Back of the Book Content for Death's Mantle 2

Health Scare

It wasn’t long after my dad died that I really became concerned with my own body, hoping I could detect any signs of a future ailment.

During a yoga class, I noticed that there was a lump on the bottom of my foot.

Being the millennial that I am, I immediately went to Google to see what this lump could be.

And of course, I stumbled upon an article that said the lump might be a sign of cancer.

I began monitoring the lump, pressing my foot against it whenever I could, judging if I was just thinking it was there, or if it was really there. The thing was, when I touched the bottom of my foot, I could feel it. 

But if I stood, I couldn’t feel the lump.

Eventually, I made an appointment with the podiatrist, and since I live in Connecticut, that meant making an appointment within Yale’s medical network. Alongside my wife, whom I scared with my potential foot cancer self-diagnosis, we drove to the outskirts of Bridgeport, to a medical complex near a movie theater.

I remember at the time thinking that this was sort of convenient. Go to the doctor for minor surgery or a checkup, and then catch a flick afterward. 

We came to the podiatrist’s office on the second or third floor, I can’t remember, and I signed in.

After waiting in a room with a couple other guys, all of whom had some foot issue that I wasn’t able to decipher by the looks on their faces, I was called by the nurse into a private room. She did the usual, taking my weight, my blood pressure, and then asked what was going on.

“There’s a lump on the bottom of my foot,” I told her, showing her the bottom of my foot.

“You should take your shoes off.”

“Right.”

Once I did so, she examined what I assumed was the lump, didn’t say anything, and left, telling me that the doctor would be in shortly.

The doctor eventually came, and after a brief conversation, he took a look at my foot.

“It’s a callus,” he said bluntly.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I had foot cancer.”

“You don’t have foot cancer. It’s a callus,” he said, getting an instrument that looked sort of like a cheese grater. 

The doctor proceeded to scrub the bottom of my foot, which didn’t feel like anything at all considering the thickness of the callus that he’d just diagnosed.

As he did so, he told me that he was once a runner, and that’s how he got into the feel of podiatry. He also told me I didn’t have the frame of a runner.

(Gee, thanks.)

“You’re good to go,” he said, showing me his foot shaving instrument again. “Next time, you can order one of these when this happens.”

My wife and I went to a diner afterward, because we love going to diners, both of us relieved that I didn’t have foot cancer.

A month or so later, I got a bill in the mail for $180. 

Rather than complain about how broken the American healthcare system was, I paid the bill, vowing to go to a salon next time and get a mani-pedi instead of paying a doctor almost two hundred dollars to shave the bottom of my foot.

Lesson learned. 

I hope.

You’re a Winner!

The concept for Katy’s dad was modeled after my own father, and a former customer I became friendly with back in the early 2000’s. 

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always a writer of science fiction and fantasy. There was a spell (pun intended?) in which I worked as a cashier at a 7-Eleven in Round Rock, Texas, a long spell in fact, nearly two years. 

During this time there was a truck driver who came in daily spending upwards of two hundred dollars on lottery scratch offs.

Sometimes he would scratch them off at the counter, allowing the employees to enjoy the high he got when he thought he was just about to win big.

He had a system, as all scratchers do, as well as a slew of superstitions and preconceived notions as to what role would be a winning ticket roll, and what ticket number the win would likely be on.

I didn’t mind helping him with his addiction; it was entertaining.

He never really won much, not more than a couple hundred dollars. But to do so, he would always spend upwards of a grand a week.

My dad didn’t spend as much as the customer did, but he was, especially toward the end of his life, really trying to win big.

He had a system and a spending limit per day. 

When he was bored, he would drive into town, smoke cigarettes in his car as he scratched tickets keeping the winners and losers. (He kept the losers to double check later, to make sure that he didn’t accidentally make a mistake in his scratch-a-thon.) He would then stockpile the winners and cash them all out at once to buy more potential winners and losers.

He would also use the winning lottery tickets as a form of currency.

When I first moved back to America from Asia, my father would give me a ticket with twenty dollars on it and tell me to drive to Austin and have a good time. Use the ticket to put gas in the car, get a burger or a cup of coffee. That sort of thing. 

His goal up to the end was to win a large sum and put the money in a trust fund to be distributed between my brother and me.

Noble, and knowing him, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what he would have done.

One more to go.

Death’s Mantle is a trilogy, and since this is the second book, there will be one more to follow. Perhaps in the future I will release a spinoff related in this world if the demand is there (hint: review these books). But for now, I’m keeping it to this trilogy.

Thank you for the continued support, for reading my ramblings and reviewing my books.

Yours in sanity,

Harmon Cooper