Works In Progress

The List Maker

A Visionary Fiction Novel

Karma has twenty-one days before the machinery of eviction begins moving toward her front door. She has $2,800 in savings, twelve cats, nearly a hundred packed boxes, no driver's license, and several years of experience surviving circumstances that most people would regard as emergencies.

Then the number $2,800 begins appearing everywhere.

A mysterious stranger hands Karma an envelope containing an old property tax statement from Central New York for exactly $2,800. Her outstanding court costs are $2,800. The estimated cost of moving is $2,800. A possible vehicle lease requires approximately $2,800. Her savings account contains exactly $2,800.

Karma observes these correspondences with the same practical attention she gives to traffic lights, eviction notices, cat food, thrift-store treasures, and the increasingly complicated logistics of moving her life somewhere else. As unexpected events accumulate around her, ordinary circumstances begin forming patterns whose meaning is difficult to determine and increasingly difficult to ignore.

Told entirely through Karma's first-person perspective, The List Maker follows a woman whose movement through everyday life becomes an exploration of synchronicity, consciousness, choice, observation, and the possibility that seemingly unrelated events may participate in a larger pattern. Karma does not leave her familiar world in search of revelation. She encounters possibility through the events already unfolding around her, one ordinary and occasionally absurd day at a time.

The List Maker is an unpublished work in progress.

A woman with long dreadlocks wearing a tank top, cargo pants, and boots, sitting on a mossy rock in a lush forest with a stream, writing in a notebook.

From The List Maker, Chapter One: 21 Days

It's 21 days until the rent is due. I'm unemployed with no job prospects. I've got $2,800 in my savings account, nothing in checking, the water and electricity have been shut off for more than two years, it's winter, and I'm wearing flip-flops.

I wasn't sure whether I was describing my circumstances or reading the opening paragraph of a cautionary tale. Most people would have called it a crisis. I called it Tuesday.

The situation would have been easier to ignore if my toes weren't numb. I rubbed my feet together and refreshed my banking app for the third time that morning. The balance remained unchanged, apparently unaware that I needed a miracle. This, I affirmed, was the arithmetic of survival.

I looked around my second-floor, three-bedroom apartment. I had perhaps a hundred boxes packed and labeled, stacked neatly against the walls as if I were ready to leave at a moment's notice. The only problem was that I needed three things.

First, a place to go.

Second, a semi-trailer and several strong movers willing to haul my life down a flight of stairs.

Third, money. It was always about the money.

The boxes had been sitting there for three years, patiently waiting for circumstances to improve. They seemed far more optimistic than I was. Sometimes, I wondered if packing everything had been an act of preparation or surrender. Either way, my life looked less like a home and more like a storage unit with an electric tea kettle powered by a small, solar-charged Jackery battery.

I'd lived in that inner-city apartment for exactly thirty-six months without paying a dime of the $1,000-a-month rent, beyond the first month's rent and security deposit, surrounded by theft, gunfire, and senseless murder. Gunshots were common enough that nobody looked out the window anymore.

The landlord was in his mid-twenties. He had purchased the six-unit building to prove to his father that he was finally a man and capable of managing rental property. Unfortunately for him, his first major business challenge turned out to be me.

About six months after I moved in, he sent me a text.

"Are you going to pay any rent, or what?"

"I don't have the money," I replied.

"I'm calling my lawyer."

I stared at the message. A lawyer? Really? I'd been evicted from better places than this. The threat felt almost charming.

The ironic thing was that neither of us seemed to know what we were doing. He was pretending to be a landlord. I was pretending I had a future. Somehow, we'd managed to keep the arrangement going for three years.