APRICOT EYES, a novella by Rohan Quine
http://www.rohanquine.com/apricot-eyes
In Apricot Eyes by Rohan Quine, a cat-and-mouse
pursuit through the
New York City night involves a preacher, a psychic and a dominatrix, broadcast live on air – until a horror is unearthed, bringing two of
them together and the third to a sticky end.
Having partially regained a power of second sight that he’d once
possessed but lost, Jaymi Peek uses this ability in a live weekly television
show online, where he channels onto the screen those unexpected places, hidden
colours and hatching plans that he can perceive throughout New York City. He
applies this sight to the task of relocating his old friend Scorpio, who has
gone missing, but succeeds in catching only a glimpse of him in some
unidentified corner of the city’s underbelly.
Across a subway station, Jaymi notices an unwelcome visitor from his and
Scorpio’s past – Kev Banton, who has now become a prominent evangelical
preacher intent upon a moral cleansing of the population. Jaymi tails Kev discreetly
through the subway, and is surprised when Kev’s journey ends at a waterfront
waste ground in an industrial corner of the Bronx, where Kev slips out of sight
amid an odd hum of underground engines…
The monstrous population beneath this waste ground, and the malign purposes
for which the preacher and his wife have been feeding it, are
revealed in the course of a triangular cat-and-mouse pursuit involving Jaymi,
Scorpio and the preacher. This unfolds in Scorpio’s physical pursuit of Kev through the crackle
and night-pulse of the streets, from Times Square to the marginalised fringes
of the city; in Jaymi’s psychic pursuit of Scorpio, whether streaking up high through the skyscrapers’ shine or secreted
on a tanker as it rattles through the Bronx; and on screen, in the colourised shimmer of what Jaymi broadcasts live.
In its rollicking journey through these hidden planes of New York, to the
simplicity and sensuality of its ending, Apricot
Eyes is a blast of fun that trumpets boldness, tolerance and voltage, celebrating
the mystery and dangers furled just behind the surface of the everyday.