Excerpt from City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Amy started combing the beach for mementos to add to her collection: fish skeletons and coins, jewelry, and other odds and ends left behind by careless tourists. It was about that time that she noticed something on the south side of the cove-just a little shimmer, like a Morse code of light-and headed over toward it to investigate.

It was sunshine reflecting off the rubber toe of a hiking boot. She didn't realize then that it was anything more than a boot. Kind of a shame, she thought, that someone had lost a perfectly good boot. But when she bent down on the gravelly shore to take a closer look, something else caught her eye. Something she had almost stepped on.

It was a severed hand, half-buried in the sand. Or at least it looked like a hand, but it was green and almost translucent, the way glow-in-the-dark stickers look when the light is on. She could see the lines of the joints on the fingers, but the entire hand was swollen and greasy-looking. It felt as if a whole minute went by while she just stood there, staring. In reality, it was probably more like ten seconds before she finally blinked and found her voice.

"Guys," was all she could muster. The others immediately stopped what they were doing and came to see what she was pointing at. Celine was the one who actually screamed-a high-pitched, earsplitting almost wail of a cry that echoed across the valley and sent shivers down Amy's spine.


"And what did you do after you found the parts?" Officer Neworth interrupted her thoughts and continued with his interrogation. At least it felt like an interrogation to Amy, even though it was just a witness account.

Amy wanted to reply, "What do you think we did? Hang them up for Halloween decorations?" But instead she said, "We went back to the Dave-Co and told Officer Barkowski."

"The Dave-Co?"

Amy sighed. "The building we're sitting in now. The Davidson Condos." The condos were supposed to have been named after some general who served in World War II, but she had heard a rumor that the buildings were actually named after Randolph Davidson, a famous Alaskan con man who set up a fake telegraph office through which he took money for sending blips and beeps that never went anywhere except into a wall.

Neworth laughed at the name. "Is that what you call it? So, how long have you lived here ... in the Dave-Co?"

Amy knew this question had nothing to do with the body parts. "Fourteen years," she replied.

"Holy cow," he said with a kind of pity in his voice.

People from Anchorage tended to look at Point Mettier kids as charity cases. "It's always shittier in Point Mettier," they would say. It wasn't just the minus thirty-five degrees and eight months of practical winter. The thing that really made otters believe residents of Point Mettier were batshit crazy was the fact that they all lived in one building ... in the Dave-Co.

There were 205 full-time residents in Point Mettier. The Dave-Co had a post office, a church, an infirmary, and a general store that also acted as a gift shop, selling the same touristy tchotchkes since the nineties-Sanders Glacier mugs and cork coasters with pictures of moose, bears, or kittiwakes. The school was just an underground tunnel away.

Back when the city was a military outpost, the Walcott Building next door had a bowling alley, an auditorium, a movie theater, and even an indoor pool, but that building was practically destroyed in the big earthquake of 1964, and now it was just an abandoned skeleton of itself. The Dave-Co, on the other hand, didn't have any of those cool amenities, not even a barbershop or salon where people could get a decent haircut.

For a seventeen-year-old, it was boring as hell. It was more of a prison than a home, really. If it weren't for the Internet, Amy thought, she would have killed herself over the lack of stimuli.

Most families who came to live in Point Mettier left after a year or two. Nobody was actually from there and nobody liked to stick it out for too long. Celine had come about two years ago from Minnesota. Marco Salonga's family had come from the Philippines. Amy and her mother had probably come from the farthest end of the earth, but they belonged to the longtimers club because Amy had been only three when they arrived. She didn't know any other kids who had lived in Point Mettier that long. Even Spence Blackmon and his younger brother, Troy, didn't arrive with their mom until much later, when Spence was ten and Troy must have been six.

Excerpted from City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita. Copyright © 2023 by Iris Yamashita. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.