Blue Lobsters and the Armadillo Domain

Keri Miller

Artist Commentary

            The short story “Blue Lobsters and the Armadillo Domain” was born from our class readings, especially those in the “Refiguring the Human, Realizing Monstrous Intimacies” section, as well as my own personal life. I’ve had a long-standing desire to create fiction about the true experience of young people, in particular, affected by rare diseases, chronic pain and illness, and our shifting perspectives on (dis)ability. This was in fact my motivation for applying to MFA programs for fiction and this literature class has created a stronger foundation for theoretical knowledge and past fictive explorations on the topics of disability and illness that I hope will be reflected in my own writing. Coincidentally, the work that I facilitated for class, Sami Schalk’s introduction to Bodyminds Reimagined was the assigned reading that really gave me a conceptual foundation for further understanding how to read, and therefore write, fiction about (dis)ability. Throughout my research and preparation for this final work, I have worked with the term: (dis)ability. The term is meant to challenge the idea that one is either disabled or abled and draws attention to how these states are non-binary (Schalk 6). With the word (dis)ability Schalk believes “the parenthetical curve as opposed to the backslash better visually suggests the shifting, contentious, and contextual boundaries between disability and ability” (6).

Along with working with theoretical concepts, another thing I’ve had to consider while crafting my fiction is trying to write a short story that could be considered visionary, in accordance with the overall theme of our course. I think this has been the biggest struggle in my process as it is my first attempt at writing any type of visionary or science fiction. In the past, I’ve very much stuck to literary realism in my writing thus far in my career: it’s what I read and write. However, I’ve always had a curiosity for science and visionary fiction and this class has opened up new doors and opportunities. Through this project, I have tried to stay faithful to my own writing style and I believe that the story, especially since it’s based on my own lived experiences with cancer treatments and chronic illness, reads as realism; however, I think that there are certain elements I have added to help create a world more visionary. For example, I’ve included actual quotes from medical studies and reports about Desmoid tumors, the illness that both the short story’s protagonists are affected with (and myself). These quotes introduce new sections of narrative and were chosen because they highlight some part of the story set to follow. I believe these quotes help add an element of tension as well as inform the reader on real-life medical visions on cure and treatments for this illness and the disabilities it incurs.

            Another element I tried to include in this story to help it leave the realm of realism slightly is leaving a lot of things unsaid by the protagonists or having the main action occur “off screen” so to say: so the reader has to imagine the outcome and the action. I think this adds a certain speculative element that creates tension in the story and gives power to the reader to confront their own preconceived ideas or tropes of superpowers. Oddly enough, I had the idea to have to two young women who undergo proton therapy (a type of radiation treatment) experience a type of emotional/behavioral change that could be considered a type of superpower that’s not quite a superpower, similar to Ozeki’s “supapowa” as Nao discusses in A Tale for the Time Being, before even reading the book. I was pleasantly surprised to see the author succeeding in something I was planning on attempting, to a certain degree. Therefore, another text that influenced my writing was this book. Another thing this book might have influenced was how I organized the narration in varying sections mostly between the two protagonists Dana and Fran similarly to Ozeki’s organization of her book between Nao and Ruth. As I started writing, I decided to include a few sections that were narrated from Rosie, Fran’s mother. I thought that the story needed an outside perspective to help inform the reader of Fran and Dana’s developments.

During class presentations, I was introduced to a term I had never heard before by Robert, Powers: boring dystopias. After learning about this term, it really made sense for the setting for my short story, which is more-or-less our current reality in the United States. This idea of it being a boring dystopia because it is not really different than our lived experiences makes the idea of dystopia even scarier. Some of these elements lurking in the background of my story are the hardships of young people undergoing cancer treatments: the disruptions in their expectations to attain careers and degrees.

        Outside of the main protagonists’ lives, we also get a touch of this “boring” dystopia with sex trafficking in Florida. While writing this story I did some research on actual cases of sex trafficking in the USA: I learned that an astonishing number of migrant workers are forced into prostitution, many from Latin America and the Caribbean. I also learned that Florida is one of the top five states for incidences of sex trafficking, and that Duval county, the setting for my short story, has the fifth highest percentage of sex trafficking of all Florida counties. Though these facts and figures don’t appear in my story, knowing them influenced the decisions I made narratively, and I think informed the direction I took the story.

            My other overall aims in writing this paper, and perhaps projects in the future, were to represent (dis)ability and illness in a different light. Often times narratives based around cancer or patients suffering from the disease, are deemed into a specific genre. If the aim of literary fiction, as proposed by our own faculty member Robert Olen Butler, whose workshop I took this semester, is to capture “yearning” or a sense of searching for identity, I can’t think of many things more nuanced than navigating the self during or after illness. Through imaging alternate outcomes for cure, for considering the abilities of those affected by bodily or mental illnesses or complications, how can we envision realism and visionary/science/speculative fictions?

