"We Are Not Phoenixes" - New Story live at Fireside Fiction!

Hello beloved readers! I have a new story for you today, and one that is quite personal. It's called "We Are Not Phoenixes," and it's in the new issue of Fireside Magazine.

It's a very short story about what pyromancers can do to show kindness and entertain patients in hospice. Magic is often used to damage or to heal. But magic has boundaries. When we're delicate and it's limited, how can we make meaning out of our actions? Even if they're magical?

The story was directly inspired by a blog post from Elephant's Child a few years ago. She posted about a visit to a hospice where alpacas were roaming around the compound. It turned out a local farm lent them to the patients for some gentle entertainment.

As someone who is chronically ill, and someone who has lost many friends to prolonged illness, this was powerful to me. I wondered: why doesn't Fantasy ever do that?

This story is my answer to that query. It's dedicated to many wonderful people who I won't see again, and who I am very glad to have known.

You can read the story for free at this link.

Why John Should Die On Your Next SciFi Expedition

Jeff VanderMeer will soon release the paperback and audiobooks of Annihilation, a novel set exploring the dangerous Area X. It sounds neat, and because it’s from the VanderMeers, it’ll probably be very neat. He’s running a little contest asking people why they should be part of the next expedition to Area X, where so many explorers have died, presumably from mysterious causes. Exhausted from a day of novel-writing myself, I couldn’t help proposing why I belong on any such voyage.

Area X sounds beautiful and highly dangerous to explorers, and thus I am the sort of person you need on your team. I have spent the last twenty years with a highly compromised immune system and am guaranteed to die in any sort of unknowably hostile environment. You will be able to dissect me and figure out what the greatest potential hazard of Area X is to the other explorers before any of them experiences so much as an allergic reaction. Atop this, I’m chipper and gregarious around strangers, and thus several people are likely to bond with me and mourn me acutely when I die out of nowhere so early into the expedition, giving you all a good bit of pathos before Pinch 2 sets in.

Bathroom Monologue: The Catch

The breath caught in Ade Akingbola's throat for the last time as the doctor explained his heart condition. Well, the second to the last time, and as he looked at x-rays and listened to possible surgeries, he calculated to not permit the true last catching of breath for a damned long time.

He explained to the others that they'd be losing their second-best shortstop. How he loved softball, and he'd still come, and still bring the home-made limeade, though he'd add less sugar from now on. That, too, was a loss.

More doctors, these cardiovascular elites called "specialists," explained that the condition was spreading to his lungs. Except "spreading" here meant "atrophy" or "corrosion." In a month, it was in his bones too. How did your heart rob your bones? By being too weak.

In a month the softball season started up again, too. By then he needed a wheelchair. A second wheelchair, actually, a motorized one after he could no longer safely move him. The effort, you know, was often hard on people.

The spring was too hard on too many people. Ade only had to visit the hospital three times a week; his friends had to lose at softball on four. He couldn't play shortstop, he couldn't even yell to support them. He could dump vodka in the limeade, though, and by Week Five, he strongly suspected it was helping more than their coach. They still lost – he'd been their second best shortstop because all but Nelson and Idrissa lacked reflexes – but they were cheerier about it an hour later. Sometimes they played morning games hung over, and no hangover changed how badly they lost. Sometimes they came closer to winning, sliding into first while trying not to throw up on the opposing team.

Ade watched every game from his mechanical chair, a sippy cup of water to keep himself hydrated and an iPhone full of cardio stats he had to monitor. There was, it appeared, an app for your heart turning against you. An app for it taking your lungs and bones with it.

He used the phone to count the unhappy winners. Team after team waddled off the field as softball season grew deep, complaining about their backs, frowning at their bats, squinting at their cars as though they hadn't played a game for several hours, as though softball had been a square traffic jam and the dugouts a miserable off-ramp preventing them from hitting their cars. God, Ade hoped he'd enjoyed playing more than all these winners did. He remembered himself having loved it, but also remembered complaining more than he liked, the mere memory making his breathing speed up, which he couldn't abide. Not if he wanted to postpone the last time his breath would catch in his throat.

Ade Akingbola found his lips smiling – had to raise his hand and feel his mouth to be sure of it, and moving his hands idly like that was no easy task anymore. He was fondling his own smile as a winning relief pitcher, who'd shut out Ade's friends for the last three innings, grimaced, spat chaw in the red dust, and walked for his Volvo. Ade pushed the switch to wheel backward, to get out of the miserable winner's way. The miserable winner wouldn't look him in the face; looked him in the chair, sure, briefly, before ticking his head away. Winning must have been so hard on some people.

