#disability comic

the sun mourns in vain for the white-throated rail: a comic about disability and the unwanted able-bodied grief for past selves.

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

Page 1: The sun holds a white-throated rail, a bird with a red head, a gray body, and a white throat, in its hands. The sun speaks in a tone represented as sorrowful pity through a drippy speech bubble.

Sun: Looking at you makes me sad!

Rail: What?

Page 2:

Sun: Looking at you makes me sad!

The sun stands with a hand clutching its face.

Sun: How miserable it must be to be flightless! Don’t you yearn for the skies? Don’t you wake up grieving you’re still on land?

Page 3: The white-throated rail looks down in frustration in the hand of the sun.

Sun: (speaking off screen) I’d simply perish if I were you!

The rail speaks, looking down. Pink flowers bloom towards the bottom of the page, petals and pollen blowing in the wind.

Rail: Why do you put your words in my beak and your grief in my feathers? Am I not beautiful?

Page 4: The bone of a white-throated rail is positioned against a colorful galaxy dotted with flecks of stars.

Rail: Am I not adaptability in action? Am I not evolution in motion? Do you mourn the days you weren’t a star? Do you mourn when the sky was cold, how unbearably hot you must burn to keep embracing it every day?

Page 5: The sun looks at the viewer.

Sun: Why would I? That was then, this is now. I am content to be in this state.

Page 6: The rail looks up at the sun off-screen.

Not so fun fact: my high schools policy for disabled fire evacuation was just to not

This needs to be talked about more, I’m sure my school wasn’t the only shitty one. We had no evac plans for our disabilities. We just had to stand next to the elevator and wait for help to come or for someone to call it drill and send us back, traumatised, to our classes.

When I moved to my college, they had to tell me what a personalised evacuation plan was. When we had a fire drill, my new teacher had to guide me out of the room as I shook in fear from the times we had sat upstairs on the third floor smelling smoke from a kitchen fire and not knowing how big that was or if someone was gonna come get us.

I was lucky, back then, that 2 sixteen year olds were in their last year, and had done this countless times before. They comforted me while I freaked out. That one was a drill. When there were fires, they were small and easily controlled, but when those came I was older, I comforted the younger students as we all stood there with the stench of burning filling our nostrils. Sometimes we’d move up the hall to the hallway balcony areas and lean over to see if the cafeteria was the culprit. We’d text friends outside asking for explanations, updates. Was it real, was it drill, where is the fire?

Sometimes I find myself beating myself up. Sometimes I say there was never any real threat, stop being dramatic.

a little comic about sleep troubles that took me entirely too long to make lol