Invaders Arrived One October Night
A short story about rural life, love, and invaders from Mars.
On the night of October 30, 1938, Orson Welles duped the nation into a mass hysteria, causing millions of faithful radio listeners to flee into the streets to escape certain slaughter from Martian invaders.
At least, that’s what the newspapers of the day wanted you to believe.
According to modern sociologists and historians, reports of panic caused by the adapted radio play of The War of the Worlds were greatly exaggerated by the newspapers in an attempt to cast radio in an unfavorable light as an irresponsible and dangerous new medium.
In reality, only a fraction of those tuned to the Central Broadcast Company’s 8 PM theatrical show were actually fooled into thinking something disastrous was happening, and most of those folks were reassured after calls to local newspaper offices, police stations, or level-headed relatives. Very few people actually thought the world was ending at the hands of hostile Martian invaders with heat rays and poison gas.
Dale Hendricks, 17, was of one of those people. This is his story.
The autumn trees of 1938 had just passed their climax of reds, browns, and yellows, and the air carried a wispy smell of leaves, apple pies, wood fires, and straw bales in the small farming town of Greenwich, Ohio. The Hendricks’ family farmhouse stood cradled by three giant corn fields, stalks browned and dried with the season, and a bright green horse pasture.
At 8:00 PM, when he should have been out to Chatfield for the big county Halloween dance, Dale walked into the small front parlor of the farmhouse with a steaming mug of coffee and a battered deck of cards his father got free at the feed store and switched on the small Crosley wireless. The Chase and Sanborn Hour was just starting, and Dale liked ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his crazy characters. He needed a good distraction, something to keep his mind from that smoky town hall dance in Chatfield, where Clara Davis was likely, at this exact moment, having the time of her life in the arms of Percy Carruthers. So coffee, a few rounds of solitaire, and radio funnies were on the docket for the night.
Dale was not what you’d call a competitive type, but somehow he found himself pitted against Carruthers for Clara’s affections. Dale and Clara had known each other for years, and they just sort of clicked together like two cogs turning the same speed. She was easy to talk to, always friendly, and pretty in a way that complimented her toughness and smarts. Dale loved spending time with her, running errands with her or helping her dad out with chores over to the Davis farm. He had grown to love her as more than a friend, although he couldn’t find the courage to tell her so. The truth of his feelings were always blocked by a terrible thought: Keep quiet or you’ll go and ruin it, Dale. What if she didn’t feel the same? Can’t take that chance.
Percy Carruthers had no such inhibitions. Percy grew up in town, with a bit more pocket change to spend on nice clothes and hair tonic. Mrs. Carruthers was in good with Mrs. Davis, and the two ladies conspired to nudge Clara along towards Percy as a suitor. As a rule, Dale didn’t intrude on the business of others, but Percy’s tendency to linger when Dale and Clara were talking on their walks was starting to irk him. Dale caught Percy glancing at Clara a little too long and a little too lewd for his comfort, in class, at the music store, Pete’s Grocers, and just about everywhere else in town.
The conspiring ladies were anything but subtle. One evening this past summer, Dale was driving past Clara’s house when he saw the Carruthers’s truck parked out front. He turned his jalopy around and pulled alongside parked truck. To his surprise, Mrs. Carruthers, not Mrs. Davis, came to the door when he rang, and she had a cold air about her.
“Can I help you, Dale?” said Mrs. Carruthers through the screen.
“Evening, Mrs. Carruthers,” Dale said, glancing past her shoulder into the kitchen. “I came to say hello to Clara. Is she home?”
“There’s no one here for you, Dale. It’s best that you drive on home and have a nice evening,” she said, and shut the door.
Dale stood there on the porch a bit dumbstruck, then walked back to his truck. If he were a gambling fellow, he would bet five dollars that Clara and Percy were sitting together somewhere in the house, and Mrs. Carruthers and Mrs. Davis were making sure they were undisturbed.
On their walk to school the next morning, Dale asked Clara about the visit from the Carruthers clan.
“Percy brought me flowers,” she said. “Can you believe it? Mom was more excited about it than anybody. She grabbed the bouquet from my hands and put them in water and made a big fuss over it. Saying what a gentleman he was.” Then, imitating her mom: “’Isn’t that nice, isn’t he a gentleman?’ All that. It was embarrassing, going on as she did, with Mrs. Carruthers right there in the room, too.”
“What kind of flowers?” asked Dale.
“They were mums and daisies.”
“Ah,” said Dale. “Not roses and candy?”
“No, and what is that supposed to mean? Would it be so crazy if someone got me roses?”
