QK Agent Round: Farmer Jack is Trapped in a Carrot

Title: Chang and the Transdimensional Carrot
Entry Nickname: Farmer Jack is Trapped in a Carrot
Word Count: 114K
Genre: Adult Fantasy/Sci-Fi

Query:

Jack Avens is having a bad day. His back aches, his dog is missing, and his neighbour has trapped him in a carrot.

After thirty years of vegetable farming, Jack is ready to retire alongside his wife, Fern, and his dog, Chang. Following a wretched day in the fields that culminates in the disappearance of his beloved dog, he discovers what appears to be an ordinary carrot. He picks it up, intending to toss it into the compost pile, but is transported to another realm instead.

Jack learns his loathsome neighbour and farming rival, Hal Stormthord, is responsible for pulling him into this strange dimension—a twisted and disjointed echo of Jack’s own world. Hal has secretly been in love with Fern for decades. Feeling bitter and wronged, he has decided to trap both Jack and Chang in his carrot-reality, hoping their loss will drive Fern into his arms.

Meanwhile, Fern has discovered the carrot back in the real world and plans on eating it in a stir-fry for dinner. If she consumes it, Jack and Chang will be doomed to an eternity inside of it. 

Jack must now navigate a sentient city, battle a ship full of mutated medical experiments, and face-off with Hal himself before he can find Chang and escape the carrot with her.

And he’s got to do it quick, because Fern could start cooking her stir-fry at any time.

CHANG AND THE TRANSDIMENSIONAL CARROT is a fantasy/science fiction novel complete at 114,000 words.

My work has previously been published in Geist Magazine and Thrice Fiction.

First 250:

Something was wrong with Jack. Or rather, something was wrong with his perception of reality today.

Grimacing, he held a hand over his nose. Although he had been starving, the decrepit smell of the chicken coop baking in the afternoon sun turned his stomach. He usually gathered the eggs after breakfast, but there had been an emergency this morning: the farm’s temperamental potato digger refused to cooperate. Jack was the only one on the farm capable of fixing it. Before he knew it, the entire morning passed by and he had missed lunch.

Time wasn’t the only thing slipping away, he reflected as he collected the eggs. It seemed the entire world was as well. He had a terrible, underlying impression a great dimensional shift had occurred, and his farm was at the hub of it. The feeling had taken hold like an invasive weed, its roots spreading deep as the morning progressed.

During breakfast, his wife joked that he must have woken up on the wrong side of the bed. Jack had merely rolled his eyes at this. With his arthritic knees, lower back pain, and hip replacement, he had been waking up on the wrong side of the bed for the past decade.    

Jack Avens did not feel like he had woken up on the wrong side of the bed; rather, he felt like he had woken up in the wrong bed, period.