A specially commissioned short story for BBC Radio 4 by the award-winning Lottie Mills. In this fantastical tale, a strange illness takes hold of those living at the Saint Francis Invalid Colony... Lottie Mills won the BBC Young Writers Award in 2020, and her debut collection, Monstrum is published in 2024. In her stories, Lottie delights in the uncanny, the unusual and the unique power of outsiders. Reader: Hayley Atwell Producer: Justine Willett Podcast presented and produced by Rick Woska
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Welcome back to the BBC short story podcast, where this week we have a story written by Lottie Mills, who won the BBC Young Writers award in 2020.
Her debut collection, Monstrum, was published by Oneworld in May 2024.
An affliction is a fantastical tale about a strange illness which takes hold of those living at the St.
Francis invalid colony.
It's read by Hayley Atwell.
The sickness begins on a Thursday,
an unextraordinary, lukewarm morning in March.
The nurses wake Katie Craven to find that her eyes have turned yellow gold, really, every speck of them midas, touched and blazing, even in the spaces where the whites ought to be.
Her pupils are the most unnerving thing of all.
They have been stretched vertically, two slits from lid to lid, inhuman.
Later, the remaining nurses will muse on the strangeness of Katie being the first to show signs.
A quiet, obedient child, appropriately unattractive, with her coarse orange hair, her jagged, rot, puckered teeth.
Unfortunate, they had always called her, rolling the word across their tongues, savoring the guilty, irresistible cruelty of it.
They remark that Katie herself seems unaware of the transformation.
They suppose Katie, who is more or less mute to be unaware of most things they do not see.
The way her new eyes dart to a basin of water, a windowpane, the cracked mirror in the corner of the senior dormitory, the way they catch sight of their own reflection, pounce on the alive, warm, twitching image of it.
They have made a fatal misjudgment.
Katie is not unaware.
What Katie is is unsurprised.