“No, it’s just, I didn’t think you’d be the type to like flowers and that sort of thing.”
“Dale, it’s nice to find out someone notices you, or thinks about you like that. Anybody would like that, even me. As hard as that is to believe.”
“I didn’t mean to tease, that’s just not what I thought you’d go for,” Dale said.
“And why do you care what I’d go for?”
Dale was quiet.
“Anyway, Percy and I sat on the back porch while Mom and Mrs. Carruthers had tea in the kitchen. He asked me to the dance on Saturday.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said I couldn’t go with him on account of I’m playing with the band. Leroy Sharps saw me in the music store getting a new A string and said they were in need of a fiddler for Saturday’s dance, asked me if I’d care to sit in. I said I would, so it doesn’t make much sense having a date when I’m the one playing the music, not dancing.”
“That does make sense,” Dale said, holding back a grin.
Square dances were held nearly every Saturday, and Clara would go on to play her fiddle at most of them until age and arthritis got in the way. But the pains of that surrender are still decades ahead of that summer afternoon conversation. Back in those days, everybody went and danced with everybody else, and it was rare that you arrived with a date unless you were going steady with the person. It was being escorted home by someone special that really mattered.
Dale loved her playing, almost as much as dancing with her. When Clara was up in the band stand sawing away, he was happy to offer his arm to anyone needing a partner, usually older ladies who could still manage the beat or younger cousins who were just learning the steps. He was even content to lean against the wall with a drink and try to catch a smile from Clara.
What he never seemed to be able to do was ask to escort her home. The band would be packing up, she’d be chatting and smiling with the band or other dancers, thrilled but exhausted from another evening of high spirits. In this light, in these moments, Dale was always a bit star-struck, and his bashfulness bloomed to the surface and tied his tongue.
Even telling her she played great seemed like a dumb idea, and he’d only embarrass himself. She doesn’t need me to take her home, and why would she? She’ll ride with her family or band friends, he thought. So he settled for a wave and a smile from the side of the room, and he’d cherish both in a special place inside.
Percy Carruthers didn’t suffer from the same bashful disposition. He would spend most dances within 10 feet of the bandstand. He rarely danced with anyone, and he never missed an opportunity to get a word to Clara between songs. Dale was his biggest competition, but he never seemed to want to make a move, so Carruthers swooped in before any other boys could.
Clara would be bending over her fiddle case, carefully placing the instrument into the felt cut-out. “Great playing tonight, Clara,” Carruthers would say from behind her.
“Thank you,” she would say with a smile.
“Say, how about I take you home?” he’d ask.
She’d always say she was riding home with her pop or sister, carefully dodging Carruthers’s invitations, but thanking him nonetheless.
One early fall evening after a dance was finished, she was packing up when Carruthers sidled up again. She looked past him for Dale but didn’t see him where he had been standing. He must have followed the crowd down the stairs and out into the night.
“How about a ride home tonight?” Carruthers asked.
“Okay, Percy. That would be nice,” she said.
“So does this mean you and Percy are going steady?” Dale asked. Carruthers had not shut up about taking Clara home after that evening. Dale and his dad had run into Clara and her pop at the hardware store in town. She and Dale stood outside the glass storefront.
“Not especially. I know he likes me, and it’s nice to be liked like that. Besides, it not like anyone else is in line. And why do you care? Is there something you want to say to me?”
“No, I was just asking, that’s all.”
“Well, he asked me to go to the Halloween dance in Chatfield. I’m not playing fiddle that night, so I’m free to do some dancing. Just because he took me home doesn’t mean we’re steady. But I might go as his date to the Chatfield dance. If nobody else asks.”
Dale almost did it. Right there. He almost spoke up and said, “Don’t go with Percy, go with me. I love you and I want to be your date and I want you to be mine.”
But he didn’t. Instead, he said, “You’ll have a fine time.”
“Aren’t you going, too?”
“Nah, I’ll sit that one out. Mrs. Jensen is starting to get the wrong idea about me, I keep dancing with her each week. I don’t want to be the subject of her bridge club gossip. Besides, Chatfield’s a bit far. You’ll have a fine time.”
“You don’t need to say it twice, but yes. Percy will show me a fine time.”
Dale sat in his parlor and took another sip of coffee. The Crosley’s dial glowed a pale yellow. Ed Bergen’s first sketch was ending to applause, then a musical number began. Dale didn’t want to listen to music, it would only make him think of Clara, dancing and having a fine time with Percy. He leaned over and tuned the dial to the Columbia Broadcast System.
Warbled static gave way to piano music, which was just ending when an announcer came on with a news bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News.
