Two Books for 99 Cents Each Plus How I Almost Lost a Foot

Newsletter 2024-07-07

I’m inverting the order of this week’s newsletter. The shameless sales pitch is first, and the humiliating personal injury story is second. I can’t risk losing your attention before getting to the most important part: This week only, the ebook editions of The Chosen Twelve and The Gods of Spenser Island are each only ninety-nine cents. For those of you keeping track at home, The Gods of Spenser Island is fresh off the presses, with a release date less than a month ago. You could interpret this fire sale as an act of wild desperation, but maybe it’s actually because the publisher has overwhelming faith in me. They believe that, by giving away the ebook for almost-free, they’ll get you hooked and make you tell all your friends. It’s the drug dealer business model. Get your fix here: Just $0.99.

This could be the push that finally brings my science fiction into popular consciousness. After my last failed brush with Hollywood, I won’t wish for a movie deal, but maybe this will lead to my big break in some other medium, like live puppetry. I’d love to see the battle for the lander acted out by Muppets on Broadway. I realize that’s completely unrealistic, but also, please let me know if you have the contact info for Kermit’s agent.

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I’ve done more this week than putting my life’s work on the clearance rack. I also almost lost a foot. Maybe it wasn’t quite that bad, but it felt like it. I woke up two Saturdays ago cheerful and ready to take on the day. The sun was shining. Birds were chirping. No one in my house was screaming, mainly because they were all still asleep, which is the only time it’s quiet around here. I took one step out of bed and impaled my foot on a massive spike. Okay, it was more like twenty-five steps, but the size of the splinter is completely accurate. It entered through my heel and stopped somewhere near my brainstem. It was so big that my first thought was that I stepped on a Lego brick or a bear trap.

Everything about the moment confused me. I got the splinter on the first step of our grand staircase, which has been ground down by thousands of feet in an unstoppable wave of human erosion. The steps are dangerously smooth, offering no grip whatsoever to anyone going up or down with slightly too much momentum. It’s a good thing children never run on stairs. Yet somehow, for one hundred and ten years, the most finely polished surface in our house had been hiding a chunk of wood in plain sight just for me. I would have been honored if not for the debilitating pain. I wish all of my unique achievements didn’t involve destroying a body part.

The other perplexing detail about the splinter was where it entered. It punched through the bottom of my heel, the hardest part of my body. I don’t moisturize the bottoms of my feet—or any other part of my person. My heels are roughly as tough as animal horn. Nothing slower than a bullet from an elephant gun had any hope of breaking through. Yet the splinter didn’t move at all. I supplied the velocity and force with my own body. As usual, I was the instrument of my own destruction. Even then, the splinter only made it through because it came straight up, like I’d stepped on a board with a nail in it. At any other angle, it would have bounced off harmlessly. I’d never gotten a splinter at ninety degrees before. I didn’t know what the right treatment would be, but I figured the first step was to take another step. Like most men, my initial instinct was to walk it off. It’s no wonder women outlive us.

To my immense surprise, walking around didn’t help my foot injury. I sat down and tried to examine the entry wound. I wasn’t flexible enough to get a good look at it. It was my butt abscess all over again. Reluctantly, I went back up the stairs to find an adult. My wife sprang into action. In our family, Lola specializes in gross medical treatments. If you need a pimple popped, ear wax removed, or an unsightly hair ripped out by its roots, she’s your girl. She pulled out her medical bag, which I’m pretty sure used to belong to a Civil War surgeon. She hacked, slashed, and excavated. It was incredibly painful. Only about ten percent of it was medically necessary. The rest was for revenge. I should have gotten her a better gift for Mother’s Day. After minutes of rooting around, she threw down her torture implements and gave up. She couldn’t have delved any deeper without finding a Balrog, yet the splinter was still beyond her reach. The main problem was she was trying to access it through a hole in my foot while the wooden spike was up by my tonsils. We didn’t have any other way to get it out. I certainly wasn’t going to the doctor for it. They barely took me seriously when my appendix was actively exploding. I resolved to implement my favorite medical protocol of doing nothing. Either the splinter would work its way to the surface on its own or it would get infected and I would die. In the meantime, I had a life to live. I limped back downstairs to my computer. It’s not like I move around that much anyway. I probably wouldn’t even notice if I lost a foot.