My Foot Stopped Working: Nothing I Can Do, and, The End of Blogging

The worst is over. Not the A-to-Z Challenge - that's been fun - but the worst of the lung infection. Three times this week I was able to walk downstairs and make myself lunch. Whine about ablism all you want, but I do not handle immobility well. It's my big emotional vulnerability, especially when my body is so taxed that it can't move anymore, while my nerves as so shot that they're begging me to adjust for relief that can't come. I'd say I was a proper mess this time last week.

It got so grim that my neuropathy became unimportant. The loss of feeling hasn't progressed beyond the previous level in my feet for about two months, and there's been no suspicious loss of motor control. After one last set of tests and fruitless meeting with a neurologist, I've given up. Unless I get another sign on the neuropathic front, this is just something I'm going to deal with. In the scope of my medical life, numbness isn't scary. And while the last set of tests were utterly useless, I did get this funny and racially insensitive label from the hospital paperwork:

In case you were wondering: I'm officially not Hispanic.

The A-to-Z Challenge and my recent illnesses have also led me to question my posting habits. I've posted daily for several years now, and this month's theme hasn't done anything unusual to me, other than demand more of my time. As I prepare the next slate of submissions for magazines and agents, that time feels like it's dwindling, especially on those days when I haven't had the strength to lift head from pillow.

So, beloved readers, how would you feel if The Bathroom Monologues finally ceased daily publication? The new routine would remain consistent. I'm thinking of running a Friday Flash every Friday, and something non-fiction every Monday. Twice a week feels more manageable, though it's not set in stone. I'm seriously curious for what readers think about this, and what they want from the blog.

So: what do you want from The Bathroom Monologues?

Waiting for a Day of Rest

Well, my first week of the A-to-Z Challenge went pretty well. Posts all went up on time, and only one had catastrophic formatting issues. I actually used an image on Saturday. Almost almost to the Bronze Age of the internet, which is pretty good considering how my physical week went.

Friends know that last weekend I had to travel out of state for several days to take care of my grandmother. She had a terrible health scare, and while I won't repeat everything that was hypothesized, I will say how relieved I am that most of it was false. She's in stable condition now, under 24-hour care, back on solid food and much more lucid. She loved having her grandkids check on her over Easter.

But spending the weekend at the hospital wing is hazardous for someone with my syndrome. By Day Two, my immune system tanked and I was sniffling. I barely returned home on Monday before collapsing from what I thought was a chest cold. It turned out to be a chest cocktail with a key ingredient: a lung infection.

I'm sorry if my Twitter or blog comments have read loopy. It's certainly thrown a kink into my fiction submissions, but I managed to get all my posts in. My mother was kind enough to drive me to and from the hospital twice during this mess.

Today Mom called with a frog in her throat. Looks like her kindness was rewarded with a lung ailment of her own. We can guess where she got it. So I'm driving her to the hospital Monday morning.

"No good deed..." That stupid phrase really picks up momentum as you get older.

How was your first week? And how did you think I did?

My Foot Stopped Working: Needles in My Legs

I thought I’d experienced every nerve test. I’ve had sweat tests, blood tests, muscle biopsies, shock tests, tests where they strapped electrodes to me and tossed me onto a treadmill. I have what are likely exaggerated memories of an hour spent in a room with gradually elevating temperature and currents being run through my left arm.

But this “Nerve Shock Test” I got in Fishkill was a new one. The technician stuck needles into the muscle tissue of my legs, then electrified the needles to record nerve reactions. It may be the first time I’ve ever bit my lip to keep from yelling. Didn’t help that the technician was a jerk who talked down to me for the entire test.

What a nice place to be electrocuted.

Then I got off the table and heard exactly what anyone who’s been electrified for their own health wants: “This shows there’s nothing wrong. That’s a good thing.”

A good thing because, according to a glib explanation, it ruled some problems out. It’s probably not Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome. He didn’t even think it was neuropathy, though he didn’t have an alternative to suggest. Now all I had to do was get another neurology appointment to come up with more tests. Recall that last time, the Nurse Practitioner was drawing a blank on what it could be and what to do.

The only good thing I’ve experienced is that the numbness hasn’t spread far. For the last few days I’ve felt it in the ball of my left foot. Otherwise it is located in the toes and periphery, and every time I’ve checked, motor control has been available. Sweet, sweet ability to walk.

