u/gorobotkillkill

I remember hearing it as a kid and wanted to try to find it again.

My wife and I have a hummingbird feeder on our front porch. It's pretty nice today, so we were sitting there when a female Anna's hummingbird came and got right in my wife's face, like a couple feet away. Then, the bird flew to the feeder, drank for a second, then came back and got in my wife's face again, then flew off.

It dawned on me that the feeder might have an air bubble, so I went and checked. Shook it and a bunch of air came up. Five minutes later, the bird came back, chased away another male hummingbird and drank as normal.

I had no idea they were onto what we're doing all along.

Dear [AGENT],

Rachel Younker returned to her small Kansas hometown to bury her father’s body.

It would be easier if she could move him. But he's turned into galena. A dense, metallic ore, cold to the touch. Rigid, toxic, and almost as heavy as lead.

Rachel spent two years watching her father, Dale, get heavy. He hasn’t moved in six months. He sits fused to his recliner in the garage, the television in front of him raging about the end of the world. His body, and the recliner, weigh north of six thousand pounds. He's still getting heavier.

The doctors can't explain what Dale has become, and Rachel can’t call the authorities. If anyone sees him, they’ll take her ten-year-old son Eli away. So when Dale finally stops moving, Rachel does the only thing she can. She rents a jackhammer, cracks a hole in the garage floor, and drops her father into the abandoned mine shaft beneath their house.

For a moment, the weight is gone.

Then Eli starts limping. It's the first symptom her father experienced. And her husband before that.

Rachel searches for answers in her hometown’s poisoned history, and she learns Dale wasn't the first man who sought the ground. The men grow heavy here, and the women bear the weight of their hardening. With medical bills piling up, police circling, and Eli showing the earliest signs of the same impossible transformation, Rachel must decide how far she's willing to go to save her son, and who she'll force to carry the weight.

Complete at 80,000 words, GALENA will appeal to readers of Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova and Lone Women by Victor LaValle, with the working-class dread of Midwestern gothic horror and the body-horror intimacy of a family curse. 

[BIO]

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Warm regards,

[ME]