Minutes felt like hours and hours felt like days, in the swirling ramble in his head as he lay dying. He turned white, he vomited corn husks, and he could no longer defecate.
To his fortune a wagon of doctors alighted upon him, and they were all decent gentlemen who didn’t believe each and every one of their services had to be recompensated with gold. Feeling they could not moved the patient for fear of risking his life, they operated on the tree trunks.
“Fie,” you, dear reader, might say, a medical professional yourself, “there is no condition under which a patient could not be moved, and ‘twere there one, it is not this.” I, who am merely the storyteller, and learned no skill in storytelling college except for the art of telling stories, say, Good on you, and good if you told these doctors too, because there was a dire need among them for knowing, none in more dire need than their patients.
“All disease is bloodborne, thus the patient needs less blood.” He then cut several veins, spilling as much blood as possible, such that the ground was crimson red, then a rust brown. Unfortunately, this method helped him little.
“Because the body and the mind are interconnected, the patient can be cured by relieving mental duress.” He drilled a hole into our hero’s head, piercing the skin and stopping right at the plate of the skull. Unfortunately, this method did not help our hero’s stress, and thus helped him little.
“Most diseases arise from the bowels and kidneys.” He had our hero ingest a laxative. This helped our hero little, though it gave him great gas.
“The planets are out of alignment, thus causing illness.” He then folded his arms and did nothing, as he was unable to move stars. This helped our hero little.
“The testicles are the source of male vitality, ergo overstimulating the body with activity.” He raised a knife, yet was distracted by an argument between two doctors. One doctor argued that those who believed disease originated from the stars were ignoramuses. It was clear that disease was contingent on the cards he drew.
The doctors perceived that our hero was dying. Some posited that death, in fact, was a cure. Some posited there was no such thing as death. Some posited that they tried their best. All, however, wanted credit for their own cure, and so they took our hero to a healer, who is a kind of spellcaster.
Spellcasters are few and far between in these lands. The city had no college of mages, as the citizens found them a suspicious bunch. However, the city had one; in fact, he was well-renowned in this land and others.
The healer dismissed the doctors, who were shouting the methods of their cures, which did somewhere between sixty to eighty percent of the work of healing our hero, which claims they advertised outside of their clinics. The healer, as a ritual, drank half of a bottle of whiskey, cured our hero with a spell, then drank the other half of the bottle, for he greatly enjoyed whiskey.
For this is the world our hero had been reborn into, a world of magic, where those who have learned to manipulate intangible, ill-defined concepts were given awesome power, the greatest of which is to charge their customers exorbitant fees for the work of lifting but a finger, which fees create an inferior class of practitioners of alternative medicines, whose services are called upon not for their correctness but for their cheapness, all contributing to a social hierarchy that could only exist in this fantastical world and surely does not exist in any other world.
Fortunately the healer did not ask our hero for a fee, as he was too drunk to recall it.
He noticed the cuts to our hero’s wrists; he covered them in bandages. He noticed the hole in our hero’s head; he gave him a hat. He saw the brown stains on his buttocks; he was not a nanny.
The healer allowed our hero to sleep in the bed upstairs; he remained in the living room, opening a new bottle of whiskey, and drank it while staring at a mirror the long night through, as he was wont to do every night.
Our hero awoke to an empty house, no letter conveying how he had gotten there nor the means by which he was cured. He was glad in his heart and felt, after all his earlier pains, he was fortunate he had not died yet, as there was time yet to redeem himself in the eyes of his healer, by saving the world once, maybe twice. He entered the city and looked for himself a job.
© 2025 François-Marie Lee