“The Body Remembers” is about the cyclical nature of chronic illness, and we were drawn to both the structure and immensely poetic descriptions of how symptoms manifest in the body. We’re pleased to speak with Barbara A. Thomas about the craft of this piece—read it first, and then check out our conversation.
Rebecca Paredes: You submitted “The Body Remembers” for our Bad Medicine challenge. That theme asked for writing about health, illness, and the gap between the care we need and what we can access. How did that prompt inform this story?
Barbara A. Thomas: “Bad Medicine” named something I live with: the gap between the care I need and the care I can get. With Cyclical Vomiting Syndrome (CVS), the illness itself is predictable. The attacks follow the same pattern every time. What isn’t predictable is whether the people treating me will recognize that pattern. I can walk into the same ER twice in 48 hours and be asked the same questions about marijuana, given the same drug I’ve told them doesn’t work, and made to wait hours for the one medication that does.
The prompt gave me a reason to write about that second illness, the institutional one. I structured the story around the four clinical phases of CVS, then let the hospital repeat its own cycle of forgetting and disbelief inside them. I also wanted to show the performance of credibility: the printed records, the sweatshirt, the careful speech, all assembled so my pain would be believed. That effort is part of the cost of care, and it rarely shows up in the chart.
RP: This piece is separated by different stages of medical conditions: inter-episodic, prodrome, emetic, and recovery. I loved this choice because it so clearly delineates the narrator’s experience of chronic illness, and even if the reader isn’t familiar with those terms, they have such a clear sense of what those terms feel like through the narrator’s experience. Were these headings always in this story, or did you find them in revision?
BT: The headings were there from the start. CVS is defined by its phases, and they’re the one reliable structure the illness offers, so I built the story on them. I didn’t want the reader to need the terminology. The goal was for the experience to teach it, so that by the time you reach “emetic,” you already feel what the word means.
The decision I’d point to is the order. Clinically, the cycle is usually described starting with the prodrome and ending with the symptom-free interval. I opened with the inter-episodic phase instead, so the story begins in a garden and a guitar chord, in the “healthy” weeks, and the dread is already there. Then it ends on recovery that doesn’t feel like relief, just a pause before the next loop. That ordering was meant to show that, for me, the good weeks are never fully good.
RP: One of the things that stood out to me about this piece is how viscerally, yet poetically, pain is described: “The light through the blinds grows teeth. Sound grows teeth. I lie on the bathroom floor with my cheek against the tile because the cold is the only mercy available to me, and I count—not minutes, those are too small a unit—I count hours, because hours are what this phase is made of.” This is just one of the many moments in this piece that floored me, really. Can you talk about how you approach writing about the body, either in this story or in your work as a whole?
BT: With the body, I try to write what the experience does to perception rather than listing symptoms. A clinical description says “photophobia.” What I live through is light turning hostile, so the sentence gives the light teeth. I look for the point where the body stops being a set of symptoms and starts reorganizing the whole world around itself.
Walter Mosley teaches in his MasterClass that studying poetry makes one a better writer. Poets train me in the precision of language, close attention to sound, and mastery of simile, metaphor, and form. They also teach me specific vernacular and subtle implication, the art of letting what’s left unsaid do the work. Reading poetry makes me ask whether a word is exact, how a sentence sounds read aloud, and what can be implied instead of explained. That discipline lets me write about pain without defaulting to cliché.
I prefer to write in a way that engages all the bodily senses, not just sight and pain. In this story, you get the cold of the tile against a cheek, the sting of bile, the smell of crushed basil in the garden, the hum of a guitar string felt in the sternum, and the hostile glare of fluorescent light. Illness isn’t experienced through one channel, so the prose shouldn’t be, either. I also lean on active verbs as much as I can. Light grows teeth, a stomach heaves, a fist closes around the abdomen. Active verbs keep the body in motion on the page, and they keep the narrator from reading as a passive victim, even when she has no control over what’s happening to her.
The passage about counting hours comes from the same instinct. Sickness distorts time, and during the emetic phase, the usual units stop working. Minutes are too small, so the narrator counts in hours, because that’s what the phase is made of. I like it when the form of a sentence enacts the experience.
I also try not to let pain be purely bleak. The cold tile is a small mercy, and noticing mercies is how someone with a chronic illness stays alive inside it. The horror is real, but so is the bargaining. A body that needs constant negotiation takes whatever comfort is offered.
RP: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece, or anything you’re working on now?
BT: “The Body Remembers” said what it needed to say about CVS, so I’m looking ahead, though the next story grows out of a similar question. I’m working on a short horror story about a woman on a late-night subway ride who’s offered a way out of a life that has been slowly wearing her down. Think The Matrix meets Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits: a threshold, a choice, and a question about which is scarier, the unknown or the world we’ve all agreed to call normal.
Both stories are about what we’re asked to endure and call ordinary. In “The Body Remembers,” the narrator’s body and the system treating it each keep repeating a cycle. In my new story, the cycle is a whole person’s life, and the horror is deciding whether to leave it for the unknown.
