---

Trending Now! Help With Legal Fees for Reluctant Swordsman

By Mitchell Shanklin

 

Hi, I’m Joshua Henzel. You might have heard of me from the New York Post article or all the YouTube videos. I’m the guy with the giant flaming sword who’s suing the NYPD. One thing the articles and videos got right is that I do have to stab myself in the heart to ignite the flame. But no, I don’t do it “for fun.” If the flame dies, so do I.

I’m sick of all the lies and If I’m going to ask people for help, they should know the whole story, so I’m going to tell my side of everything. My lawyer told me I should only tell part of the story (sorry, Mr. Schmitz!), but my best friend Billy told me that lawyers are paranoid little poops and I trust Billy. (He didn’t say “poops” exactly, but I don’t like profanity, so I edited it, even though he says I’m way too young to be such an f-wording prig).

I’ve never done a GoFundMe before, so I’m going to have Billy read it before I post it, but I don’t think he’s done one of these before either. If I screw anything up, tell me and I’ll try to fix it. Billy told me I should record a video for the GoFundMe, but I don’t really like my face or the sound of my voice much. (My face is narrow and pointy and my voice is high and squeaky.)

So, when I meet new people, the first thing they talk about is all of the “debunking” videos and how there’s no way I can easily stab myself with a seven-foot-long, thirty-pound flaming sword. The first thing I tell them is that the newspaper lied; it’s only six foot two inches and ten pounds, but that’s still two inches taller than I am so I understand why they’re skeptical. The second thing I tell them is that it’s not that easy, there’s a lot of preparation involved.

In my apartment, I have an iron stand that’s bolted to the wall in the kitchen that angles it just right. I don’t have many visitors so I usually just leave the sword in the stand. My kitchen is small so there isn’t a lot of room, but I can still get to the counter and all the appliances without singeing myself.

It’s trickier when I go out. For a while I didn’t go out much, but then my uncle told me that staying inside all the time wasn’t good for me, so I started to take more walks. I usually only need to relight the flame every few hours, but it’s unpredictable. The shortest it ever lasted was fifteen minutes and the longest was a bit more than eight hours. And stabbing myself early before the flame starts to go out doesn’t seem to make it last any longer.

If the sword is unsheathed, I can see the fire dying down and that gives me a little more warning. But if I can’t see the sword, it takes longer for me to notice. It starts with a . . . twinge isn’t the best word, but I don’t have a better one. Imagine that your heart is an old, worn guitar string and some cruel musician with a pick as sharp as a knife starts playing Misirlou on you at twice the normal speed. When my chest feels like that I know I have two minutes tops.

I have no idea why the New York Post reporter said that I “drew the blade from my hip” — there’s no way that would work. I carry it in a special sheath on my back. Kind of like a long, narrow backpack, with one extra pocket bulging out in the middle for my tripod and my travel fire extinguisher. The entire left edge of the main compartment is lined with snap fasteners. It’s positioned so that the tip of the sword is about a foot off the ground and the hilt sticks out from the top about a foot taller than me. When I need to pull it out, I grab it by the hilt and it only takes a quick jerk to the side to release the snaps. Unzipping the flame-retardant pouch around the blade and setting up the tripod are the hard part — my hands get so trembly when I’m twingeing.

There’s this one “debunking” video about how much force you actually need to stab someone through the chest, the one where they strap a dummy made of ballistic jelly with a plastic rib cage to the front of a car? And it would be totally right, except the blade goes incorporeal when it slides through my chest. (The part that sticks out the other side is as solid and sharp as ever, though.) But there’s still a little resistance, so I glued rubber bumpers to the hilt and tripod legs so they don’t slide around too much.

I’ve figured out the physical side of how to stab myself in the heart quickly, it’s the social side that gives me the most trouble. People almost always think I’m suicidal and call the cops. I used to try pretending to be a street performer. I carried a hat with me with a few crumpled singles so if I felt the twinge I could slap the hat down and make it into a show, but it never helped. If I can find somewhere with no one watching I’ll do that, but it’s hard in New York. When the cops come, I show them my documents and try to convince them the city law about fixed blades longer than four inches doesn’t apply because this isn’t a weapon, it’s a medical zweihander.

The cops are supposed to be able to handle this kind of stuff. Kulkarni vs. The State of Indiana was decided when I was two years old. Not harassing me or arresting me when I use my sword seems like a “reasonable accommodation” to me. But I think most Potentially Divine Intercessions don’t bring police attention as often as mine does, so they don’t have much experience with it. And from what I can tell the captain in charge of my precinct is a huge jerk.

