Kelly's World-Fixing Machine
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Tell her it's finished, Max....
Those final words sounded in Max's mind every morning, and in his dreams almost every night. He could hear them louder than his own thoughts, but they still made no sense.
"My name is Max, and I'm an alcoholic."
The sun was already up, but a stranger in Max Kordon's hotel room might not have known it. The drawn blinds maintained a strange form of predawn hallowedness as the Klondike prize-winning author spoke to his barely visible image in the unlit bathroom mirror, squinting in order to see any familiar signs of his addiction, but finding none.
"It's been less than twelve hours since my last drink," he continued to whisper, knowing that no one would have heard him even had he been shouting into the mirror. "That was.... Well, it was counter-clockwise. If you had asked me earlier yesterday evening, I would have told you that it had been nine years, four months and eleven days since my last drink. So what happened? I won. I guess that was the proverbial straw on the proverbial camel."
Sleep had not come easily that night, and it had not lasted long. Max had been showered and dressed in casual clothes since before five-thirty, and he had been staring at himself in that dark mirror ever since. Hollie was particularly puzzled by her master's stillness, sitting at his feet and staring up at him. She gave a low whine and slapped the cuff of his blue jeans with a forepaw every few minutes, as though requesting an explanation, or possibly a doggie treat, but Max barely noticed.
"I know the title, Stan," Max muttered, still staring his own reflection down. "I just don't know what it means."
Tell her it's finished, Max.... was the only reply Stan seemed to give.
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About the Book
Kelly Adams is a musically gifted orphan from Romania, studying the performing arts in a small private school in the Alberta badlands. Tanner Kounz is a talented actor and playwright, who has just been given the most important writing assignment of his career. Kyle Teller is a deaf instructor of American Sign Language, trying to cope with the traumatic events which robbed him of his hearing. Maya Carpenter is a drug addict with a life in shambles. And Cassie Hudson is an exhausted single mother and high school dropout, working double shifts at a 24-hour roadside gas station.
When reclusive novelist Max Kordon wins the coveted Klondike Fiction Prize, his acceptance speech is witnessed by viewers from across the nation, most of whom have never seen him before. But his words and face are sufficient to send shockwaves through five unrelated lives, bringing to light his hidden past, as well the largely forgotten life of a man named Stanley Harmon, whose special birthday present for Kelly was never delivered.
About the Author
Lane Bristow lives in Chetwynd, British Columbia, where he also works as a paramedic with the BC Ambulance Service. Kelly's World-Fixing Machine is his fifth novel.