Drabblecast 507 – Fatal Conditions

The voice in this episode comes from the award-winning Caribbean comedian, Onicia Muller who regrets leaving sunny St. Maarten for windy Chicago. Her weekly humor column, Just Being Funny is chicken soup for the naive skeptic’s soul. She gave up crime reporting to write silly thoughts for American Greetings, The Daily Herald, Hello Giggles, TODAY.com, HuffPost, and others. Past comedy showcases: the kates, Mother Cluckers Comedy, the Lincoln Lodge, the Annoyance Theater, and Louder Than a Mom. Join her newsletter for funny stories and stand-up comedy at oniciamuller.com

Fatal Conditions
by Chris Campbell

A mean yellow eye fixed on me from the other side of the window where the white gyrfalcon perched. He’d been tapping on the glass for hours. Big Ma had used the same nasty familiar to summon her line for as long as any of us remembered. I’d known it was a matter of time before she found out I was dying.
Follow the falcon, and we would have the confrontation I’d been dreading. Look at me, girl. She would cup my chin, leveling me with an eyeballing that could teach her bird a lesson. Her hair tied back in one of her bright handkerchiefs. Short, tight curls, long turned white with age, peeking from under the fabric.
Didn’t I teach you better? Magic ain’t for fools.

Big Ma had stood a bit over six feet tall in her prime, and time had done little to diminish her. They said Ol’ Sylvie had been a great brawler. Ol’ Sylvie is what they used to call her, but now most everyone called her Big Ma. They said she’d take on any challenger, be they man or woman, black or white, even beasts or demons. When it came down to fist and feet, she was unbeatable. And for the few who had been fool enough to attack her with tools of war – from clubs and knives to goophers and curses – fewer still walked away or ever again.
Her time in the fighting ring ended the moonless night thirty-five years ago when I slipped into the world– silent, blue, unbreathing.

“The last thing I smacked good with this arm was your hiney, girl.” Big Ma liked to tell the story of her shriveled arm when her people were about. Always making a show of it, raising her good arm to the heavens with her fingers reaching out to clasp some ephemeral spirit before swinging down in a wide-sweeping arc, so fast it cut the wind.

“Smacked the soul right into you!” she’d thunder at the climax of her yarn, her hand slapping down on the thick ash wood of her round cutting board with a crack loud enough to make you jump, even when you knew to expect it.

“Healings help,” she used to say during our summer lessons. “But most times, a smart hurting helps folks longer. Know when to use your gifts and when to use your fists, girl.”

I can’t say I’ve ever gotten better advice. Magic is danger, and it runs strong in our blood. The summer lessons ended with the time crunch of clinical work.

“Folks can’t always be well– sickness comes sometimes.” Big Ma chided me when I told her our summers together were over.

“People wouldn’t be sick half as much if they didn’t shine to foolery. If people lived like we used to, they’d be a good deal stronger, healthier, and wouldn’t die so soon. You don’t need doctors for that.” She paused for breath, and I knew well enough to settle on some cushion.

“People today, they eat too much sugar, drink too much, and don’t dress warm enough.” She continued, pinching the fabric of my blouse and sucking a tooth in disapproval. “This cotton ain’t the thing for health, neither. We used to wear wool, wool underclothes and wool skirts too. Wool all over, and boots of good heavy leather you could kick a man’s tripe out with. What kind of boots do your doctors wear Rebecca, you tell me that?”

“And don’t get me started on the bloodletting. A body’s stronger with its blood in it. You doctors ain’t better than a pack of thirsty bugaboos. Least they don’t come around when the sun is shining and don’t pretend they are doing any favors.”

Nothing I said got through to her, and I couldn’t be in two places at once that summer. I could get drunk, so I helped myself to a bottle of her homemade peach brandy while I tucked away a plate of dumplings dipped in Big Ma’s salted molasses butter. I let her voice her anger over the void I would leave behind, trying not to take it to heart.

