Title: Scars We Bare

Age Category: Young Adult

Genre: sci-fi

Word Count: 72,000

Pitch: When 17-year-old Olivia discovers her dad’s amputation scars, branding him as a sub-human wingless being from the planet Keres, she’s forced to confront her biases, or risk losing the only father she’s ever known.

First 250 Word of Manuscript:

Everyone dreams, at some point, of flying. Not going to the airport, getting scanned, and spending a few hours staring out of an eight inch square window. I’m talking about when you reach your hand out of the car window and feel the wind slicing through your fingers. Looking down from a high building and getting that sensation of falling. Like being on vacation with your family, the seat belt cutting into your lap a little as you bounce over hills in the country. Like all of that, only lasting however long you want because the wind couldn’t hurt you, because you won’t ever fall, and there is no seat belt holding you down.

When I asked Mom what she thought it would be like, flying, a crease formed between her brows, and she looked at me as if I had read some passage she had posted long ago and forgotten, one I now confronted her about. I asked because of all people, I thought she should know—working with the anthies. Their days in captivity had rendered them flightless, she confessed, so she felt unprepared to answer my question.

“Do you think they miss it?”

When she didn’t answer and I saw her eyes, I knew she was millions of miles away—maybe even back on Keres where we had spent the first five years of my life.

Later I learned I never should have asked my mother that question because she couldn’t possibly have known the answer.

I should have asked my father.