“It’s just a sprain,” her parents shrugged. “Use Tiger Balm.”

“You’ve walked on a shattered fibula for weeks,” the radiologist says. “You need surgery. Doesn’t it hurt?”

If you want impervious, robotic offspring, she thinks, you beat them, belittle, humiliate, minimize.

Body, mind, heart, soul: shattered.

She smiles. “I’m fine.”

Z.J. Lee is a neurodivergent, nonbinary, chronically ill person of color who lives near the Pacific Ocean and writes by the seat of their pants.