Chase and Haven
Winner of the 2009 ReLit Award!
He saw it. Like one dead eye filmed over. Like a tunnel that would kill you. Like a star coming to explode you. He saw it. Closer and closer. It was morning. It was daylight. He shouldn't be thinking this. This was a nighttime thing. Stop. Stop. Stop thinking. He felt it. Like black oil on his spine. Like night inside of him.
Haven is fiercely protective of her little brother, Chase, spiriting him away when her father's temper is about to flare again. She hides the bread away so he'll have something to eat for lunch, and teaches him how to make himself invisible, how to read signs. But when that's no longer enough to keep him safe, Haven steals the family car, whose dashboard she can barely see over, and pilots them away to safety to their Aunt Mary's. Their aunt takes them in and tries to love them and make up for everything they've endured.
But a childhood so harrowing is impossible to forget. Haven goes to medical school, hoping to heal herself by healing others. She marries young and has a daughter, April, whom Haven hopes will serve as some kind of redemption. Chase, more damaged even than Haven, battles his demons through cathartic but doomed performance art. But his searching just takes him to darker and darker places. And, always, they try to keep one another afloat.
Chase and Haven is a haunting story – inventively told and deeply felt – of suffering and love, made of thousands of small impressionist facets that refract the quiet spectrum of the beauty and the detritus of two entwined lives.
