Excerpt from Time's Mouth by Edan Lepucki, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Even though she was only watching herself from afar, she could feel the top of the zipper's teeth against the nape of her neck and the grass poking her arms, just as she could also feel the coverlet in the bedroom and the hole in her sock.

For a moment, Sharon opened her eyes, and she was once again on her bed, in her room, with the portrait of a teddy bear begging. She was also watching herself in the yard. A palimpsest of two realities. She had no word for this.

In the bedroom, the yard began to dissolve and she closed her eyes to will it back. Already she wanted more of this—whatever this was.

The Sharon in her funeral attire had flung herself on the scratchy lawn, the air around her humid and heavy, and she was running her arms up and down as if she were doing snow angels. She was smiling to herself. This Sharon was staring up at the stars, at her favorite constellation, the big bear, feeling free for the first time in her young life. Her father was finally dead. The feeling returned as she watched herself: a kind of full-body throttle, a drunkenness, the whee! of a balloon released into the windy sky.

Sharon tried to get closer to herself on the grass—she wanted it so badly—and quick as a snap she was back in her bedroom with the smell of overcooked meat in the air, the sallow light, and the hole in her sock. The other world was gone. She felt exhausted, and then terribly woozy. Her head was heavy as an anchor, the stink of dinner too much.

As she vomited onto the carpet, her mother called up from the kitchen, "Sharon? You all right up there?"

She didn't answer. She hated that name.

She wanted to do that again. That thing. As soon as she figured out how.

* * *

By the time Sharon packed her knapsack and ran away from home, she had been doing the thing for a year.

How was she able to do it? And why, on that autumnal evening, bored out of her mind, dreading dinner with the widow, had it begun?

Sharon didn't have a name for what she did, let alone a reason for how it worked. She only knew that something had called her to the past, and that it respected her enough to not pull her too far backward, to the horrors she so assiduously kept out of her mind. She wasn't used to being respected.

Even so, these were the early days. Traveling made her ill afterward, and she couldn't do it on command. In the beginning, she felt no purpose, especially since she could only return to moments in her own life. It wasn't as if she could help anyone. Including herself.

And yet. It showed her that anything was possible. It's what gave her the courage to run away.

She decided the only place for her was California; she had seen pictures of San Francisco and Hollywood, and of ancient trees wide as houses. There had to be others like her there.

She left in the middle of the night and hitchhiked across the country. Bad things happened to her, that's what she expected, as if she were marked for trouble. She told no one where she was going. The widow had no idea and that was how Sharon wanted it. If her mother had loved her, even in her own deranged way, why hadn't she protected her? It didn't matter that Sharon's father was dead, not unless her mother had killed him. She hadn't; a stroke had. No, her mother had cooked that man breakfast and lunch and dinner and served him his drinks and starched his shirts. She left that chair by the door for his hat. And all along she knew what he was doing to Sharon.

He was—
No. She did not go there.
As she crossed the border from Nevada into California her old self became unreachable, the name her parents had given her just some word. She was different now. She would call herself something else. She was Ursa. Nothing would hurt her.

According to Ursa, her story begins here. Although she was seventeen, the years before that might as well not exist. Ursa struck them from the record. Sharon was born in 1938; Ursa wasn't. She arrived, fully formed, in 1955.

Excerpted from Time's Mouth by Edan Lepucki. Copyright © 2023 by Edan Lepucki. Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.