How I Became a Writer

by BJ Leesman

It was by accident.

Don't remember much…just the sound of a crash, then total darkness.

I woke up to my teenager screaming, "What's happening?"

Our SUV spun in circles and jerked to a stop. The satellite radio hung off the dashboard at a crazy angle. I tried to put it back but it wouldn't stay.

Across the intersection, the car we never saw or heard moved in silence. Air bags deployed, it rolled to a slow stop on someone's front lawn.

"My head, my head..." Blood ran down Stewart's face.

Fumbling for my phone, I called my husband. "Paul, we've been in an accident. It's bad."

My family arrived before the ambulance rushed my son to the trauma hospital. I tagged along and almost passed out next to his stretcher. Family took Stewart home around midnight diagnosed with a concussion.

In the packed waiting room, I sat alone cradling my left arm against my chest. Around 2 am, Paul returned and convinced the nurse to give me two aspirin. My wrist began to curl at an odd angle as dawn lit up the faces of the sick and injured.

Thirteen hours after the ambulance ride, I saw an ER Doctor.

"No, you're wrong. My right hand's not broken, it's my left wrist."

"You have seven breaks in your left wrist and hand." The doctor pointed to the X-ray. "The break on your right hand looks bad. If this was the only break, you'd have the same kind of cast on your right arm. But you need to be able to use one of your hands."

My husband pushed me in a wheelchair to his car. An old-fashioned plaster cast from my fingers to my armpit kept my left arm stationary. A shorter removable cast immobilized my right hand.

On the long ride home, I watched the light change as the shadow of the Sandia Mountains receded from the foothills. Imagining how to capture the scene in a watercolor, an idea fractured the picture in my mind. I panicked.

My career as an artist is over. I'm doomed. I'll never be able to paint again. It doesn't matter about the art shows in New York, Chicago, and LA. What do I do now?

Months later I sat in front of my computer wearing purple and blue casts. It took weeks to figure out how to type again. I learned to punch the keyboard with my index fingers while resting both casts on a pillow and balancing ice packs on the back of my wrists.

Bored, restless and bored again...I got an idea for a story and haven't stopped writing since. And that's how I became a speculative fiction writer. It wasn't for a couple of bad breaks, I'd still be painting.

Read BJ Leesman's story The Little Man Who Wasn't There in the October issue of Penumbra EMag.