I really liked this one.
The MC not being able to become a doctor after the second time she didn’t “match with a hospital” resonated with me, and I think it will resonate with any young adult. It reminded me of the Law Bar exams in Germany, where you just have three chances: three strikes and you’re out, you just threw all those years of law school in the garbage. And you need to have good grades to enroll in law or med school. If you played too much videogame as a teenager, you pay the price when you’re an adult. Luckily, grades don’t count that much in my country. That would be the end of me (my grades are equivalent of a C in America). We also have a lack of doctors and med schools here so a graduate will always find a job that pays well (actually, they’re already working before graduation).
Even so, the thought is scary.
Just imagine having done something in your past that keeps you from achieving your dreams today. Imagine having to work part-time in Starbucks and McDonald’s, live off your parents until they die and you get evicted, become a hobo, get sick, die waiting in a public hospital queue, and be buried as an indigent in a mass grave full with college educated, yet unemployed people.
Yikes!
“The system is broken. The system breaks you.”
Like we discussed in a past thread, PseudoPod aims to go through all layers of horror (
even scatology, don't matter how much I hate to admit it), and
As Well as the Infirm makes you fear your own past and the actions that may condemn you forever. This hits hard.
Not much to say at this point, just that the meaning of the title should have been explained throughout the story (and not in a note), and that this really looks like a story I’ve written. Even the money counting part. (
I can’t say anything else because I still want to sell it. Hopefully to PseudoPod. )
I thought the ending would be happy… until the last line. The haunting continues; the system is still operational. And it breaks us.