Excerpt from “Blue Lobsters and the Armadillo Domain”

Desmoid tumors (also called desmoids fibromatosis) are rare slow growing benign fibrous tumors without any metastatic potential but a strong tendency to invade locally and to recur.[1]

Dana

English Pirates

I knew I was going to like Fran the first time I met her, after spending about seven hours straight together, because she told me this story about how she had slept with this man at a music festival. We’d started with coffee and after we couldn’t stop talking about how eerily similar our lives were, though separated until this point by an entire ocean, the meet-and-greet grew into a late lunch then continued with drinks on a rooftop bar. The story goes like this:  on some dusty farm in the English countryside, Fran shouted over what I imagine to be loud slicing post-punk British indie guitars and screaming, to this well fit lad asking him his name and where he was from and what he did for a living. All that good stuff. And Fran heard him answer back: “Pirate! I’m a pirate.”

As she told me this story she smiled, her face beautiful with bright red lipstick and just enough eyeliner on her mischievous brown eyes.  Fran’s tumor caused her left eye to droop slightly, but she didn’t seem to let it bother her, and after a while I didn’t notice it either. Just like she didn’t care about the bright pink glow of a deep layer of epidermis peeking out from where the radiation burn was peeling away at her brown skin. This was another thing I liked about Fran: she walked around with the radiation burn on her neck for all the world to see. Unlike me, when I’d had my treatment two years before, and though it was the end of a hot Florida summer, I put a light scarf over my neck so no one would ask me about it, no one would see me as sick.

Anyway, I imagine Fran peeling off her sweaty tank top in this pirate’s tent at the musical festival. I didn’t ask Fran if he had asked her about the scars I knew sliced down the left side of her torso, where the English healthcare system had tried to cut out the aggressive Desmoid tumor. It had come back though, some months later; it left its mark on the interior and exterior of Fran’s lean body. This pirate man might have asked about them. Or he might not have. From my experience with men, he might not have even noticed them. She might have made a joke about shark attacks or she might have told the blunt truth. But I imagine Fran postcoital, glorious in her scars and her skin tanning from the summer sun, pouring a bottle of water over her face to clear away the dust and sweat while the guy goes on to talk about all the places he flies to: Norway, Denmark, Iceland, even.

“Fly?” Fran asked.

“Yeah, of course, for work,” the pilot says.

We laughed and laughed like old friends and I thought of what a bold story it was for Fran to share the first time meeting me. How bold the beautiful tattoos were that climbed up and down her forearms of flowers and profiles of feminine faces. How bold she faced Jacksonville, Florida outside of the Proton Center without covering her radiation burn or hiding her droopy eye behind dark sunglasses. Not to mention the many times she had been asked how she could be British and black.

When my nurse, at my two-year checkup, had mentioned that a twenty-one-year-old woman from the UK with a Desmoid tumor was in town getting treatment, just like I had, thirty rounds over six weeks, and that the tumor was also on her brachial plexus, but the left side, mine the right, I asked if I could meet her. It had taken me a few weeks to finally compose the email to Fran. I’d just been put on medical leave from my first year teaching middle school, after being prescribed a new type of chemotherapy pill: hydroxyurea. I was too tired, too sick to meet this girl, who was, after all, younger than me and possibly really lame or terrible. And the girl being from England meant that she wouldn’t have any other friends and I’d be stuck with her and I just really wasn’t feeling up to friendship these days. The pile of dishes that grew in the kitchen sink from my two roommates taunted me and made me resent these able-bodied brats who left the house in a hurry. Who went to their jobs and went on dates while I binged watched series on my tablet in bed in my pajamas all day. 

My mom called to ask how my checkup went. Same old same old. But I did tell her about the new Desmoid tumor patient. She was ecstatic. Two blue lobsters in the same city! My mom called me a Blue Lobster, because she’d seen something on MomBook about every one-lobster-in-a-million being blue: similar stats to someone getting a Desmoid tumor. I didn’t really like the nickname, or the idea of being compared to a crustacean, the least sexy of ocean creatures, but my mom had suffered through my illness and treatments seemingly harder than I had myself, crying at every appointment, even if it wasn’t bad news; so I never said anything.

Though the idea of finally meeting another person with the same tumor as I was intriguing, I hesitated to make arrangements. I hesitated because it was growing harder for me to leave my house, but also because this girl probably thought that this proton therapy was going to make her tumor go away, just like I had. I didn’t want to stand in front of her, almost as a projection of the future, and say how my tumor had started growing again just six months after I’d finished treatment. How I was on my second type of chemotherapy since then, and how after getting fried for six weeks, my skin taking years to lose the shadow of the radiation burn, my arm never quite recovering from the tissue damage, swollen and making me feel insecure in sleeveless dresses, my mobility restricted and my pain keeping me on medications and restless at night: single, unemployed, and much more of a crab than a lobster.

[1] Kasper, Bernd et al. “Desmoid tumors: clinical features and treatment options for advanced disease.” The oncologist vol. 16,5 (2011): 682-93. doi:10.1634/theoncologist.2010-0281