Read an extract from the most exciting debut novel of 2026
Six hundred years. Five interlocking lives. One computer game.
And the many paths that can lead us home.
An extract from Homebound by Portia Elan
In the car, Sheila tells me that her appointment was with Cedar Village, the assisted-living facility. “They don’t have any openings right now, but she’s on the list for when they do.”
We turn onto Bubbe’s street. No kids on bikes here, just quiet oak trees and drawn shades and squat, sleepy houses that remind me of the Shire.
This has always been her home. She raised her children in this house. How could Bubbe live anywhere but here?
“What does Bubbe have to say about it?” Bubbe has something to sayabout everything.
Sheila gives a sigh again as she parks in front of Bubbe’s and turns the engine off. “Your uncle’s death has . . . ” She pauses. “She’s having a hard time with his loss. It’s become clear she needs more support.”
I feel the vast gulf between us, and on her side is the inconvenience of a dead brother, and on my side, I’m with Bubbe, in the thick sadness. Two sides of a valley with no way to cross. “I could move in with Bubbe.” I can see it: driving Bubbe’s LeSabre to the grocery store, coming back from my shifts at the record store and falling asleep in the guest room that used to be your bedroom, playing chess with Bubbe on Saturday mornings. Bubbe, who loves you, who doesn’t talk around your name.
'I feel the vast gulf between us. . .two sides of a valley with no way to cross.'
“Oh, Rebecca. I found her at the bus stop last week. Waiting for a bus to—she couldn’t even remember where she was going. You know what you can do? Help me clean the house this summer. She just has so many things.”
Despite the heat, Bubbe’s window units sit silent and off, and while Sheila goes to turn them on, her heels clicking with annoyed purpose, I call out for Bubbe, who usually meets us at the door.
The golden, familiar sound of her laughter comes from the kitchen.
“No, no,” she’s saying. “You’ll have to finish telling me later. I have company!”
But when I walk into the kitchen, she’s alone, her cheeks rosy with the heat. She’s buttoned her paisley blouse so that the bottom hangs crookedly.
She raises her hand to tuck her gray curls behind her ear, and her hand shakes ever so slightly.
“Oh!” She squints, as if she is trying to place my face. “Hello?”
“Hi, Bubbe. Who were you talking to?”
“Oh, just Elijah.”
Of course, Elijah. Prophet, folktale hero, missing Passover guest, bris supervisor, fiddler. Is Sheila right about Bubbe?
“Are you hot? Do you want something cool to drink?”
“Yes?”
I get us both cold cans of Pepsi, which are probably left over from the last time you visited. Sheila comes in and Bubbe relaxes, recognizes her, and Sheila says nothing about Cedar Village, only asks Bubbe if this summer she and I could help with some housekeeping.
“Yes, that would be nice. My son is coming to visit soon, and I want to make sure his room is ready.”
I don’t meet Sheila’s eyes. Does Bubbe not remember that you’re dead?
Sheila looks in the fridge and shakes her head at the disappointing contents. “Mom, I’m going to go to the store and get you some groceries, okay? Rebecca can stay here and help with whatever you need.”
“I can drive myself, you know.” There’s a mulish look on her face now—a stubborn expression I’ve seen Sheila make before. I wonder if I ever wear that expression.
“Mom.” Sheila rubs her thumb over one of the charms on her bracelet.
“Don’t bully me, Sheila. If it would make you feel good, fine, fine. Go.”
Where is the laughing Bubbe who was talking on the phone when we arrived? Now she is sharp, her eyes narrowed, her hand tight on the back of the kitchen chair in front of her.
In Psych 101, during a lecture about attachment theory, the girl in front of me leaned over to her friend and whispered, “It’s like that poem. About how your parents fuck you up, how they give you all their baggage.”
It sounded nothing like the Keats and Poe I’d read in high school English.
It’s true, though, isn’t it? What Bubbe gave to Sheila, what Sheila gave to me.
