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In Cody County, Lux and his little girl Sadie live among rust and weeds in their scrap yard, eking out a living selling “treasure” and shuttling local drunks in Lux’s cobbled-together limousine. Haunted by the memory of Sadie’s dead mother, a junkie named Calista, Lux attempts to preserve Sadie’s innocence in a town full of people also trying to forget. In a series of vignettes, written in poetic prose, an exotic dancer and a drunk free a bird from a third-rate hotel, a fear-ridden widow steals a mannequin, and someone is breaking into people’s houses and sleeping in their beds. Unwittingly entangled in these grim lives, Lux is driven to the edge. At once tough and tender, Scrap Metal Sky is a novel about the durability of love and the good intentions often behind our bad ideas.
“Erika Brumett believes in the emotional lives of objects, the inner lives of outcasts. By revealing one to us, she illuminates the other, and introduces us to the nooks and crannies of our own secret lives, the lives we barely acknowledge to ourselves. The compassion shown in these stories reveals beauty in the most unlikely places.”
—Kathleen Alcala, author of Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist (Calyx Books)
Read the first chapter of Scrap Metal Sky
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Erika Brumett
Erika Brumett's words appear in numerous publications, including The Los Angeles Review, Pooled Ink Anthology, PageBoy Magazine, and Crab Creek Review. She holds a triple degree from the University of Washington, as well as an MFA from Northwest Institute of Literary Arts: Whidbey Writers Workshop. Erika lives in Seattle, where she and her husband put black on blank, read poetry out loud, and stare at Puget Sound.
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