Cure

by Dakota Canon

I went to the doctor because the spirit inside me had died.

“I can save you,” he said, his own hero. “We’ll have to cut it out.”

“But how can I live with no spirit?”

“It’s vestigial. Like your appendix. Lots of people lose their spirit. See?”

He opened a cabinet filled with infected, grey lumps. “These are just the ones I’ve removed today, and all the patients went home healthy.”

I thrust my hand inside, touching the dead spirits, and their sorrow filled me like a dream.

“I have known these people,” I said. “They all died long ago.”



Author bio: Dakota Canon is a left-brained professional by day, masquerading as a right-brained artiste by night. She enjoys writing shorts, flash, and poems, and several years ago began assembling her stories into her first novel. An early draft of that novel, The Unmaking of Eden, reached the semi-finals of the AUTHORS Young Adult Novel Contest. She received an Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest Annual Short Story Contest and has been long-listed in the Brilliant Flash Fiction competition. You can find her work in Seven Deadly Sins: A YA Anthology WRATH and Speculative 66. Follow her on Twitter @DakotaCanon or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/dakota.canon.author.

Cure is part of 101 Fiction issue 17.