Map of Days

(excerpt) PROLOGUE: It's strange, what the mind can digest and what it resists. I had just survived the most surreal summer imaginable--skipping back to bygone centuries, taming invisible monsters, falling in love with my grandfather's time-arrested ex-girlfriend--but only now, in the unexceptional present, in suburban Florida, in the house I'd grown up in, was I finding it hard to believe my eyes. Here was Enoch, splayed upon our beige sectional, sipping Coke from my dad's Tampa Bay Buccaneers tumbler; here was Olive, unstrapping her lead shoes to float ceilingward and ride circles on our fan; here were Horace and Hugh in our kitchen, Horace studying the photos on the fridge door while Hugh rustled for a snack; here was Claire, both mouths slack as she gazed at the great black monolith of our wall-mounted television; here was Millard, my mother's decor magazines rising from the coffee table and splitting in midair as he skimmed them, the shape of his bare feet imprinted into our carpet. It was a mingling of worlds I'd imagined a thousand times but never dreamed possible. But here it was: my Before and After, colliding with the force of planets.