My Avatar Lives My Life
By: Luanne Castle
The stink of roasting duck swarms my room where I lie on my pink-ruffled bed with the pillow over my face. Bright lights flash inside my head. The Sledgehammer Man has been drilling into my head again, causing me to throw up my lunch and a purple popsicle. Earlier, I cried to Mommy that I didn’t feel good, but she was crying, too. Company coming, Daddy needs a loan from the lady, and Mommy doesn’t know how to cook a wild duck. Better Homes & Gardens doesn’t mention cooking animals that were flying free until your Daddy shoots them.
By middle school, I just say headache. Occasionally, the school nurse doesn’t send me back to class with an eye roll. Those are the good days, where Mom picks me up and I get to stretch my trembling legs inside my bed’s cool sheets, a compress over my eyes. Our family doctor calls my attacks “sinus infections,” prescribes me penicillin until my stomach, arms, and thighs sprout puffy patches, mimicking a beehive designed by crazed bees. Dad says I’m mah-lingering and demands I get in his old Chevy with the hole in the floor that makes me dizzy if I watch it too closely. Young lady, what’s wrong with you is you have nothing to do. You’re coming to work with me.
After I leave home for college and work, I do better on my own. I can more easily avoid what triggers the symptoms and take care of myself when I’m ill without having to explain myself to disbelieving family members.
Then, I start teaching under flickering lights. I’m in the ER, the question marks drifting like ash in the air around us. Extreme vertigo, sinus dry burn, profuse sweating, then chill, one eye scrunched shut, bees buzzing in my legs and arms. A Sumo wrestler on my chest. Elevated blood pressure. Pre-hypersomnia vomiting. Three more ER visits. I believe you are not having mini strokes, but an unusual type of migraine. In fact, you most likely have genes for two distinct types of migraine that are collaborating with each other. This causes a long symptom list and difficulty in diagnosing. Migraine meds are contraindicated and could be fatal. Genes--take that! --Dad. My son draws an avatar of me in de rigueur hat and sunglasses, the defining characteristics of who I have become.
Piece by piece, my life falls away. Spending the Fiesta Bowl in First Aid, the paramedic reporting the score to me. My hoodie on backwards to block the rotating colored lights at a Johnny Rivers concert. Another ER visit, a different hospital. There aren’t any rooms, so I am parked in the hallway under the fluorescent devils. I place a pillow over my face, erasing myself. The ER doctor wakes me from my end-of-episode sleep four hours later: I’m writing you a prescription for migraine meds. I leave without checking out, feeling the law at my back until my car is out of the parking lot. I’m balloon-weightless, wobbling across a glossy sky, unblemished as an avatar.
Luanne Castle’s Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Copper Nickel, Verse Daily, Saranac Review, Bending Genres, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Disappointed Housewife, South 85, Roi Fainéant, River Teeth, The Dribble Drabble Review, Flash Boulevard, and many other journals and anthologies. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Her hybrid memoir-in-flash will be published by ELJ Editions in 2026. Luanne lives with five cats in Arizona along a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare.IG | X | FAcebook | Website