Ladder to Heaven: An excerpt of the new speculative novel by Katie Welch
Preview Katie Welch's new book, Ladder to Heaven, a gripping and gorgeous story of addiction and resilience, as well as alienation from a bewildering, rapidly-changing world
For today’s post, author Katie Welch has shared an excerpt from her recently published novel, Ladder to Heaven. It’s available from Wolsak and Wynn Publishers.
Here’s the blurb from the new release:
In 2045 an earthquake ravages the Pacific Coast of North America and the world shifts. Suddenly people and animals can understand each other, while the chaos of climate change combines with the destruction of the earthquake in terrifying ways.
Inland, where she should be safe, Del Samara finds her life spiralling out of control. Struggling with addiction and with her ranch in ashes around her, Del decides her family would be better off without her. Leaving her daughters behind, she retreats to her father’s fishing cabin with her dog, Manx.
When she emerges three years later, she finds the world since the earthquake has become a very different place and she begins a dangerous journey to Vancouver Island to find her family and, perhaps, find peace.
“Katie Welch has crafted a complicated and unforgettable protagonist in Del, a woman who survives both global and intimate disasters, and who tells her fascinating story after a lifetime of barely speaking.Ladder to Heaven is finely and beautifully written, and asks us to consider our individual roles in a world that can totally destroy us.”
— Jen Sookfong Lee, author of Superfan
Ladder to Heaven: An Excerpt
Katie Welch
I lived alone at Stone Lake, conversing with animals. To draw out my drug supply, I halved then quartered pills. Animals spoke on an inner channel I trusted more than my thoughts; after the car accident, I was glad I’d surrendered my children in the valley. I was crazy, dangerous. If my kids had survived, they were better off without me.
Talking to Manx alleviated my loneliness. Months into self-imposed exile I swallowed my last pill, and withdrawal was ugly, twitching in a bed made of balsam branches, sweating, longing to die. When detox symptoms subsided very little had changed. On a plateau above feelings, I invented jolly lives with friends and parties for Cleo and Amelia and described them to Manx. Dreams seemed real. Days skimmed past fleetingly like ducks across the lake, there and then gone. Poplar leaves faded to yellow, fell, and grew again. As time passed, leaving the fish camp became less plausible. Thoughts of my children tore holes in my chest and I clutched at empty places with red, chafed fingers.
It was November when the cougar came. I knew from a calendar carved in smooth silver birch. Squatting outside the shack, using a tree trunk for balance, ankles shackled by tatty long underwear, I gazed at Orion’s belt. Satellites in orbit cluttered constellations, like static on a screen. Cold air chilled my exposed skin, urine streamed into a tuft of moss and a sultry voice spoke.
We are patient, seeking only that which is provided.
In a thicket along the creek, two bright green oblongs: cat’s eyes.
I had come across cougar scat and feline paw prints pressed deep in lakeshore muck. I sometimes heard the animal in heat, yowling to be mounted, a ghastly sound like murder. When I snared a rabbit or caught a fish I left bones and guts as gifts, in case the cat might spare a feeding hand. A ridiculous practice, I realized, as the cougar emerged from shadow, white feline muzzle and tawny sinew backlit by a gibbous moon hanging over treetops. Bladder still partway full, my urethra tightened in fear. I bounced on my heels, shaking errant drops to the ground, and stood up slowly, sliding decrepit underwear to my waist. My plaid jacket was unbuttoned. I tugged it across my breasts and met the cougar’s blank eyes with a thrill.
Photos are courtesy of the author
We are hungry,the cougar said. Lifting a casual paw, it licked between claws.
“What do you mean?”
That which you provided, and now do not. We seek it.
“I’ve been sick. I haven’t been hunting.”
We seek it,the cougar repeated.
I wondered why the cougar said we. Was it female — did she have a litter nearby? Tense seconds passed. An owl hooted, and the cougar swung back toward the creek.
In the morning, I set six small snares.
An afternoon trapline check produced a scraggy rabbit, body still warm, foam from death throes lining strangled chops. I butchered and skinned the emaciated creature, keeping only a small portion of flank, leaving the rest for the uppity cougar.