I’ve only been arrested twice, not “dozens” of times like the newspaper said. I’ve been harassed dozens of times, and I was fined once, but I’ve only been arrested twice. The first time was how I met my best friend Billy. I told the cops who arrested me about Kulkarni and my first and fourth amendment rights but they didn’t care. Billy was in the drunk tank and he saved my life. He saw me collapse after they took my sword away and screamed bloody murder until they let me touch the hilt through the bars. (Even if the flame is going strong, I can’t survive being separated from the sword for more than a few minutes.)

Aside from keeping me alive, my flaming sword pretty much always hurts more than it helps. It is not very compatible with 21st-century America.

I have an uncle here in New York City who helped me out when I decided that I didn’t want to live with my family anymore. (My parents always called him the black sheep, but Uncle Rob is a really nice guy even if he’s a “big city liberal” and argues with the rest of the family on Facebook a lot). New York City is probably one of the worst places for the sword, but I didn’t have many folks in my life who were willing and able to help out and I was afraid of going it alone. He got me a small apartment and a job as an administrative assistant. I told him I wasn’t great with computers. (My family didn’t have a lot of money so we only had one beat-up laptop growing up and they homeschooled me because of the sword, so I mostly let the other kids use it for homework.) But he said it was easy and I’d learn fast and . . . I should have told him no, but he was helping me so much I didn’t want to disappoint him.

It went okay until my manager asked me for an Excel listing all of his project’s milestones and their estimated completion dates. I’d never used Excel before so I was confused.

My thinking is sharper during ignition — it’s way easier to learn new things — so I tried leaving the blade in for a few minutes while I figured it out. I’d talked with my officemates when I started the job, but it wasn’t enough. An intern walked by my cube and saw me sitting sideways on my office chair with a flaming blade extending five feet past my back. He screamed, and I swung around and lit the chair on fire.

I always have my travel fire extinguisher with me; it was out within seconds. I told them they didn’t need to buy me a new chair, I was fine using the old one with the scorch marks, I even offered to pay them for it, but they let me go because I was a “safety hazard.” Billy told me that was bull poop and I should sue them but I didn’t want to make a fuss.

You know, I’m grateful. It doesn’t seem like it but I am. I’m grateful that I didn’t die as a five year old. I’m grateful that my parents prayed so much over my busted heart valve that an angel came down from heaven and saved me, but . . . sometimes I wish I could give God a piece of my mind, you know? Why didn’t He let His angels fix busted heart valves with surgery? Or a magic pen knife? Is it so important for Him to keep up appearances that I have to be saddled with this giant piece of magical steel for the rest of my life? He could have at least made the timing predictable. One stab every four hours would have been fine. Even on the hour every hour. Or give me twenty minutes of warning before I’m on death’s door rather than two.

Maybe God was out of touch with humanity in the modern era? The sword had other abilities — it wasn’t only for healing — but none of them could help me hold down a normal job. My parents had me train with it as a kid; they wanted me to know how to use it if I had to, but it always felt kind of pointless. If I’d lived in medieval England, a magical flaming sword that healed me of all wounds would be pretty sweet. I’d probably be a knight. I could help people — or, well, I’d probably end up oppressing the peasants in service of some lord, medieval England kinda sucked. But at least the sword would be useful. At least I would be useful.

Whenever I talk to Billy about it he tells me that everyone knows that God is an f-wording tool. Some things would have been easier if my parents hadn’t hidden me away as a kid; the shock was too much when I left home. Billy said it made me a social imbecile and that if I’d gone to real school I’d know way less about the Bible and way more useful poop. But I’m sure they would have found some excuse to kick me out. Other parents would have freaked out because of the sword, wouldn’t want their kids around something that dangerous. My parents had a lot going on — they had four kids to take care of and not a lot of money. They did the best they could and they care about me a lot.

Billy isn’t nice about it but he cares about me too. (Billy, I left in the part you added about how you aren’t nice but if you keep on deleting the part about how you care I’m just going to keep on adding it back).

There’s something I really don’t want to talk about, except I kinda do, and my lawyer really doesn’t want me to talk about it, but it’s important for you to understand, and I think it’s more important that people understand than for me to win the lawsuit.

I nearly killed my little brother when I was eleven.

I had a growth spurt when I was ten, so my parents decided I was big enough to start training with the sword a bit, just some basic slashes and parries. My brother Zeke was seven and super jealous of me because of the sword and because I “didn’t have to go to school” and we always got into fights about it. I told him that it was the worst and I wished that he could have had the busted heart and the giant sword. I told him I wanted to go to school rather than stay home alone most of the day. I asked our parents to get him a sword too, but they said a big one was too expensive, so he got a short sword that they didn’t let him play with unsupervised. He was still jealous that I had the big fire sword that I could “play” with all day because he was really, really dumb.

