This year, my goal is to write four short stories--one for every three months. Despite wanting to be a writer, I have rarely actually managed to
finish something, afraid, as I have been, of failure. I don't need it pointed out to me, how paradoxical that statement is. I know. How was I ever supposed to improve without setting words to paper? But this year will be different. By finishing my stories and posting them, I hope to inoculate myself to the work of failing at my craft.
I started this one last year, and I have many gripes with it. I won't enumerate them here, before you have had the chance to read the story. Let me, instead, talk about what inspired this one.
We have lived with ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome) for going on seven years now. A not insignificant amount of that time was spent in an abyss of fatigue, brain fog, and suicidal despair. We're really only just starting to pick up the pieces of that now, despite resurfacing in 2022. This story is about that experience, if it happened to someone else, and if they had literally died. I wrote this piece as if the character were a vampire, because the undead are such a rich textual ground for explorations of chronic illness.
Reader advisory: this is a short story about a vampire struggling to feel like a person again, with prose intended to put you, the reader, in the shoes of the main character. It ends on a hopeful note.
-------*------
( Read on... )