Faces Etched in Me

A lifetime in one day.
All ancestors in one body.
What if your entire life unfolded in twenty-four hours under laboratory lights? What if every hour aged you a decade, and every decade carried the voices, scars, and love of those who came before you?

In this fiercely intimate Afrofuturist novella, T. Aaron Cisco invites you into a world just behind, and slightly beneath, our own. Follow a Dayborn soul as it's pushed through childhood, adolescence, desire, regret, and revelation. Each hour compressing years. Each breath crowded by ancestral memory. The lab wants data. The clocks demand obedience.
But the blood remembers hymns the walls were never built to hold. What begins as an experiment becomes an uprising of identity, expression, and inheritance braided into one body that refuses to be reduced.

This for anyone who has ever felt measured by systems that never loved them, for anyone who has carried family histories like both weight and wings, and for anyone who knows that as long as there's another minute on the clock, there's another chance to carry on. Listen for the hum. Make way for the hymn. And when the glass breaks...walk through.

Inside you'll find:

• A page-turning, hour-by-hour structure that reads like a thriller and lands like a prayer.

• A visceral, voice-driven narrative that marries body horror and lyric beauty-"break the glass, break the clock."

• An allegory with teeth: trauma acknowledged, joy insisted upon, and a communal "we" that outlives the experiment built to contain it.

• Representation that matters, on the page and in the bones: a testament to BIPOC and LGBTQIA survival, solidarity, and becoming.

• A cathartic finale readers won't forget: the minute the clock never meant to give, and everything that can live inside it.

Perfect for anyone who loves speculative fiction that is both haunting and humane; tightly paced yet lushly written; intimate in scope, epic in feeling.