I AM

by Matthew Hubbard

represented by Kolinda Scialaba

Phoenix Harper’s life has always been a game of hide-and-seek. He was always hiding—just waiting to be discovered or forgotten or needed or rejected or loved. He has been waiting for life to happen so he can start living, but he is about to learn maybe he isn’t the person who should be hiding. Maybe, just maybe, he is the one who ought to be seeking.

Yes, he graduated from college. No, he didn’t go on to live happily ever after in the twisted fairytale of adulthood his professors had driven into his head. He moved back home to the hellhole that he’d ran away from—the small town of Sulfur Springs, Alabama. There was his family and their own brand of drama surrounding the ruins of the life he’d separated himself from. He had spent the last four years trying to forget the past, but the stifling heat of an Alabama summer brings everything flooding back….

His parents had not believed him. They’d claimed it was all a figment of his imagination. He was forced to keep quiet, to suffer in silence.

The summer engulfs him with its heat like he is a speck in the universe—a tiny, little ant. All of the repressed thoughts he’d been doing his best to not think about are being magnified. And just like the ant, he is starting to burn.

With the help of the cashier and the bag boy at the local grocery store (where he routinely shops every Thursday), an elderly neighbor who sips sweet tea on the front porch while she reminiscences about her past, and his kid sister who acts like a crazed baboon, Phoenix Harper will finally discover the life he has been missing.