J. S. Kuiken

I’m going to try posting a Weekly Excerpt each week. It will help me continue the habit of blogging regularly, which I started with #WriterLifeMonth. It will also give my existing readers something to read while we wait for my work to find a home and be published ( 🙂 ), and it will give new readers nice tasters of my work.

This excerpt is from one of my works in progress, a composite novel. My current “cover blurb” for the story is thus:

Their lives weren’t supposed to change, but when Michael is diagnosed with terminal cancer, his family erupts into communal and private chaos. His husband, Cal, veers wildly between his absolute devotion and his fears of the unknowns. As Michael succumbs to the effects of his illness, Kate, Michael and Cal’s seventeen year old daughter, tries to be the bedrock for her family that her parents can’t be. And Erika, Michael’s older sister, finds herself evaluating her life and relationships, especially as her relationship with Cal becomes increasingly intimate.

This portion is told by Erika, and takes place immediately after Michael’s diagnosis. She’s an astrophysicist, and that will be fairly obvious once you start reading.

Michael has cancer.

About 13.8 billion years ago, time and space began. The early universe, a hot white bundle smaller than an atom, exploded and expanded. In mere seconds — the universe we know was born.

In those early years, she burned and burned, and it was only when she cooled, with what we could imagine as an earthly hiss, that atoms formed. And from them, stars and planets, solar systems, galaxies — and everything else you could imagine formed.

The atoms in our bodies were born through that very explosion, from the very beginning of space and time.

The same atoms which were brought forth by the very beginning of space and time make up the cancer in Michael’s body.