One of the first things Big Ma taught me was how to construct the mental shielding healers need to protect themselves from the random pains of strangers. A month into my residency, I’d removed as much shielding as I could manage without losing my shit. Power is temptation, and every doctor wants an edge, be it ego or ambition. Still, I wasn’t fool enough to use my gifts for more than examinations; more was the promise of a quick death.

I managed to leave myself unshielded for years without trouble until that damn heatwave rolled in after the waters came. For weeks I’d trotted down the hidden paths the quantum magicians had laid. Following them to the old folks who screamed into my head from their stifling apartments and damp filled houses where they’d been left behind. It wasn’t like I was regrowing limbs, lost to foreign wars or the sugar. I didn’t even restore sight to the blind, well, no more than a handful of times. I was careful.

Or I thought I was.

I paid many small prices to work my craft; the regular scratchy throats, a burst appendix, various smaller illnesses. Healing in exchange for injury, health in exchange for sickness. By the time I realized something was very wrong, it was already too late.

Follow the falcon, and my scolding would last until sunrise. In the end, Big Ma would be kind. She would take me by my curls, bring me close to kiss my forehead like she always did, ginger cake on her breath. She would remind me of her funerary rights as was her habit. You promise to hoist me high, to a good solid crook. She would point to the large, heavy coil of rope she had placed by the door a score of years ago. High and true in my big chestnut, he and I have some catching up to do. And be quick about it, before your cousins get the notion to put me in the ground, dying ain’t no excuse to backslide on old deals well struck. And don’t go forgetting your Aunt Lizzie’s Bible. Lastly she would tap the key she kept on a chain around her neck. Big Ma’s daughter Elizabeth, my great aunt a few times over, had been a fortuneteller of note and none but Big Ma had laid eyes on the ancient tome in living memory.

Follow the falcon, and Big Ma will save you, girl. But I’d be the one tying her corpse to the trunk of that chestnut tomorrow.

“Tell her I’m not coming, tell her I’m sorry.”

He clicked his beak at me.

“Tell her I know what I’m doing, it’s going to be ok,” I lied. “Get now.”

Screeches of disapproval trailed me into the thicket of trees behind my house until I slipped into the hidden ways, beyond where he could follow.

***

I made my first stop in the northeastern tip of the country for a newborn, Miranda. Marked by the precogs and oracles, and exactly the type of child meant for my healings. I didn’t know what she would become, with her futures still shrouded by the certainty of her death. All I knew is that if she lived, she could change the world.
Martin Luther King Jr, Alexander Fleming and Fatima al-Fehri were all tiny bundles of potential once. If the auguries were true, Miranda’s name would be spoken along with theirs someday. She was the reason I’d waited until tonight to do any more healings once I realized I was dying.

She was also why I now trudged through a foot of snow in the thick stand of sharp needled black spruce where the hidden ways had dumped me. Razors of ice and cold wind snapped against my face.

“Damn Quants.” I spoke to no one but the empty woods, my voice cracking the snowbound silence. After the hemlock die-off, the quantum magicians had grown more circumspect in how they built their hidden ways. Circumspect, and inconvenient as hell for someone racing against the clock.

While Miranda was only born yesterday, I had planned this trip with care for two months. I arrived at the child’s house just as her exhausted parents returned from the hospital. Once my senses confirmed they slept, I slipped through the front door they’d forgotten to lock.

In a scant few hours, they would have woken to their daughter struggling to breathe through tiny blue lips a few feet from where they slumbered. A few tortured hours after that, they would have stood in an antiseptic hallway while a doctor explained in soft tones all the ways their daughter’s body was born incompatible with life. The words wouldn’t matter. Their only truth would be they had been sleeping when Miranda needed them. I have delivered the same speech too many times, and never found the words that released a parent from misplaced guilt.

Tonight though, I would save them too.

