Michael Herman

Girl with All the Pain Michael Herman

Ten-year-old Isabel occupies very little space in the world.

Hiding in plain sight, she travels along edges. Orphaned and unwanted, some whisper she is a Mapuche witch. But to the local boys, she is a rite of passage.

Slap her. Make her fear you. If you want to join the gang, then hold onto her for a count of thirty long painful seconds. Endure the electric bite of her fright. It's like the shock of an eel but with lingering after-effects; nightmares, screams in your head, visions of terrible times gone by. But that doesn't matter because you're in the gang now. You are a man.

Until one afternoon on the roof of an abandoned building, little Isabel changes all that and suddenly the gang is no more.

Homeless and hunted, an encounter with her doppelganger results in sanctuary and knowledge for her at the price of innocence lost where she is plunged into an ongoing struggle between two alien entities that has been in the making for millenniums.

Who she is, what she is, and why she is here, are all vital to the evolutionary progress of mankind.