Скачать или смотреть The Professional Invalid – Part 2 | Dark Comedy of Illness, Power, and Family (Short Story)

The Professional Invalid – Part 2.

PART 1 can be found here:    • The Professional Invalid – Part 1 | Dark C...  

A darkly comic, satirical family drama about a “professional invalid,” a real consumptive, and the way a household chooses its myths. Complete short story audio.

In every respectable English family, someone discovers that the easiest way to rule a household is not through money or brilliance, but through a very delicate heart. In this one, her name is Aunt Agnes, a lifelong “invalid” who has converted a sofa, a stack of shawls, and a handful of ominous specialists into a private throne. For years, the family tiptoes around her “attacks,” treating her heart as more sacred than the British Empire itself.

Then Ellen arrives from Rhodesia: thin, sun-browned, coughing up blood—and entirely uninterested in being an invalid. She smokes, tells dry stories about lions and dust storms, and laughs at the idea of arranging her whole existence around a diagnosis. Her real illness quietly exposes Agnes’s theatrical one, and the household’s loyalties begin to drift from the sofa in the front room to the bed in the little back room.

As Ellen grows weaker, Agnes grows louder, determined not to surrender her monopoly on suffering. The family, the doctor, even the narrator himself all find it easier to protect the myth of her “lion’s heart” than to face what that myth is hiding. In the end, it’s not just a story about a fake invalid and a real consumptive; it’s about how a family chooses its legends—and who gets written into the margins so the legend can survive.

🎧 This video continues and concludes the full, two-part reading of “The Professional Invalid.”
🗣️ Narration is AI-generated; all text selection, editing, and presentation are done by me.

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© 2026 V.M.T. / AlgoRhythms: Poems Sung, Stories Told.
Story text and audio presentation. All rights reserved.

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