Synkroniciti is proud to welcome back writer Dr. I. Jay Asher, based in Florida, with a short story entitled 999. The title refers to the London emergency number and the story begins as Andrew, age 8, calls emergency to report his mother’s overdose. He is then placed into the foster care system. Already vulnerable because of his mother’s drug use and poverty, Andrew is sexually abused by his foster family at home and ostracized at school. Our narrator is his case worker at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and he paints a picture of a life wasted as the system merely prophesies Andrew’s demise rather than rescuing him from peril. In this terse tale, summarizing ten years in the life of a kid in trouble, inexorably ratcheting to a predictable and horrifying climax, Dr. Asher gives us a cold, hard look at the failure of social safety nets and programs, and worse, the failure of human resolve to help rather than harm. The fleeting moments of tenderness and connection–the emergency operator’s concern, a McDonald’s Happy Meal, Andrew’s warm welcome from his foster family, a cup of hot tea–serve to point us toward the reality of what might have been–a rehabilitated life. What if kindness was the norm, instead of the exception?
Read 999 in Synkroniciti’s “Belonging” issue, available for pre-order here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Dr. I. Jay Asher has reinvented himself repeatedly: a successful New York fashion designer, an advocate for GLBT youth, a family therapist. And the universe continues to guide him into new levels of meaning and purpose.
“After five years of graduate school and twenty-six years as a family therapist, I asked the universe to point me in my next direction. Writing! Really? O.K..
I joined writing groups, read books that explained the art of writing, and then, and then what? What do I want to write about? I had learned that one in three women are sexually abused as children. Not new news. Then, I learned that one in four men, worldwide, have been sexually abused as children. That was new news for me. I wanted to tell their stories, to write about the sexual abuse of boys. I researched the subject and forced myself to deal with my own history of childhood sexual abuse. I found my passion.”