I waited two weeks before posting this, just in case. Bruises the size of my thumbs still mark where the needles “probed.”

Eight days after Nerve Shock Test. My leg doesn't look like Jupiter anymore!

My Foot Stopped Working: Neurology Wants to See You

I’m getting better at going to the hospital. I’d rather get better-period, but I’m taking pride in handling how these investigations work. On Friday I saw the Nurse Practitioner at my hospital’s Neurology department. You’d think waiting a month and a half would yield a doctor, but she was very friendly and thorough. She jabbed my feet with pointy sticks, banged on my knees with metal rods and tried to knock me over several times to figure out how much proprioception I still have.

Good news: I have some. Proprioception is the wonderful sense of balance and spatial reasoning. The notion that we only have five senses is a crock.

I need to be electrocuted again?

The sign of my improvement at managing healthcaregivers (perhaps the second-ever three-word portmanteau, after “plainclothesman”) came as she tried to dust me off to blood work. After we got the results, we could schedule a follow-up.

I opened a portfolio and produced the bloodwork from January, when the neuropathy was already going on, complete with disease tests and liver function. She found nothing suspicious in the data and said she’d have to sign me up for a Nerve Conduction Study, where they run electrical current through your nerves to see which are active. Shock tests. They usually took a while to get, but we really needed to know…

I opened my portfolio and handed over the results of the Nerve Conduction Study from January. Ba’am.

Bringing print-outs of records saved me at least two months of waiting between tests, but I still needed an EMG, because for all the data doctors have taken on me, the Nurse Practitioner couldn’t figure out a proper cause. In her experience neuropathy usually results from alcoholism, diabetes or age, none of which apply to me. The “age” one made us both laugh. I believe the only time I’m ever called young anymore is when someone is talking about the health problems I’ve already developed.

Because of two particular nerve groups that appear damaged, her best hypothesis was Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome. It’s like Carpal Tunnel, except focusing on the tibial nerve in your foot. Well, not your foot. Both of my feet.

That it’s in both feet is what baffled her, because such neuropathy and motor control loss is seldom symmetrical without a spinal issue. This sort of malfunction typically hits one foot and might hint at something. It’s something we’ll review after my EMG. She spent a proper half hour fielding my questions, getting down to some crazy theories about non-manifested diabetes and shoe sizes. At the worst, I couldn’t have asked for someone to be more indulgent of my curiosity.

This was also the first hospital visit on the case where someone said it might be all in my head. It was a joke, but it was said.

My Foot Stopped Working: What Chronic Pain Is Like

It strikes me that in some of my earlier neuropathy posts that I’ve neglected to inform people about my basic health. You know that I’m losing feel in my feet and legs, and sporadically lose the ability to move parts of them. Perhaps you don’t know why the numbness was so immediately apparent.

Since age 13, after some catastrophic medical malpractice, I’ve been in constant pain in every part of my body. It’s been so long that I don’t know how not hurting feels, except for this new alternative: not feeling anything at all. The first time that my toes irrevocably went off the grid, I was terribly frustrated. I’m used to navigating with them, and feeling the twinges of pain in their second-from-last joints as the curl, the bellwethers of how putting my foot down in each step will feel, and how sharp the pain will be in my arch and ankle.

Perhaps the best analogy is to remember the last time you had a really bad flu. That deep ache that settled on your flesh and in all your tissues, that made every movement a deliberate labor and reminded you of all those organs you take for granted. Sometimes one part, like my spinal column, hamstrings or kidneys will ache worse, and the chief pain can even be a means of focusing through the disorienting general pain. The worst is when the fog of pain is so great that I can no longer speak or compose full sentences. That general pain is so distracting, because the reports come from so many parts of the body, that my biggest daily problem can be thinking straight. This has been the last two decades of my life.

It's a little tragic that I miss the pain in my feet. I'm too used to it. The human mind is a remarkably adaptive thing, and at present I'm wondering if I could eventually adapt to not feeling anything at all, perhaps over a course of decades.

I learned to deal with chronic pain, since the alternatives were dying or getting hooked on morphine. I know I’m good at dealing with it because most people are surprised to learn there’s much wrong with me. Argue ableism and disableism all you want, but from my teens on, the ability to blend in with relatively healthy has been a source of pride. Often, also a source of protection. The kid who limps and props himself up against walls is a great target for beatings.

Finally seeing the neurologist on Friday. It's been a long month of no leads or answers. Feeling a bit hopeful today.