I’m sorry. He was just a kid, but kids are dumb and the sword was a sore spot for me. I wish he’d been dumb about something different.

(Before I go any further, I want you to know that I don’t remember the exact words we said, but Billy said I should make some up and put them in quotation marks, so I did that. He also told me I didn’t need to call attention to it, but that would be dishonest.)

It started when I woke up in the early morning with a twinge. It was a Saturday, but both Mom and Dad were working. I got up quickly; I was always on edge when the twinge woke me up, but you get used to it — I usually had to ignite the sword a couple times a night.

But the sword was missing from the stand in my room.

I knew it was Zeke, I knew he’d taken it to play with it. I hoped I was only twingeing because the sword was too far away from me, not because the flame was dying down. I let my senses expand . . . if I paid attention I could always figure out where the sword was. He had it in the backyard. As I ran towards the back door, I could feel God playing a solo on my heartstrings.

I saw a few scorch marks on the walls and the carpet on the way. He must have been carrying it by the hilt, but he wasn’t strong or careful enough to keep the tip entirely off the floor or make all the corners. He could have burned the house down.

It was in the grass, which was luckily still wet with dew. The sword was almost out: only a few tongues of flame left near the hilt. Zeke was leaning over it, touching it near the tip where it wasn’t on fire anymore. He hissed and put his finger in his mouth — the steel was still hot even when the fire was almost gone.

There was no way I could have gotten it back to the stand in time, and I didn’t have my portable tripod yet. I could have asked him to hold it up but I didn’t trust him to keep it straight.

I needed to Call it to myself.

“Get out of the way, Zeke!” I shouted at him and he jumped to his feet.

“You always get to play with it, it’s not fair!” Zeke shouted and stamped his foot. “I wanted to touch it when it wasn’t on fire but you always want it to be on fire and it’s not fair, my sword doesn’t light on fire.”

The strumming of my heart was reaching a crescendo. I didn’t have much time. “Zeke, if you don’t get out of the way I’ll die,” I said.

He started crying. “It’s always about you, isn’t it, why can’t it be about me? Why is it always about you?”

I tried to reply but my lungs were choking up and gray spots were swimming in my eyes. He was standing to the left of the sword; if I moved a few steps right he would probably be clear. The tip would lift when it flew towards my chest, but it would lift away from him. I stumbled three steps to the right and narrowed my focus on the sword. With a moment of concentration, I yanked it to myself. But he’d moved along with me, and when I Called it, he had one foot on each side of the blade.

The tip of the blade tilted up and to the right as it flew towards my chest and sliced off half of Zeke’s left foot.

Years before I was old enough and big enough to train with the sword my parents trained me with bandages and first aid. I used a tourniquet and bandaged him up and he didn’t bleed out much. If we’d moved differently, who knows what would have happened. He got a prosthetic. My parents made a lot of new rules about the sword, but Zeke didn’t try to play with it anymore anyway.

I wish I could tell you that in the years since that day, Zeke and I have figured out how to move on, that we’ve managed to forgive each other for nearly killing each other. I want to tell you that brothers don’t have to let something like that grow and grow until it’s too big to talk about, too big to think about. And I don’t think we had to, but we did.

If you’re reading this, Zeke, I’m sorry. I wish I’d talked to you more before that day, I wish I’d let you play with the sword, that I hadn’t been so annoyed that you were jealous; maybe that would have changed things. I wish that I hadn’t Called it, I wish that I’d died rather than hurt you so badly. Billy says that’s crazy and I shouldn’t think that way but it’s true. Let me know if you want to talk about it. I want to talk about it. I want my brother back.

Billy says that it isn’t mine or my brother’s fault — it’s our parents’, that they should have kept us safe. I got a bit angry and shouted at him the first time he said that. Have you ever tried being poor and working seventy-hour weeks while raising four kids, including one that needs to be stabbed in the heart with a giant flaming sword every few hours? Trust me, there is no perfectly safe way to do it.

I’m never in a good place on June 5th, the anniversary of that day. Three months back, it was the ten-year anniversary and I decided to go for a walk at night. I usually try not to go out at night; if I have to bring the sword out, it’s really bright, really obvious. I get the cops called on me more often, even if there are fewer people around.