Despite Miranda’s sickness, I expected a smooth healing. Newborns are relatively easy; their little forms contain ferocious reserves of power that thirst for life. My work on her overtaxed heart began just minutes before it failed.

I had done this delicate work before. Speaking to the child’s body, I learned at Big Ma’s side, but the knowledge I had gained as a doctor allowed me to heal her with my talent. After I finished with the heart, my focus spread to the nearby blood vessels, then her underdeveloped lungs.

I spent two hours on meticulous reconstruction before little Miranda’s own brilliant life- force took over the task of healing. Two hours to save one newborn while countless others met the fate she had avoided. All the healers in the world couldn’t change that. The price was too high, and we were too few. Magic would never save the world– but maybe little Miranda would.

My long skirts were still damp from the snow when I slipped out of the house, my heartbeat ringing in my ears and blood running freely from my nose. I paused to lift the charm I had set to keep Miranda’s parents asleep during my ministrations. The child was safe now, and the magic would fade rapidly in a few hours. I trudged back into the dark stand of woods, holding the red handkerchief I had brought to my nose before heading back into the hidden ways.

***

My next stop was the hospital room of one of my distant cousins. He was nearly fully grown, but I still pictured a little boy flicking acorns off a distant tree with a twitch of his finger, grinning ear to ear at the chance to show off his budding power to his aunties. I felt the child’s fall when it happened nearly a week ago. Everyone in the family with a lick of power did. They say blood speaks but in a family like mine, blood tends to holler.

I worked my way westward to him using the hidden ways, adding a few extra hours of darkness to my night, hours I would need to finish. Although the thought that I might be buried by tomorrow had begun to circle in the back of my mind as spots began to dot my vision. It was going to be closer than I would like one way or another, is all I decided to admit to myself. Even if I could only save the boy it would be enough.

Healers aren’t common, but Big Ma’s line has given rise to more than a few of us. I’d kept the others away from the boy since his fall; lying to them about his doctors’ prognosis, but also telling them the truth when I promised I would see to him myself if it came to it. It hadn’t taken much to warn the others off. Healing an injury like his was truly dangerous.

A fall in the mountains had shattered his skull, and the damage to his brain was thorough. They’d medevacked him from the bottom of a five hundred foot cliff near a popular trail. The rescue workers told his parents it looked like a tragic accident, but still asked if the boy might have wanted to hurt himself. They had no way of knowing that he had been lifting tractors with his mind for the last three years.

Careful to avoid the tubes and sensors, I moved close enough to examine the damage.

They removed the top of his cranium to clear away sharp bone fragments while giving his swelling brain room to expand. The wrongness pierced my healer’s senses, but the doctor in me knew it had been the only way to save him. The wound reminded me of the depression in Big Ma’s skull, and my thoughts drifted to her story as I scanned the damage.

“Put your fingers here.” She had instructed during one of our lessons after removing her scarf and pointing to the crown of her head. Several scarred over wounds covered her scalp, including a dent in the top of it, large enough to fit my finger in up to the knuckle.

“It was my mistress.” Big Ma spit out the words. “The she-devil took a fire shovel to me on account of my sassing.

The first blow took me off my feet.” She traced one long scar down the side of her head. “But it was the second one that broke my pate. I went so stiff she thought I was dead… but I wasn’t.”

“I was told my silent scream set every talent for two states on edge, but it still took weeks with me near-dead in a coma, for help to come. They didn’t let our folk travel freely back then, and this was before those quantum magicians of yours poked all them hidey-holes all over the place. I guess after the first two weeks, someone figured if I ain’t died yet, there was no telling how long I was gonna linger on, scattering all the good folks’ wits. It was some white man who came for me. He didn’t give a name, and he left my head like this when he finished.”

As a child, I had shared my Big Ma’s anger at a job left half done, but in the years since, I’ve come to see it in a different light. Even with all my modern knowledge, I might not have been able to do better.