After Sheila’s gone, Bubbe sets me to washing the curtains. I tip the dusty lace off the curtain rods in each of the rooms, my nose watering. Living room, dining room, bedrooms. I think of all the holidays we had in this house, the Friday dinners, the seders, the break fasts and shiva for Zayde six years ago. Always, I was the only child, asking the adults all four questions. It was a little lonely sometimes, but because I was the only child, I got the first taste of Bubbe’s perfect latkes. I remember falling asleep on Zayde’s lap while he read his beloved Yiddish poets; I remember Bubbe scolding you and me until we left behind our chess games and helped peel apples; I remember standing between Bubbe and Sheila as we each lit our pairs of Shabbat candles, and this was the whole world, all the family I needed or wanted. I can’t imagine our family as a family without Bubbe.
In the guest bedroom, which was your room before you moved to the East Coast, I find a tall stack of moving boxes against the wall. There, piled haphazardly in an open box, is your old computer. A Commodore PET 2001. The curtains forgotten, I sit cross-legged on the floor and pull pieces out. Keyboard and monitor in their heavy case, a tangle of cords, the cassette recorder, a dual floppy disk reader. Did you leave these here when you moved? No, you wouldn’t have left all this. Getting up from the floor, I peer at the outside of one of the boxes against the wall—Bubbe’s name and address. These were mailed here. I pull off the lid and realize: all these boxes are full of your things. Someone sent Bubbe your things.
A stack of manila folders.
'There, piled haphazardly in an open box, is your old computer.'
A mug with a lamp on the side—an inside joke from Colossal Adventure, the first game you showed me. Without the lamp, without light, you fall through holes in the floor and the game is unwinnable.
Three framed photos: Bubbe and you, when you were young, wearing roller skates and a cowboy outfit. You and me when I was seven, standing in front of the mainframe in the Baldwin basement, our arms full of punch cards. You and a tall, bearded man, your arms around each other. I don’t recognize him.
A bundle of your favorite Ball Liner pens. A tearaway calendar of one-minute mysteries, left on March 23. A Nerf ball with “Ask Ada” written in Sharpie.
This must have been from your desk at work. The other boxes must be from your apartment. And then I see the envelope with my name on it in your handwriting.
For Becks
I pick it up, feel the shape of a hard square inside. It feels like floppy disks. What have you left me? More unfinished programs, like an invitation from beyond the grave? I feel a tide pull of possibility, like the bass line of “Blister in the Sun.”
“Hello?” Bubbe’s voice comes from the other side of the house. “Is someone there?”
“Just me!” I pile everything into the box except for the envelope of floppies, which I slip into my back pocket next to the illicit Kit Kat wrapper. I’ll have to wait to see what’s on the disks. I gather up the curtains and sneeze into them as I maneuver back down the hallway.
When I started at UC last year, you promised I could spend the summer after freshman year in Cambridge with you. Learning how real-world programs are written, sitting in on implementers’ lunch, play-testing new games. And then in January, you canceled and wouldn’t explain why. It’s when you realized you weren’t going to get better, isn’t it? And I punished you—like a child—by not returning your calls, not answering your letters.
In the bathroom now, I put the dusty lace into the bathtub, sit on the closed toilet, and watch the bubbles in the soapy water pop and dissipate. Ridges run along the edge of the tub where Bubbe has re-enameled the metal. She makes things last. She gave me an oatmeal bath in this tub when I was six and had the chicken pox. Her smooth hands pouring cool water over my back, her voice saying, “You’ll be okay, little duck.” That memory feels a sad, uncrossable distance from here, from now. I imagine her sitting alone at the bus stop.
Bubbe comes in to check on my progress, leans over the water to swirl the curtains. “You know I made these.”
“The lace?” It seems impossible that something so delicate, so intricate, could have been made by hand.
'She is slipping through time, step by step moving from past to present and back again.'
She nods. “You see this—” The lace’s pattern winds in rootlike tendrils, but when I reach into the water to unfold its length, I see that the lines curve and build into a loose spiral across the curtain. “The pattern is how we survived.” She pats my shoulder with her damp hand. “I could teach you, if you like. When you’re done with this, Sheila, will you help me fix the answering machine? I can’t get it to play anything.” And then she wanders out, her rubber-soled slippers squeaking on the linoleum.
She is slipping through time, step by step moving from past to present and back again. There is nothing I can to do catch her, hold her in place— and would I want to? Tie her to the present, when you are dead? I wouldn’t want to stay here either, if I didn’t have to.