God waited until I was a half-mile away from my apartment to play Misirlou on my heart. This time I ran into an alley and set out the performance hat but I got arrested anyway. I showed the police my papers but they didn’t care.

There was no Billy this time. I pressed my face into the cot and felt my heart stuttering.

The first time I was arrested there were at least four cells and who knows how many hallways and rooms between me and the sword. If I’d Called it I would have killed Billy and probably a lot of other people. Honestly, there was always a risk. I don’t think it could be stopped when I Called it — it would punch through concrete, steel, anything, and chunks of whatever it broke through would fly everywhere.

Maybe I should just . . . let it happen, I thought to myself. Maybe God only meant for me to have an extra decade and a half. I was supposed to die at five years old, so I got over four times as much life as expected. Maybe that was enough.

But that time I felt the blade just a few feet away on the other side of the cell wall. I thought it was probably in the evidence locker. It was even pointed at me; it wouldn’t have to reorient. I was pretty sure it was on a shelf that was directly against the wall. There probably wasn’t anyone between me and the sword, I told myself, it was probably okay . . .

Then I clenched everything as a twinge shook me to my core. I couldn’t. What if I hurt someone? What if I was wrong about the positioning? What if there was someone in the evidence locker and the debris from the shattered wall flew back? What if someone died? I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t Call it. Not again, I wouldn’t hurt anyone again. I didn’t deserve it. It was easier if I let go . . . then no one would get hurt because of me again. That was the only way to be sure.

Then I imagined what Billy would have said if he’d been here. His bushy white eyebrows would gather, his lips would purse and he’d say the f-word . . . No. He’d say “fuck.” He’d say “Fuck. That.” with a snarling growl and his cheeks would get flushed and yeah, fuck that. Fuck that to hell and back.

(I let Billy keep the swear words in this once. Even though he wasn’t really there in the cell with me, he saved me.)

I knew I would be healed once it landed, but I dragged myself to the far side of the cell anyway: getting my face torn open by a flying chunk of concrete would still hurt a lot. I wished, for the hundredth time, that the blade could go incorporeal before it was inside of my chest.

I closed my eyes and counted three breaths before I Called it. I heard a crack as loud as thunder, then I shivered and gasped as the twinges vanished. I opened my eyes to the hilt sticking out of my chest and a five-foot-wide jagged hole in the concrete.

The sword didn’t do as much damage as I’d thought it would. The evidence room was pretty messy and there were some concrete chunks and a lot of dust, but it could have been way worse. Afterwards I cut a hole in the outer wall to break out; I wasn’t going to wait for them to take it away from me again, probably farther away this time, with more walls and people in between. It felt weird, using the sword as a sword.

The NYPD eventually dropped the criminal charges against me for escaping and for the damage to the building. I think they were embarrassed by the bad publicity; the New York Post reporter got a lot wrong, but the one thing that he got right was that if I hadn’t done anything I would have died. I think they were also embarrassed that they couldn’t arrest me. There’s not a lot you can force me to do when the blade is in my chest. Nowadays I leave it in no matter how many cops show up. (Now that I’m better about “not being an f-wording idiot” as Billy says.)

So now we’re suing them for nearly killing me. The law firm Billy and Uncle Rob hired thinks my lawsuit has a chance. There’s still a lot of unsettled case law around Potentially Divine Intercessions.

But the case will take years and my uncle can’t support me forever and I don’t think office jobs are the best for me. So I’m asking for $26,000. Here’s the breakdown of where the money will go:

• $21,000 to pay my uncle back for the defense attorney he hired before the NYPD dropped charges
• $5,000 to help me stay on my feet while I look for a job

I’m planning to find a job and make enough money from that or the lawsuit so I can pay you all back. I’m going to keep track of who donated how much.

But the best way you could help me is this: if you have an available job where it’s okay if I take a break every few hours to stab myself with a big flaming sword, I’d really appreciate it. Maybe something outdoors? I don’t know everything, but I’m always willing to learn.

Thank you and God bless.

---

Update: Thank you so much, for the donations and the messages! I even have a few leads for jobs — y’all are wonderful. But one problem is a lot of you donated anonymously and commented it was so I couldn’t pay you back, which is not okay. You need to send me your name if you did that.

Also, to the Zeke H. who donated . . . I’m not sure if that was you, but if it was, thank you and I miss you. I’m here if you ever want to talk.

---

Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Trending Now! Help With Legal Fees for Reluctant Swordsman” by Mitchell Shanklin, and if you enjoyed that then I’m very happy to say that Mitchell is one of those excellent people who has a website with an obvious URL and a page listing and linking all his stories online, so hie ye hence to mitchellshanklin.com, click the word Fiction up the top, and take your pick from his stories at Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Daily SF or more. Couldn’t be easier.