I worked on the boy for hours, hours I didn’t have, trying to fix the unfixable. He would wake up, but he would not get another chance to fly. I’d saved his life but none of his talents.

By the time I finished, my left arm hung numb at my side. I nearly let slip a curse at that – like most talents in our family, I’m a lefty. I used my right hand to open the door instead, and somehow managed to throw out my back. The spasms of pain knocked the wind out of me.

If I stopped now, if I collapsed there on the hospital floor in my condition, they would pump me full of narcotics and leave me to my death in a comfortable bed. I was tired, and it was tempting, but I had come too far.

I steeled myself for the journey ahead, sending a prayer to Eshu to clear the path before me with a promise of service yet to come. Thankfully I only dealt with automatic doors the rest of the way to the hospital’s exit.

***

I made my final stop on a deeply forested peninsula between a fog-shrouded bay and the ocean. Across the bay, the city cast a pink haze into the mist, a pale imitation of the sunrise I’d run from since my first stop of the night.
Edekon’s home stood before me, constructed from giant redwood beams, large panes of glass, and sleek gray marble. More of a complex than a house, it balanced between the beautiful and garish. Big Ma had always warned me to “never let a thirsty bugaboo get a taste on you,” but tonight I strode into the monster’s den by choice. It was already too late to turn around, doubtless he caught my scent as soon as I left the crossroads above to march down his driveway, to him and to our now joined fate.

I couldn’t help but compare the creature’s mansion to the modest cabin of wood and stone that Big Ma had summoned me to tonight. She had been a free woman for over two centuries, but with nothing to show for it compared to Edekon. Her freedom hadn’t come cheap.

It was Big Ma’s favorite story and my favorite too. It started with the dent left in the then young Sylvie’s head.

“It was after she broke my skull, I made up my mind that I would fix her good once I was grown. I waited my time and grew strong. So strong I was polling a ferry across the river at Great Bend as quick as any man by the time I was thirteen, but I still waited. I waited until she had all her grand company around to see it when I fixed her.” Big Ma would say, lifting the front of her apron like she was curtseying.

“It happened in the barroom. There was some grand folks stopping there when she struck me with her hand, so I squared for a fight.” As Big Ma spoke, she would raise her fists to her long dead tormentor.

“Well, she should have known better, but my mistress took up that ol’ fire-shovel again, that was that.” She would say with a smile. “I struck her one hell of a blow that knocked her half through the panels of the door. I turned to the folks in the barroom before they had a chance to take her part, and I smacked my fists together at them and told’ em to wade in, if’n they dared. I would have thrashed the devil out of every one of them, but there wasn’t a one that dared come at me. Then I got out and quick, ran halfway to my Baba’s place in Jersey before I slowed.”

I was smiling at the memory of a young Big Ma smacking her fist together in defiance when Edekon opened the wide double doors of his home to greet me. He was shirtless, wearing only white linen pants. His body rippled with the muscles of the battle forged Goth warlord he had been long ago. The handful of scars that ran across his body in jagged stripes only enhancing the barbarian physique. Keepsakes of the man he had been before he died and changed.

“I smelled you, witch,” he said with a half-smile.

“Then you know why I’m here.” I approached warily, barely hiding my curled lip.
Edekon gestured wordlessly toward the interior. Halfway through the door, his ice-cold breath coiled around my neck.

“You walk with too much confidence, mortal,” he whispered. “You know I could rip those legs off.”

“You threaten a slowly dying woman with a quicker death. I expected more from you.”

He snorted.

“Enough games. Will you do it?”

“You think to command my will, witch? I am not some filthy merchant of a demon for you to conjure up and trade with. Maybe I should kill you and be done with it.” His body shifted, pinning me against the redwood beam of the entryway with inhuman speed.

