Excerpt from Glory O'Brien's History of the Future by A. S. King, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Anyway, I knew that one day the picture would be accurate, because everyone dies.


I got my first camera from my mother for my fourth birthday. I wasn't allowed to use it, but it was mine… for the future, which, looking back, is a bizarre idea when one's mother doesn't make it to one's fifth birthday. But anyway. It was a very simple Leica M5 in a leather case. Not a digital camera. Darla O'Brien believed in film. She believed in emulsion and silver halide. She believed in something called the Zone System, which was developed by two photographers named Ansel Adams and Fred Archer around 1940.

The Zone System divided the tones in a black-and-white photograph into eleven zones between maximum black and maximum white. The challenge was to make an image that represented all eleven zones. Maximum white was 10. Maximum black was 0. Max white was blown out. Max black was nothingness.

Max black was my code for dead. "Max Black" would be what I secretly called the petrified bat because I was picky about saying something was what it wasn't. The bat was not petrified. Minerals couldn't have replaced its cells. It was just dead. Zone 0. Max black.

My one regret was that I never photographed the bat before we drank it. It would have made such a great image—so many zones represented, standing at attention, carving themselves into the emulsion. It would have represented me. Glory O'Brien, light as a feather. Glory O'Brien, jarred. Glory O'Brien, faking everyone out looking alive when really I was disintegrating. Glory O'Brien, wings folded, not flying.

I'd taken a picture of the jar, of the picnic table, of Ellie staring into the bat's mummified eyes, but I never took a shot of the bat itself. Maybe this meant something. Maybe it didn't. You choose.

Maybe I was avoiding death at the same time as I was obsessed with it.

Humans are weird, right? We're walking contradictions. We are zone 10 and zone 0 at the same time. We aren't really sure.

Or, at least, I wasn't. But that was a secret.

I loved the challenge of the Zone System, but I had never tried it. Darla's darkroom was off-limits. It was an acrid-smelling shrine in the basement where her secrets lived. And the more my own secrets emerged, the more I wanted to get into that darkroom and compare our notes.

Did she get those dizzying panic attacks too? Was this a sign?

What about not wanting to make friends?

What about not trusting people, in general? Was that normal?

What about feeling lost in the world? Lost in my own future?

What about my curiosity about what she did to herself? Why did she do it? Why did she seal the kitchen door with wet towels to spare me the gas?

Did she really spare me? Was this what spared felt like?

Boobs

Max Black would bring me closer to God than anyone ever did. Eventually.

Up until then, no one had ever convinced me that there was a real God. Not the priest who buried my mother when I was four years old, not my aunt Amy, who tried to school me in Catholicism after Darla died.

Because no god would make my mother put her head in the oven.

Not with me in the house.

Not on Letter N Day.

No god would let my dad suffer so much that he ended up resembling a hairy hot-air balloon. No god would make him ride one of those Jazzy carts at the supermarket like old people do because his knees hurt too much to walk.

He was only forty-three years old.


I was seventeen when I drank the bat with Ellie. Seventeen is the average age of one's first sexual encounter in America. I'm not sure what the average age of bat ingestion is.

The average age of childbearing in America is about twenty-five, which is when Dad and Darla had me. But nothing else about Darla and Dad was average.

Excerpted from Glory O'Brien's History of the Future by A. S King. Copyright © 2014 by A. S King. Excerpted by permission of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.