped into the kitchen and found her coated in so much blood, holding the corpse of their beloved father in her arms.

She was mumbling incoherently between her wails. Ezra stepped beside her, dropped to his knees, and touched the blood on his father’s clothes. He swallowed, then looked at his mother, his beautiful, perfect mother, and felt his entire heart trying to crawl from his throat to rest with her love forever.

Alas, Ezra Josiah Smith was not dead, nor was his sister. It was just the rest of the people who mattered.

When Rebecca finally stopped crying, she looked at him, noticed the skewered eyeball, and decided she didn’t care.

“It’s because they helped them…it’s because they had compassion,” she whispered.

Ezra blinked and solemnly regarded his folks. His heartbreak was very real, but his body was too tired to show it.

“It is.”

“What do we do now, Ez? What if they come for us?”

“They won’t.”

“How can you know that?”

He looked at her, very stoic, entirely closed. “Because some things are worse than death.”

She didn’t know what it meant, but didn’t push him either. They were quiet until he cleared his throat and got to his feet, gazing out the window at the trees and dirt in the distance.

“Pack up, Blue Bird. It’s time to fly.”

And so pack they did, stuffing brown bags made of cowhide with everything they had to their names and attaching them to the saddles of their two best horses. They left town in the woods, skirting the main roads, though Ezra knew their lives were spared.

They journeyed until dark, then built a fire out of juniper in a field with little protection. They ate conservatively because civilization was several days away. They went to sleep early because they knew they needed energy to get there.

But as Ezra lay on the dirt with a woolen blanket over his chest and a wadded jacket beneath his head, he couldn’t help staring at the stars. He could indulge his sorrow if he wanted, and he realized he probably should’ve, but something inside of him had been broken beyond repair. He didn’t know what it was back then, and truthfully, still doesn’t.

All he knows is, as he stares at those very same stars now at twenty-six years and counting, he feels about the same as he did then.

Some things are worse than death. That much is true. But life has a funny way of forcing balance, those worse things being no exception because, while it is a fact that this empty living is a terror so much worse than it would’ve been to die with a grin that made holy blood boil, it’s also true that very few things are sweeter than revenge.

With a smile, Ezra focuses on the fire crackling beside his feet, Blue Bird breathing shallowly a short distance over, and Judy “No Bullets” unexpectedly tucked against his chest after a connection in the woods he didn’t see coming. It’s all well and good but ultimately meaningless, a mere pleasant distraction along the more palatable journey toward what he craves.

It won’t be long now, Snake Eye.

Hold your worry. I’ll be there soon.