Stumping back into camp, I spied a flicker of brown fur in the vegetable garden. I squinted through deer fencing and saw a whole and healthy rabbit feasting on tough kale. Sensing trouble, the rabbit rose to its haunches and spoke in a squeaky, plaintive timbre.
I deserved loathing. My hands were bloodstained. I had snared, mutilated and eaten the rabbit’s kin, often without proper rituals of gratitude. I felt bad about it, and with guilt came resentment, because from that moment on, the creature’s objectionable voice would ricochet inside my skull. Bounding to a hole by the cabbages, the rabbit vanished underground. It was Manx’s job to keep foragers from devastating the garden — where was he? Lately the dog had been roaming. Soon he would find other strays, and form a feral pack.
At dawn the next day, hungry and indolent, I ate some raw potatoes. Winter was coming and the cabin walls were imperfect, with gaps that needed chinking. The weather was clear and not too cold, good for collecting moss and stockpiling cedar sprigs, though it would mean venturing farther afield than I cared to. Mustering resolve, I took the high ridge trail to a logging cut-block, a slope littered with the dry branches of trees felled for their straight, true trunks. A shoulder-high juvenile generation of spruce and pine pushed up in planted rows. Westward lay the jagged Coast Mountains, peaks bright with snow. Gold-green grasslands rippled to the south. Pitchy conversation betrayed a flock of birds hidden in shrubs, gorging on bitter berries. At my approach they flew away, cursing my presence, but a pileated woodpecker remained, pinned to a snag, its taunt echoing off distant trees.
Fu-tile, fu-tile!
I hacked young branches from supple green growth with a hatchet, sap-blood sticking to my fingers. As I worked, a deep groan emanated from underground, a rumbling muffled by dirt. Lower tones joined in, creating a chorus, and the ground reverberated, bass notes amplified on subterranean speakers. Was it the root system, the mycorrhizae or a chorus of both? Stripping saplings was tantamount to torturing a baby forest; the Earth was urging me to cease. Hurriedly I gathered bundles of insulating material and returned to long-dead walls that baffled the clamor of living things.
I deserved loathing. My hands were bloodstained. I had snared, mutilated and eaten the rabbit’s kin, often without proper rituals of gratitude. I felt bad about it, and with guilt came resentment, because from that moment on, the creature’s objectionable voice would ricochet inside my skull.
My leg muscles cramped up that night, and my hips ached. I shifted my weight, distributing it evenly on balsam boughs. My thoughts turned to the valley. Tempted to return, I fought the impulse by imagining Cleo and Amelia’s reactions to my surfacing: denouncements, spleen, accusations of treachery. And my children might not be alive; after the earthquake, inadequate resources had surely led to looting and savagery. Sometimes a spire of black smoke spiraled up from Vernon, or Kelowna, farther south. I could count, using three of my eight fingers (two lost to frostbite) the number of humans I’d seen at the lake. Civilization had likely collapsed. But jet planes roared overhead, and far-off blasts boomed. At night satellites orbited, spying on the world. Human inventions shrank the planet, and wild things expanded it, but where did the balance lie between the manufactured and the natural? Circumstances were dire, and yet a person could still cleave the forest, stake a claim along a stream, and cobble together a home. As long as you could renounce society, there was hope.
Katie Welch writes fiction and teaches music in Kamloops, BC, on the traditional, unceded territory of the Secwepemc people. Her short stories have been published in EVENT Magazine, Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review, The Temz Review, The Quarantine Review and elsewhere. She was first runner-up in UBCO’s 2019 Short Story Contest, and her story “Poisoned Apple” was chosen as Pick-of-the-Week by Longform Fiction.
Katie holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Toronto. Her daughters, Olivia and Heather Saya, share her passion for nature and outdoor recreation. Katie loves to cycle, hike and cross-country ski with her husband, Will Stinson, and they are creating a remote home on Cortes Island, in Desolation Sound.
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Love this book so much!