In the coming days, I did my best to ignore my heel. The jolts from that region were intermittent. I’m thirty-nine. Everything hurts some of the time. My pain receptors blink on and off at random points like strands of Christmas lights. Nothing changed until Friday, a full six days after my initial impalement. While I was packing the van for the family reunion at my aunt’s house in Minneapolis, the pain in my heel flared up and didn’t go away. Luckily, we had a nine hour drive ahead of us. Surely that would help it. It didn’t. When I put weight on the foot, the pain was unbearable. When I took weight off, the pain got worse. I don’t know how two different positions each managed to hurt more than the other, but they pulled it off masterfully. I grimaced through two hours of rapidly escalating pain cycles while Lola looked on from the passenger seat and questioned her choice in life partners. There are plenty of guys out there who don’t spend entire car trips making faces like they’re pooping themselves. Just when I thought I’d have to pull off the interstate to find an emergency room, the pain relented. My body was done trying to tell me something was wrong and simply gave up. It was like a long-ignored check engine light that finally shuts off. That means your engine is fine and you have nothing to worry about. I know as much about the human body as I do about cars. No wonder my premiums for both kinds of insurance are so high.

Nine and a half hours after we set out (we had to make a few stops for gas and bathrooms), we arrived at my aunt’s place in Minneapolis. She hosts our family’s annual summer gathering because her amazing house has an equally amazing pool. I’ll call her Pool Aunt here to keep things simple. I might also start calling her that in real life because I have a lot of aunts to keep track of. My mom is one of nine kids, and they were all expected there for the weekend along with a smattering of their children and grandchildren. It wouldn’t be all five hundred of us (or whatever the full number is. Even the Census Bureau doesn’t have an accurate tally.), but it would be enough to fill the house and much of the surrounding area. Given the size of the gathering, one-on-one time with any particular relative was precious. Naturally, I used it to complain. I told Pool Aunt about how I had impaled my foot. Her eyes lit up. She said her specialty is removing splinters. She asked if she could try. At that point, I wouldn’t have objected if she said she wanted to saw off my foot. I waited nervously by the pool while she rushed inside to grab every sharp thing in her house.

She returned with an unexpected assortment of tools. She started out with a sewing pin and seam ripper. It didn’t feel great. The Busch Light helped. It was basically medicinal. I should check if it’s covered by my health insurance. Pool Aunt couldn’t get to the splinter, either, but she could see it thanks to cutting off half my heel. She had another idea. She used the Bug Bite Thing, a plastic device made for mosquito bites, but it couldn’t get any suction. My heel was too hard and dry. She told me to soak it in her pool. Twenty minutes later, she tried again. She put the Bug Bite Thing on the gaping chasm in my foot. The splinter moved. She used the sucker again. The splinter moved some more. Millimeter by millimeter, she drew it out with the power of a ten dollar novelty medical device. By now, a large crowd of relatives had shown up at Pool Aunt’s house. Nothing else was happening at that moment, so we were the center of attention. Pool Aunt didn’t let it distract her. She applied the Bug Bite Thing one final time. The splinter popped out. Everyone cheered, and by “everyone,” I mean me. It’s not easy being the main character of reality.

The sight of the splinter was underwhelming. Inside my foot, it felt like it was the size and shape of a telephone pole. In the light of day, it wasn’t even the width of my pinkie. Maybe all that pool water made it shrink. With the splinter removed, the rest of the reunion was perfect. The forecast had called for rain all weekend, but the clouds stayed away both days. My kids swam for four hours the first day and ten the second. My youngest aunt, who is only a few years older than me, has daughters who are my girls’ ages. Her kids and mine hung out in a big pack all weekend. It reminded me of how I used to rove around with my own swarm of cousins at my grandma’s house a thousand years ago. It was nice to see the kids repeating my own childhood memories, even if I know where that road leads. I hope they always wear shoes. Back in the present, I used my new lease on life to once again take my organs for granted. Almost-My-Age Aunt is married to Almost-My-Age Uncle, who is a big fan of craft beers. He always brings an assortment for us to sample as a group. They all tasted like beer with notes of beer and a hint of even more beer. It was delightful. For dinner, a longtime family friend who once learned recipes from a celebrity chef made his famous ribs and chicken wings. It was my moral obligation to eat myself sick and also take home as many leftovers as I could carry. There’s a reason I drive a minivan. Thanks to the perfect weather, we weren’t forced to resort to my emergency stockpile of board games. That was the only disappointment of the trip, even if it made everyone else breathe a sigh of relief. Getting stuck inside with me during inclement weather is most people’s worst nightmare. Pass the dice, please.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Don’t forget to buy both sci-fi books for a pile of pennies. Let’s get Muppet Gods of Spenser Island to Broadway.

James