“It’s no worse than the fate I’m facing. I’m tired.” I said, and I was. “Come take me,” I told him, and I meant it. I tilted my head back to offer the mocha skin of my throat to the abomination. The smallest of sacrifices to end so much suffering, his greed was what I counted on and I knew in that at least I wouldn’t be disappointed.

What came next was only instinct. His cried out to him to feast on me, so he did. Mine begged me to fight like hell to stop the beast and it took everything I had to resist it.

I let him drink freely of me. Within the space of three heartbeats, dark waves of warmth and pleasure replaced all of my pain and terror. I wasn’t surprised he decided to change me, but I was more than a little surprised at how good it felt.

While his curse worked on me, my blood worked its way through him. In a family like mine, blood tends to holler, and every drop of plasma shouted to me even from inside the creature’s body. I could feel when his necrotic flesh seized and consumed my blood cells one by one. The wrongness beat against my senses, teaching me it’s secrets.

I felt the curse inside me turn my first cell and begin my transformation. One infected cell was enough to turn me even if the creature stopped now, but he wouldn’t. One infected cell was also enough for me to finish figuring out how to cure the curse and set to the final bit of work for the night.

A lot could go wrong with my plan, but the worst would be if he started to resist with me locked in his embrace.

He had been a person once, and my only hope was that if I healed his mind first, I might rekindle the conscience of the man inside the monster. I tracked my blood to the creature’s brain, fixing as much as I could, quickly as I dared. Then I traced along his optic nerves to his eyes, once I’d finished, one look into them, and I would know what doom faced me.

The strange admixture of dead and living flesh before me cried tears of blackened fouled blood when his soft green human eyes met mine for the first time.

Confident now, I redoubled my work, time slipped, and my focus deepened. After finishing with his brain, I restored his wilted heart to better circulate my healing blood through him, although my heartbeat began to flutter from the effort. I set to work on the rest of his nervous system. For the first time in over a thousand years, Edekon would feel the world with human senses. I couldn’t feel my legs once I started with the deepest portions of the creature’s flesh, revitalizing layers of fat and connective tissue.

By sunrise, his tears ran clear.

We sat there for a moment, gazing into each other’s human eyes while light from the rising sun steadily marched across the bay, its rays glittering as they splashed against the breaking waves. I dragged myself free of his swooning form before the first tendrils of light slipped up the cliffs and in through the three-story bank of windows that overlooked the bay.

Magic is danger, and it runs strong in my blood. By the time he figured out something was very wrong it was too late.

The creature’s outer shell of vampiric skin exploded in flames with the first caress of the sun, hot enough to burn off my eyebrows. I lurched to my feet as Edekon transformed into a tower of orange flame. Rivulets of fire licked down his form and danced across the redwood floor.

Edekon remained silent, centuries of iron will devoted to watching the sunrise in his final moments.
I stumbled into motion as the flames grew, managing to run by the time I hit the front door. Healing in exchange for injury, health in exchange for sickness. Some would judge me for this – not for the extermination, he had that coming, but for my unsettling feast. There would be whispered questions and darting looks… but not from my Big Ma. She’s the one who taught me, a smart hurting could help folks longer, and our magic ain’t for fools.

***

I followed the gyrfalcon out of a familiar stand of trees. He led me to an old but well-made wood and stone cabin, scolding as I walked off the last of my limp.

The older woman scowled from her stoop while her familiar flew ahead to perch on the eaves above her. A series of short, high-pitched screeches made it clear he wasn’t happy with either of us today.

“Hush now, Jura.” She looked me over closely with narrowed eyes, before smiling and ushering me into the house with a flap of her skirts. A steaming bowl of samp porridge and a slab of cornbread waited for me on her old oak table. She cuffed me softly across the ear when I sat, before wrapping me in a warm embrace.

I leaned back into the comforting bulk of my Big Ma and clenched her shriveled arm gently but firmly within my grasp. I smiled at the older woman’s gasp when I started my work. It would be a tough year for the pride of young boxers.

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