An Excerpt from She Ruined Our Lives
For anybody interested in my latest novel, I’m reprinting a brief excerpt from the opening scene of She Ruined Our Lives:
Layla Dolak stopped loving her younger sister Erika three months earlier, on a humid summer day. Perhaps that was not entirely accurate. It was possible that underneath all of the burning anger and searing resentment some remnants of filial affection still remained. If this was the case, however, Layla was unaware of it. As far as Layla knew, all warm emotions she once felt towards Erika had been severed that sticky August afternoon, when she
had taken a nap between shifts at Grobel’s Tavern.
Looking back, Layla realized that she should have been warier when her sister had offered her a cookie. Erika wasn’t much of one for cooking at all, let alone baking, so Layla ought to have been suspicious. But she was both tired and hungry, so she’d gratefully devoured the cookie without thinking about the incongruity of it. It was not a particularly tasty cookie. The batter was clearly that of a prepackaged plastic-wrapped tube from a supermarket cooler, and there was a slightly medicinal taste that she didn’t detect until a
few moments after swallowing the last morsel. Normally, she might have asked questions, but she was dead on her feet, so she washed away the crumbs with a few sips of milk and collapsed on her left side upon the living room couch. She rapidly fell into a much deeper slumber than usual and stayed in dreamland for over two hours. Her usual naps lasted forty minutes on average, depending on how well she’d rested the previous night.
While Layla slept, Erika had silently tiptoed behind the sofa, gently graspedLayla’s silky tresses with her left hand, and, gripping a large pair of scissors in her right hand, chopped off nearly twenty-six inches in a series of careful snips. Had she simply gathered up her sister’s locks into a ponytail and severed them, leaving Layla with a ragged bob, Layla would have been enraged, but not filled with searing hate. But Erika sought to profit as much as possible from her sister’s hair, and every fraction of an inch left attached to Layla’s scalp was money Erika was denying her own pockets, so
she ruthlessly brought the scissor blades as close to Layla’s skull as possible, tying up every flowing length of hair with a rubber band and carefully bagging them. In about fifteen minutes’ time, she had clipped away every lock of Layla’s thick mane, leaving the barest possible covering of peach fuzz over her head.
Erika had then rushed from the house without waking Layla, hurried
downtown to a shop that purchased human hair, and after a little negotiating and flirting with the clerk to drive up the price, accepted six hundred ten dollars for her sister’s tresses. The proprietor had originally presented a lowball offer of four hundred dollars, but Layla had done her research, and she knew the going rates for a particularly thick skein of glossy dark brown hair that had never been dyed, permed, or styled with heated instruments. The buyer, who had been willing to go as high as six fifty, paid in cash. Erika
immediately rushed to the dealer she had known since high school and spent her entire windfall on pills.
If you’re interested in reading more, please take a look at She Ruined Our Lives!
–Chris Chan
Chris Chan’s second Funderburke and Kaiming novel, She Ruined Our Lives, was released on February 6th. His sequel to Sherlock’s Secretary, Nessie’s Nemesis, was published on September 3rd by MX Publishing. His novel Ghosting My Friend was released by Level Best Books on March 28th. His first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released by MX Publishing, as was his anthology Of Course He Pushed Him and Other Sherlock Holmes Stories Volumes 1 & 2. His Agatha-nominated book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter was published by Level Best Books. His first non-fiction book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there). It is also available in a Kindle edition.
