Life has a way of giving you what you need when you need it most, and when you least expect it – that’s how it seems from the cocoon of my middle-class existence, anyway. On Friday last week, I started coming down with a fever: chills, headache, sore throat, fatigue, the works. With a mixture of medication and regular visits downstairs to stand in the hot sun I managed to see through the work day, pick up the kids, and drive home. I then lolled on the lounge and contemplated the impending horror of my second flu for the year while my wife cooked the children’s dinner, bathed them, and put them to bed.
That alone might not be worth complaining about, but my wife had spent weeks organising an ‘adults only’ party at our home on Saturday afternoon, our first kid-free gathering in more than four years. My participation, even the event itself, was beginning to look improbable indeed.
I ate my own take-away dinner – I wasn’t nauseated at least – and fell into bed at 9pm. About an hour and a half later, our son Cody woke up crying. Between then and dawn, there was just one period where he slept more than twenty minutes straight, and it would sometimes take the best part of an hour to soothe him to sleep again.
To say I had a despairing outlook the next morning is an understatement. Cody had finally fallen asleep face down on our bed – we’d learn in an hour or so that he’d developed an ear infection – and I went downstairs for a bowl of cereal that I needed but didn’t want. The thought of staying awake for another seven or eight hours and then entertaining friends was appalling. While staring up from the depths of this black mental abyss, I grabbed my iPhone and checked my email. I found a note there from the editor of Andromeda Spaceways #70, Eugen Bacon. She was fond of my sci-fi horror story ‘The Larval Stage’ and wanted to publish it.
I noticed something else, too. Even though I hadn’t had medication in many hours, the shivers had gone away. I still had a sore throat and a bit of a headache, but it wasn’t the flu after all. And although my wife and I were haggard with sleep deprivation, we decided to go ahead with our adults only party. As she so soundly reasoned (I was beyond reason), we could be awake half the night looking after Cody, or we could send him and his antibiotics to his grandparents’ place and be awake half the night talking to our friends instead.
It wasn’t until the Sunday morning that I could properly appreciate this second acceptance from Andromeda Spaceways. Together with my story in Aurealis #106, which was published a week or so ago, it gave me a sense of making a meaningful contribution to Australian fiction for the first time.
The only good thing about tumbling into an abyss is that the sunlight looks so beautiful when you climb out again.