Bathroom Monologue: The Diet Scam

Lita made all the meals. This was in part because she was an amazing baker, and part because he was terrible at cooking, and a large part was utter complacency. He loved her cooking; he never questioned the source of such buttery scones, untouchable pizza dough and jams. She didn’t seem to question it either until that doctor visit where his cholesterol came back at 285.

Now, the man exercised. She goaded him into it, sometimes dragged him out to jog with her, and even brought him tea as he soaked in the tub afterward. She had, in his words, the unfair advantage of being a titan against his hobbit. True to his inner hobbit, even if he did jog or play with dumbbells, he ate half his own weight in snacks almost immediately afterward, and grew a most spiteful temper at the mere suggestion of removing them.

He never questioned her dominion over cooking, and so she could have made him cook for himself, if she hadn’t tasted his cooking. It was too mean a thing to do to him. And yet no conversation argument would get him off the stuff that was killing him; he became so sour if she forbade any snacks from the kitchen. It was all a sullen demeanor she couldn’t get at with emotional prods.

He never questioned her dominion, and was certainly too loving to complain when his scones began tasting drier, heavier of flour. When garlics and peppers grew fainter. He didn’t know anything about how to make what she’d made, only that as she cajoled him to come on hikes with her, the stuffed cabbages and vegetable soups somehow took on more flavor than his old snacks, and as sore as he got, he’d settle for almost any flavor. Any flavor that wasn’t as bad as what he cooked. He tried baking his own tarts once, and it was the only time she ever willfully sabotaged him. It didn’t take much help for him to give up and go back to reading.

By the time his cholesterol resumed safe levels, he was actually asking after her vegan chili. It almost worried her that he’d want to learn how to make it.

My Foot Stopped Working

So on Thursday the 3^rd I was in the hospital. I’m going back this week for updates and more tests. It’s nothing serious; I just can’t feel my foot, and if the condition spreads, I’ll never walk again.

We’re calling it “neuropathy” for now. It feels like nothing serious because of how I’ve been jerked around. The podiatrist gave me non-prescription drugs that did nothing and seemed annoyed that I wanted to know why my toes had gone numb. My regular doctor was too busy to see me; his physician’s assistant was willing, then too busy, and on our make-up, caught a cold and left work early. It took me four tries to see anybody.

But man, fourth try is the charm! They drew a dizzying amount of blood for three pages of tests. I’m fielding a new unit of measurement for blood: “the Tarantino.” Sally extracted at least a Tarantino from me to see if this is a blood disease, diabetes, hepatitis, MS, or, well, I hadn’t heard of half these things. Eventually the joke became that maybe I was pregnant (it doesn’t know where to grow in me, you see). I promised to name it after Sally if I was.

So now I’m editing my next novel and waiting for a phone call to find out if something is enormously wrong with me. Is this just my foot, or will it spread? Will that symptom turn out to be the tip of an iceberg? Hurry up and wait.

I’m going to blog about this going forward. I believe in publicly exposing our most sensitive moments. While fiction is my favorite means of self-expression, this is a gaping wound in my life. Every living person walks around pretending they don’t have gaping wounds in their lives, and so I’m going to show mine, in the hopes that more people don’t feel so uncomfortable or driven to hiding theirs. Hiding what’s eating you is a terrible idea, not only because you often avoid the kind of reflection and feedback that might help, but because human history is littered with people who hid that their fuses were burning until they blew. Whether it’s closeting your depression, or shouldering cancer on your own, or a marriage that needs scrutiny and only receives silence – there are too many ways we hurt ourselves. I’ll happily embarrass myself to do a little good for somebody else.

If that makes no sense to you, we can talk about it.

Bathroom Monologue: Gyration Narration

“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”

“Hang on, hang on… it’ll pass.”

“Are you dancing at me? What the Hell is that?”

“It’s a neuromuscular syndrome. It’s complicated. My nerve-endings are messed up, and there these muscle spasms. Give me a minute.”

“It’s a what?”

“It’s kind of like muscular dystrophy, I guess.”

“It’s like what?”

“How about Parkinson’s? Not that it’s really like that, but...”

“What’s Parkinson’s?”

“You’ve never seen Michael J. Fox? Jesus. Okay, what about nerve damage?”

“I’m not really into that.”

“Into…? Listen, you ever thrown out your back?”

“No.”

“Then why am I talking to you? Get the fuck away from me and get some life experience.”