Excerpt from The Avian Hourglass by Lindsey Drager, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

We walk and walk—we are walking from the farthest point within the town limits to the place that I call home, we are walking the full span of the solar system. I hug my oversized sweater around me closer. When we get home I realize suddenly, a bit sadly, that I didn't even look up once to see if I could spot a star which means, to my sorrow, I am growing used to the world without them.

"Luce?" I say, when I split off to head toward the duplex and she keeps going north to get to her house.

"Yep," she says.

"You found Pluto," I tell her and smile.

She grunts. "It's easy to find something no one else is looking for," she says. 

I nod a goodnight to her, and she nods right back. Then I go inside and shake Uri from his sleep on my couch and he hugs me, barely awake, and heads out my front door, and a fraction of a second later I hear him heading in his front door, then upstairs to his room. 

I sit in the rocker of the triplets' room and listen to the sounds of space, watch the slow rise and fall of three tiny chests as the bodies of the triplets conduct their breathing.

I pull the sleeves of my sweater over my hands, hug my legs with my arms, and use the force of my form to make the chair rock.

I think: I am real. 

I think: Luce is wrong. We are not just words. And my father is wrong. This isn't a simulation.

This is real. All of this is real.

I exist and we are here and this is now and I— I am real.

Excerpted from The Avian Hourglass by Lindsey Drager. Copyright © 2024 by Lindsey Drager. Excerpted by permission of Dzanc Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.