A lot of this story is grounded in fundamentally American experiences of (a) an attitude to policing that looks, from outside, mostly like hostile occupation; and (b) a hyper-individualistic understanding of any problem anyone might have, wherein—at a society-wide, political level—there seems astonishingly limited empathy for other people’s circumstances, or understanding of how random and non-discriminatory ill fortune might be (though certainly historical discriminations intersect with that, and increase the odds and opportunities of such). RFK Jr has an incredible amount of incredibly stupid opinions—I’ve not been shy about my autism, so you’ll not be shocked to hear I’m not a fan of his fundamental belief that we should be eradicated entirely as nothing but a burden on society, which to be fair is pretty much the opinion I have of RFK Jr so maybe we’d be even if not for the power differential—but one of the more stupid has been his recent pronouncement that healthy people don’t get sick and are immune to germs and infections, which is possibly the perfect circular argument and would be almost admirable in its perfect idiocy were he not, y’know, the health secretary of the United States.

Aaaaanyway that means there’s layers to this that I’m not qualified to comment on and am probably missing, that individual and unique experience being the brilliant thing about art wherein any work exists in a nebulous space between creator and audience and not wholly in the control of either, but anyway, third digression I should move on from, the one thing I am acutely aware of is the random nature of disability and illness, and also the unique nature of both, where there may be common experiences among folk of a given diagnosis but there will also be, always, a unique manifestation and combination of circumstances for each individual, an intersection of all the aspects of self and situation, such that while you can make some general accommodations for disabled folk—flat routes with wide doorways, my gods people, it’s not rocket science, just push a trolley round your building to discover how inconvenient and unfriendly it might be to anyone in a wheelchair or scooter—what you actually need to do to accommodate disabled people is just fucking listen to them. Each of them. All of them!

Don’t assume you know better than they do, don’t behave as if the act of treating a fellow human being as a human being is somehow a massive inconvenience, don’t get all awkward about the fact you might have to—oh no—acknowledge somebody’s difference in pursuit of supporting them and that difference. Just ask people how you can help, or listen when they start telling you anyway, and that’s probably not going to be as dramatic as “let me stab myself through the heart with a six foot two flaming sword”—in fact I would put real money on that specific aid never coming up for you—but it will be whatever that person needs it to be, and the best thing you can do is just accept it and act on it, not negotiate it, not say “well my cousin’s son is also…” or think that this person is wrong because that person last week had the opposite request, or—and this is what the story is really getting at, for me at least, and what is the really harmful social idea that goes unspoken so much of the time—think that this is somehow a scam this person is pulling on you to take advantage of your kindness or to get away with something, as if anyone is bothering to pretend to be disabled and going through all the humiliation of justifying themselves over and over and over—we have just been through the PIP re-evaluation in our house, which is the UK disability benefit, and by the deep gods and the high it is such a degrading form to fill out, you’ve no idea if you’ve never dealt with it—no-one’s going through all so that they might, I dunno, park a bit closer to the shop, or be able to use a lift instead of the stairs.

Oh no.

If that thought is something that rings a little awkwardly, painfully familiar to you—and I don’t necessarily blame you if it does, because ableism is so common and so invisible in the very structure of society it is almost impossible to identify, sometimes, and certainly impossible to avoid, and it’s not even 20 years since Little Britain was playing on it for laughs with Andy and Lou, and probably only a week since the Daily Mail was running it alongside something about benefits scroungers; anyway—I just wish people would consider the failure states of each side. Which is to say, even if someone were trying to scam you into showing them a kindness or a little more understanding, the outcome is that… you were kind to someone when maybe you wouldn’t have been anyway? Whereas if you’re wrong, and the need is genuine, the failure state is that you leave someone feeling rejected, humiliated, misunderstood and unable to do whatever thing they wanted to do that presumably anyone else could do. Put another way, if everybody could please stop policing random folks about their right to park in disabled bays given how many disabilities are invisible and/or dynamic and that they are really tight about handing out blue badges no matter what the newspapers tell you, that would be brilliant, tah.

And breathe. Sorry. Clearly a ranty mood today, to the extent that I’m pretty sure that I’ve invented a strawman person there to argue against in the strange belief that the rest of you would somehow find that enlightening or entertaining, which, maybe? I hope so, anyway, my thoughts are the only thoughts I have so it’s this or an awkward silence for your outro. I hope you enjoyed the story from Mitchell, at least: as you might tell from the above, it meant a lot to me.