One day I received a rejection from The Barcelona Review, a literary journal I was jonesing to get into. The editor complimented the work I’d just sent, but asked if I had anything “edgier.”

I didn’t, so I sat down to write this story. I had no idea when I started where the work would go, but thinking of writing “edgy,” I came up with the voice and the main character.

I’m a former nurse, and I have a very good friend who got hooked on Vicodin and went through a Diversion program offered by the state of California for health professionals who get addicted. It’s an occupational hazard, so I had an insider’s perspective.

The character is not likable, she’s a user chick, using drugs and people. That presented a challenge, to give her a moment of redemption—which wasn’t much—but for her, it was huge. The challenge was in keeping it from getting sappy. I love exploring the relativity of “good” and “bad,” the gray area of what is moral.

My character’s affinity for BDSM made me think of testing limits, and how she tested hers with how far she’d go in using this poor guy, Curtis. She was a dog-eat-dog character, a believer in “survival of the fittest,” but she had to survive her own ruthlessness to carry on. I introduced the rash and the migraines to show she wasn’t doing so well. And that’s when I began to like her.

Playing Doctor

Eloise Chagrin

Julie and Andrew were a new couple when they first came to me for counseling. They were married for only three months, and already were having problems that were serious enough to rock their marriage to the point that they were having thoughts of separation. They were both twenty-three and had dated in college before getting married after their graduation. They came from a Baptist background, and both their sets of parents were deeply religious. When I first saw them together, it became evident to me that they were very much in love and that their problems, like the problems of so many couples, had to do with issues of insecurity and jealousy. To help them better, I first wanted to see them individually, separating them so that they could be frank with me about what really bothered them.