Hold Without Taking

by Jessica K. Murray

$4.99

In 1998, Emma Ellis times her son's falls with a stopwatch. Colby is nine. He has Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a wheelchair somewhere in his future and not much road after it, and a Darth Maul action figure he has personally improved with a Sharpie. Emma is twenty-eight, divorced, taking night classes, and building a GeoCities page to raise money for a chair she cannot make herself picture him in. One night, exhausted, she hides a wish inside a broken line of HTML where no one will ever read it. If somebody someday knows how to cure Duchenne muscular dystrophy, I want to go there. She wakes in a forest with no roads, no engines, and no people. What she finds is not a laboratory. It is an archive — a living one, that keeps whatever was said often enough and loses whatever was said precisely. It can tell her that a cure exists. It cannot tell her the dose. She comes home with fragments. Seven verbs. A plant she already owns. No numbers at all. What she does with them will keep her son alive, cost her most of what she recognizes as herself, and set something moving that outlasts the people who started it. Hold Without Taking is a novel about caregiving as logistics, memory as infrastructure, and the difference between holding something and taking it.

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