The Freestone Letters, or: The Trials and Tribulations of One Victor Freestone freestoneletters.com The Trials & Tribulations of One Victor Freestone © 2022-2025 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Victor: Took the jaw off first - had to make sure that he wouldn’t stop breathing halfway through the disassembly - and then worked my way down. Stripped the muscles from the bone, stretched them out on the rack - that’s always the scary part. You nick a tendon and you have to hope you can make a replacement out of boiled horsebone. Then all I had to do was pick out the worms with tweezers. Not sure if you ever worked on lockjaw, but the worms are purple and wiggly - easy to see, tricky to catch. Got them all in a jar downstairs, might make them into jam after church this Sunday. Then I just put everything back, which would have been easy if I wasn’t rushing and forgot to number all of those red ribbons.
Victor, continuing: Still, it all worked out fine. Charlie’s walking like new, the seams are barely noticeable, and the ether kept him asleep through the whole thing while the voltaic kept him living. It’s always so much worse when they wake up halfway through. Or die. Or both. (End quote) Geraldine: Subject: Victor Freestone, new ‘doctor’, invited to family dinner after I convinced my father of the importance of having a viable doctor around, odd proclivities and ignoble breeding aside. (End quote) Narrator: In the late 1870s, in the shadow of the Civil War, there was an incident in the small town of Henshaw, Missouri. A great tragedy occurred, and at the center of it all was the unexpected variable, the uncommon physician, one Victor Freestone.
Narrator, continuing: Scholarship has not been kind to him. Until the last twenty years, when renewed interest in the topic led to reassessment of older material, most historians covering him worked off of Howard Dixon’s distorted version of events from his 1902 book, Unnatural Phenomena in the Midwest, which paints the ordeal as a lurid revenge plot. Victor: They’ll stop fighting me once it’s clear that I’m not leaving. And when they do, I’ll fix this place. Take it apart, put it back together. Maybe then I’ll find out why they shot you dead. Love, Victor
Happy #tdov! Did #transreadathon leave you wishing that you discovered more writers of color? Let's fix that. The Freestone Letters by @infimace.bsky.social is an epistolary webnovel about a Black doctor in Reconstruction Missouri with some unconventional methods 🧵 freestoneletters.com/about/
