It’s not medical; it’s not an inner ear issue. It’s like I’m a baby deer in clown shoes—I go butt over tea kettle at random times.
My stubbed big toe throbs and rubs my shoe in the wrong place, but it’s not my first and it won’t be my last. Neither is losing a toenail because of it. Liam wasn’t wrong about that either. Chances are it’ll be a year from now before I can make a pedicure look right. Thank goodness for long Colorado winters and boot season. That’s still a ways away, though.
Perched on a stool, I watch the machines as they whirl. And with more excitement than most researchers, I allow a little shimmy from my chair.
The data we’re seeing is life-changing. Life-and-death changing.
The immuno-compromised haven’t had this kind of significant breakthrough in a century. HIV, Lupus, Hashimoto’s, Arthritis. All of it could be a thing of the past.
I didn’t get into this field because I wanted a Nobel prize. In fact, that’s never been on my radar, even if my brother jokes about it. Because not once did my mind ever conceive such a discovery.
But this genomic isolation and what I’m looking at right now? Its significance cannot be underplayed. The last discovery with this kind of ramification was insulin.
Technically what I do here is the intellectual property of Platt BioPharma. And I’m fine with that. This—all of this, my education, my research, my career—all of it is so Strider can live longer, choose to live normally, heck—justlive.
I swipe a rogue tear from my cheek. I didn’t realize I was crying.
I did it. I’ll save Strider. I’ll save a million Striders. Everything I could ever want in life scrolls across my screen in that putrid digital green, showing me it’s all been worth it.
6
cyanide cookies
Lorien
“Sam?” I ask as the call picks up and exit to C470, heading for my house.
“Lolo? What are you doing?” My sister’s voice is low and melodic.
And slurred.
This is not the time. I wanted a chance to celebrate with the one person who has the same stake, albeit without the same investment.
“Not much. How are things in the Keys?”
“Righteous.”
Yep. Stoned. And five or six decades past when her “spirit” was born. My sister, the hippie, living sixty years after her tie-dyed self would’ve thrived.
“Glad to hear it. Work is going well?”
A door softly clicks shut behind her and her voice rises from its whisper. “Yeah. Loving life. Hurricane season notwithstanding.”
“I’ll never understand how you chose a place that you know multiple times per year can be wiped off the map by Mother Nature.”
“Says the girl who lives in blizzard country and could die from frostbite or a snow drowning.”
Wow. Dramatic much?
“The high country maybe, but I’m well below that.” I exit, avoiding the house, and head to King Soopers. I’ll surely need wine after this conversation. Every conversation with her highlights our differences… our different-ness.
“A mile high is not well below.” She emphasizes the last two words of her sentence.
“Maybe not. Tell me about life in a place Jimmy Buffet thought of as paradise.”
“Don’t harsh my mellow, Lo,” she whines. “I miss Jimmy. That wound is still raw.”
Wrong decade, I tell you.
