Calendar

[whipchick]

Holidays filled him with dreadful excitement. St Patrick’s Day (Amateur Night, his father had called it). Thanksgiving. The first day of deer season, turkey season, even spring bear season when there was one, though a fatal head shot in Alaska was unlikely to help him.

His calendar was filled with handwritten notations, three-day weekends

Comments

[medleymisty]

Beautiful.

And I can sympathize with the POV character. Wanting to be healthy, wanting the pain to stop - it can make you think and feel things that you'd never expect.

[whipchick]

Thanks - and, yes.

[whipchick]

Thanks - yeah, I wasn't quite sure how this one would turn out, but I was struck by something basric said around Memorial Day, how holidays are big transplant times, and thought, wow, so there's people for whom that's a *good* thing...

[kathrynrose]

It's haunting. After the first couple of paragraphs there's the, "Oh..." of realization what the perspective is behind it. I never considered leveraging the odds by living in a no-helmet-required state. But of course in that situation everything would occur to you.

It's a story that leaves me thinking and unsettled. Then I saw the tag, "horror," and I thought yes. It's that kind of psychological horror that you can't shake away by telling yourself it isn't real.

[whipchick]

Thanks - yeah, I was trying to go for that kind of "the horror...the horror" sort of moment when you get what you wished for.

[myrna_bird]

Wow. Very interesting. I never would have thought to increase the odds of getting a donor by moving to a state with no helmet laws on the books.

[notodette]

This.

[whipchick]

Yeah, I don't know if anyone actually does that, but I have heard of people moving to be closer to the transplant center so they'll be called sooner (some organs don't last as long so the center is less likely to call a patient in from farther away).

[revelgrove]

Very glad my cousin, who needs three organs, is in the south for the same reason as Kentucky.

[whipchick]

You know the weirdest part? It was actually tough to find a Southern state with a "no helmets at all" law that a lawyer would want to move to! Even Kentucky is technically an "adults don't have to" state, but it's the one that occurred to me because I'd ridden with no helmet there.