We went to a bar with a TV and stared for an hour. Devadatta met us there. Bomb squads and cameras were trained on the New Land Trust Building like it was a birthday cake with a stripper inside. Then they cut back to Brass Ring with its missing face.

I couldn’t stop. I saw the buildings burn in live time. People were crying. They were scared. High school girls huddled together waiting for their parents to come get them. A little Vietnamese boy wailed in his mother’s arms. Oh god, I thought, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god…and I ran my shaking hands through my hair. With short sharp fingernails I scratched at my chest until it was red with crosshatches…

Download:
ZAZEN, Chapter 15 — “Head of John the Baptist” (pdf, 75k)

The Story: It’s the very near-future, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest—or a neighborhood near you. 27-year-old Della Mylinek has suffered some kind of breakdown after failing to stop the construction of a local Walmart. In an attempt to regain psychological, financial and emotional stability, she’s moved in with her brother and his pregnant wife and taken a job waiting tables at a vegan restaurant. But her anger remains, and one thing leads to another…

“Zazen” Keywords: geology, veganism, the apocalypse, urban planning, yoga, sex parties, bombs, anarchism, aging new-left revolutionaries, strip malls, paleontology, dark hippies, transcendentalism, lavender hair dye.

The Author: Vanessa Veselka is a writer and musician living in Portland, Oregon. She has been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress and a mother. Her work has appeared in Bust, Bitch, Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll, Yeti Magazine and Tin House. Zazen is her first novel. She is online at vanessaveselka.wordpress.com

The Serial: Chapter 16 of ZAZEN will be posted Thursday, November 19. There are 30 chapters in all.

Previous chapters available for download:

ZAZEN, Chapter 14 — “Two Rivers” (pdf, 84k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 13 — “Manifestation” (pdf, 94k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 12 — “Colony of the Elect” (pdf, 58k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 11 — “Church of Enlightened Capital” (pdf, 65k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 10 — “Venus Rodere” (pdf, 64k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 9 — “The Rat Queen” (pdf, 87k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 8 — “Lagerstätte” (pdf, 61k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 7 — “Cherry Blossoms” (pdf, 75k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 6 — “Aerial Map of Carnage” (pdf, 76k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 5 — “1 800 buy COAL” (pdf, 88k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 4 — “Asian Market” (pdf, 56k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 3 — “New Haiku” (pdf, 64k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 2 — “Pregnant Rats” (pdf, 81k)
ZAZEN, Chapter 1 — “Burning Ants” (pdf, 79k)