Disability

Cris Mazza's novella, Disability, punctures deeply into the world of the severely disabled, where nothing is as it should be. Told in a broken shorthand voice, Mazza's language is acute, evoking a place where the patients, the caregivers, and the system are all disabled.

Teri and Cleo are minimum-wage nurse-aides at a state ward for severely retarded and physically handicapped children. They are expected to feed, bathe, clothe, and carry out the required therapies for their patients in a 4-hour shift. They're working within a system where money for therapy is only continued if therapy shows improvement … and yet the state-paid therapists who oversee the ward know the patients will never show any improvement. To keep the money coming in, it's up to the minimum-wage caregivers to "see" and chart important improvements, thus keeping the therapy program alive.

Blinded, in their own way, by pet-like adoption of favorite patients, Teri and Cleo struggle to remain both optimistic and realistic, two emotions very much at odds, but which they try to maintain in balance. As their personal failures mount—and even transpose or emulate the travesties within the state ward—Teri and Cleo, with their own unseen "disabilities" in dealing with their lives and pasts, react harshly to the breakdown in the emotional balancing act.