We are delighted to share an excerpt from Susan Coll’s Real Life and Other Fictions, which releases on May 21st 2024, so read on to discover the synopsis and a sneak peek!
Cassie Klein has always used stories to help her fly, but now her plot points aren’t lining up.
In her 50s, Cassie has already weathered more than most. She was orphaned at the age of two and has never fully understood why her DC-based parents were on a bridge in West Virginia that just so happened to collapse as they drove across it. Her search for answers prompted a failed career in journalism, and now she’s an aspiring novelist teaching at a local community college waiting for her literary dreams to finally come true. She stood by her once-doting husband when his meteorology career took a nosedive, and now she has learned that the man who became an internet meme has been cheating on her.
She’s had enough. She scoops up a teething puppy and embarks on a road trip that’s heavy on impulse and light on planning. She’s not sure where she’s going, but she knows she might as well start at the beginning. What really happened to her parents all those years ago?
In this comically surreal, warmhearted journey, she encounters people she never knew existed—chief among them, an enigmatic cryptozoologist, who helps her in the quest to discover her past. And along the way, she looks for answers regarding curious sightings of a creature known as the Mothman in the months before her parents died. As the line between real life and fiction blurs, Cassie finds herself grappling with the nature of stories, myths, and who gets to write the endings.
Chapter One
The Incident on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge
A heavy grey slush begins to fall from the sky, and the windshield wipers turn themselves on, startling me. Although the car is seven years old, it is new to me, and I’m still getting used to its high-tech features, many of which are already obsolete. It has none of the self-driving technology one reads about, for example, so it’s entirely on me to stomp on the brakes to avoid hitting the car ahead as traffic comes to an abrupt stop.
The vehicle which I mercifully did not plow into is a green Honda CR-V with a University of Virginia sticker affixed to the top right corner of the rear windshield. The speed at which I am traveling is precisely one mile under the fifty-miles-per-hour limit.
I lock into these details because I am the sort of law-abiding-to-a-fault motorist who minds the rules of the road, always staying at or below the speed limit, and because my daughter, Vera, has only a few days ago completed her first semester at the University of Maryland. In front of me is presumably another student, or a former student, or the parent of a student, or an instructor, or someone student-adjacent in one form or another, albeit at a different public institution of higher learning.
But also, I lock into these details as a way to ground myself. I’m feeling light, without anchor, as if I might unbuckle my seatbelt and crack the window and slip through the slit like a puff of steam or a wisp of smoke. It’s not simply that my daughter is away for the holidays for the first time in nineteen years; I have also just left my husband. I have brought to a conclusion a long, painful stalemate, taken my poorly behaved puppy, and walked out the door.
No harsh words were exchanged, although I had half-hoped for a provocation, or at least some display of emotion, when I told him I was leaving, that I was headed to my aunt and uncle’s house on the Delaware shore. We were meant to go together—it was our family’s long-standing tradition to spend the week between Christmas and New Year’s at the beach— and I confess there was still a piece of me that hoped he would protest, that he would apologize and suggest we sort things out, bundle up and take some long walks along the sea and clarify our situation, maybe find a way to start anew.
Instead, he replied only with a warning: “The last place you want to be in a weather event is on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.”
Richard and I have been idling in an indeterminate state for some time now, and have more recently begun to trend in the direction of collapse. After a series of problems with which he has refused to engage—first professional, then personal—Richard moved into the basement, where he now works and sleeps. This morning, as I departed, I told him I couldn’t live like this anymore. But what, precisely, I hoped to achieve, I can’t say for sure.
I suppose I would have welcomed any sort of reaction, anger included. At least it might have moved us toward the next place, wherever that might have been. But my formerly dynamic, rabble-rousing, storm-chasing meteorologist husband has imploded on so many different, spectacularly painful levels that there is little left of him, or of us. He is like a star that has collapsed under its own gravity, a black hole, a closed presence that spends most of its time and space crafting copy for the newspaper’s weather desk, staring at a bank of screens.
***
Before slamming on my brakes, I had been singing along,
loudly, to a catchy, infectiously upbeat song that included lyrics about a dog, sung—or rather hoarsely and charmingly croaked—by an oddly named band called Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. In the song, the dogs have quit their barking. In my car, as it came to its abrupt stop, my dog’s barking had just begun.
Luna, my puppy, now barks and barks and barks. She stops for a moment and then begins to bark again. In the rearview mirror I glimpse something fluttering. An insect appears to have presented itself in the car. It flutters, it lurches, from one window to the other, flutter-lurching back and forth madly, which I believe is what prompted the puppy to bark. As my foot continues to press hard on the brake, I wonder idly whether it is odd to have an insect trapped in the car in winter. I catch another glimpse and realize it is a moth. At this point I feel a shift in my equilibrium, a minor anxious jolt.
To keep myself from thinking about the possibility of being stuck in a traffic jam on a four-mile-long bridge nearly two hundred feet over the largest estuary in the country, I try to focus on practical matters: If the traffic does not ease, I should tell my aunt and uncle that I’ll be arriving later than planned. Also, I am low on kibble for the puppy and make a mental note to order more for overnight delivery as soon as I get to their house. Entirely unrelated: I need, badly, to find a new hairdresser and do something about my too-long, nearly feral hair.
I try to take a few deep breaths, the sort a yoga teacher might recommend, but my thoughts continue to boomerang toward the end of my metastable marriage, then toward this steel and concrete structure, plus the open water, plus the possible moth. The need to tend to logistics about my late arrival, or kibble, or my wild hair, does not detract from so much as compound my anxiety.
This might or might not be a good place to mention that my parents died in a bridge collapse—an event that was presaged, some say, by the appearance of a giant moth. I was never sure what to make of this story, but I find myself obsessed with it, nonetheless.
