sits online, overstimulated by blue spectrum light, scouring for evidence, though all he understands is purely anecdotal. The first-person accounts, the stories from a friend of his sister’s boyfriend’s boss. He misinterprets clinical studies, decides two and two equal five, wonders why it’s taking so long for science to discover a capital C cure.
He is not a biologist but he might be a theologist. He does not know B cells from jail cells from T cells from killer cells from supercells. He thinks the cure is known, locked in a cylinder in a vault in Antarctica where nobody will ever find it except through an act of espionage.
He thinks sick people are the cash cows of the Corporation. That vaccines are for fools. That medicine is poison. That if you drank special water, ate special diets, performed special yoga poses, that the gut biome would reverse itself and eliminate your (dis) ease.
Our web evangelizer believes you will fall for his friendly profile picture, the posts about his dogs, his misspelled words and conspiracy theories posted at hours when only insomniacs breed. Who knows who he really is? To be sure, we could all stand to look in the mirror to see who we are and who we are not.
Tamara Kaye Sellman is a widely published writer living in Bainbridge Island, WA. Her most recent work appeared in Something On Our Minds (3 poems, November 2017) and The Nervous Breakdown (flash nonfiction, Spring 2018). Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She works as a sleep health educator, healthcare writer and MS advocate/columnist when she’s not crafting creative prose.
© 2018, Tamara Kaye Sellman
Halfway Down the Stairs 
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