Excerpt from Issue 308 (Summer 2026) Disability: The Revolution
"Peripheral Bodies" by Mel Williams
Content Warning: includes conversations about war and weapons.
The first time I self-injected, I struggled to hold the vial steady in my hands. The liquid inside was pale gold, thick like honey, and caught the overhead lights in a way that made it look shimmering and alive.
I removed my forearm crutches — their rubber grips worn smooth from years of use —and leaned them against the stainless tray. I pressed the needle into the fat of my stomach, as I’d been directed. The medicine — its hue now a milky yellow under my skin — spread down my legs and up into my chest, like a current stretching to reach a vast shoreline. A slow warmth unfurled under my skin.
The instructors told me to inject one hour before each session. By the time I’d reach the gym, the serum would be coursing through my body, priming my nervous systems for maximum progress. The jab replaced the oral pills I’d been taking, which had produced no measurable effect since my admission almost a month ago.
For those first three weeks, I’d been measured, moved, and manhandled by a variety of experts in white lab coats, each carrying narrow slabs of dark glass balanced in their palms. They tapped in their observations: the speed of my uneven steps, the strength of my too-lean arms, the tightness of my crippled grip against resistance bands. Four times a day they delivered thick, blended, blue shakes they said contained collagen, spirulina, and sulforaphane — each supplement designed to combat neurodegenerative disease. I slept inside an oxygen canister and sat beneath sun lamps. I’d breathed and warmed and regained lost weight. My ashen skin grew more golden each day and hair began to sprout on my patchy scalp. And yet despite the elimination of contaminants and reuniting my body with nutrition, my recovery seemed only superficial. I looked healthy, but my mobility issues remained unimproved.
During this period, I’d waited for the faintest stirring — a flickering of an inactive muscle, a surge of strength from a weak one — a sign that the medication and diet was healing something inside me. Swallowing pills had felt less invasive somehow, and I was disappointed they hadn’t worked. Injecting medication was different. The list of ingredients was no longer composed of semi-familiar vitamins and minerals, but a chemical compound simply called ’Nueroplexin’. It had never before been tested on humans.
But I’d signed up for this. I wanted my abled body back, didn’t I? I brushed my unease aside.
*
When I arrived at the clinic doors, the hallway smelled of disinfectant and something tangy, like citrus fermenting under a heat lamp. The room was humming with the low, insect-like buzz of machines on standby. The tech — ASTRA, her badge said in bold lettering — greeted me with an assuring smile, the way one smiles at a nervous child in the doctor’s office.
“Let’s get you secured in the exoskeleton.” She gestured for me to follow her along the gym’s perimeter path.
Before I had the chance to ask her what an exoskeleton was, she was already a few steps ahead. But my answer was in front of me, standing against the far wall: a looming frame of brushed steel and carbon, jointed like an enormous insect, with cables coiled along its limbs, and electrodes dangling from its torso like branched tendrils.
There were a dozen other patients already inside their own frames, moving through prescribed routines: reaching, grasping, walking in slow, exacting strides. The rhythm was hypnotic: hydraulic sighs, synchronized beeps, the soft slap of metal feet meeting the floor. No one made eye contact with me; all eyes were fixed on some invisible point ahead. Instructors called out metrics they read from a digital panel: balance, strength, accuracy. Every perfect repetition lit a green panel on the side wall.
“Stand here while I secure you.” Astra’s voice had the tempo of someone who’d practised encouragement — gentle, almost apologetic. Her hands were brisk but careful as she fitted the adhesive pads to my skin: thighs, calves, shoulder blades, spine. Each electrode bit in a static sting. “You’ll feel a tingle,” she murmured, “but this is normal.”
With her guidance, I slid my arms, then my legs, shaky with muscle spasm, into the metal braces. Cold clamps circled my forearms, thighs, and ankles. The frame’s weight shifted as motors adjusted to my height, whispering and clicking like the start of a ritual. Cables snaked from the console into the ports along my limbs. Tiny red diodes blinked to life as each connection registered, and the machine tightened around me. My pulse throbbed in my ears.
Astra brushed a stray hair from my face before stepping back. “It’ll sync to your breath,” she said. “Just breathe through the alignment. It needs to study you.”
The electrodes pulsed, flooding my muscles with artificial power. Within a few minutes, the weakness in my limbs decreased and my muscle spasms eased. My body — this body that had failed me for a decade — lifted up as if pulled by invisible strings. Astra leaned my crutches against the wall.
“Go ahead,” she urged.
I took three cautious steps away from her.
“Good,” she whispered. “You’re part of the future now.”
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— Mel Williams is a Toronto-based writer whose memoir Little Flames Under My Skin won runner-up for the 2025 Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She authors the Substack newsletter Little Flames which features essays and interviews on disability, reinvention, and finding beauty in the fracture. Find her at www.melwilliams.xyz.
Read the rest of "Peripheral Bodies" by Mel Williams in Issue 308 (Summer 2026) Disability: The Revolution. Order the issue now:
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