Professor Morse of McGill University reports observing a total of three explosions on the planet Mars, between the hours of 7:45 PM and 9:20 PM, Eastern Standard Time. This confirms earlier reports received from American observatories. Now, nearer home, comes a special announcement from Trenton, New Jersey. It is reported that at 8:50 PM, a huge, flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty-two miles from Trenton. The flash in the sky was visible within a radius of several hundred miles and the noise of the impact was heard as far north as Elizabeth.
What? Dale turned up the volume.
The announcer then said a team was on the way to the impact site in Grovers Mill, and picked up the ongoing show from the Hotel Martinet in Brooklyn, New York, where Bobby Millette and his orchestra were playing dance music.
Just as he was about to turn the dial away from the dance music, the announcer cut back in. A mobile unit had arrived at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and were apparently broadcasting from the scene of an impact crater.
A man named Carl Phillips described the incredible scene, fumbling for the right words. Something was buried in a vast pit of torn and smoking earth. The object in the pit was half-buried from the force of the impact, and it had a distinct appearance of a large metal cylinder.
“A German bomb?” Dale said aloud to the empty room.
Police were on the scene; Dale could hear them fighting to keep gawkers back. The radio man, Phillips, was speaking to a professor.
Phillips interrupted the professor saying a humming sound is coming from the object, then Dale could hear it himself as the announcer moved his microphone closer to the smoking cylinder.
Then, apparently, the cylinder opened in a rending, screeching turn of a port cover, and the metal door slid from the cylinder and crashed to the earth. Dale could hear it all, right as it happened, right on the little radio in his front parlor.
He couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like the crowd in Grovers Mill saw a creature in the bowels of the object.
“What the hell is going on?” Dale shouted at the receiver. “Get out there!”
A jet of flame erupted from the cylinder, engulfing the nearest onlookers. The entire area was set ablaze: the woods, the barns, the fields. The gas tanks of cars exploded, and Dale could hear it all. The mass chaos, the destruction. The deaths.
The broadcast cut to silence, after which an announcer apologized for the difficulties with the signal, then switched to a message from an Army general declaring martial law.
Dale heard police briefings, Red Cross efforts, and rescue services coordinating. The unthinkable was happening. A large metallic structure on enormous walking legs arose from the pit, with something alien and sinister at the helm. And more of them were emerging from other impact craters all over the country. Dale listened in shock as railroad tracks were torn from the ground, bridges destroyed, and power lines cut as the machines marched on, killing thousands of terrified people. Highways became clogged with fleeing crowds as the Secretary of the Interior begged citizens to remain calm and act rationally. US Army Air Corps scout planes detected three machines marching toward a town called Somerville. Reports were coming in that coon hunters stumbled on another cylinder in a swamp south of Morristown. More walking machines were spotted by telephone operators and motorists. An artillery unit was choked to death by deadly black gas as they tried to bring one of the invaders down. Planes were shot out of the sky.
A reporter on the roof of the Broadcast Building in New York City related the evacuation of the city. Bridges were jammed with motor vehicles and the rivers were clogged with overloaded boats. The army had been wiped out, the artillery, the Air Corps, all gone. The reported saw them now, five giant machines were wading the Hudson.
At 8:38 PM, he read a bulletin: Martian cylinders are falling all over the country. One outside Buffalo, one in Chicago, St. Louis…seem to be timed and spaced. Now the first machine reaches the shore. He stands watching, looking over the city. His steel, cowlish head is even with the skyscrapers. He waits for the others. They rise like a line of new towers on the city’s west side. Now they’re lifting their metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out. Black smoke, drifting over the city. People trying to run away from it, but it’s no use. They’re falling like flies. Now the smoke’s crossing Sixth Avenue…Fifth Avenue…one hundred yards away…it’s fifty feet…
At 8:39 PM, the man broadcasting from the roof of a New York skyscraper fell dead from the toxic smoke. New York City had been destroyed.
Dale was paralyzed a moment, in shock, then felt a singular moment of clarity.
“Oh, God. Clara.”
The back door slammed, and Dale gunned his truck, spraying gravel and dust into the cool autumn air. Back in the parlor, over the wisps of steam from his abandoned coffee, a calm voice spoke from the little Crosley at 8:40 PM:
You are listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. The performance will continue after a brief intermission. This is the Columbia Broadcasting System.
His truck roared down the dark country road to Chatfield, his eyes darting to the sky often. He had to get Clara, to keep her safe. She’s a tough one, but if this is the end of the world, he thought, I want to be by her side.
He rounded curves and tore down tree-lined back roads into the darkness. High winds made the trees flail, and dark shapes in the fields appeared to pulsate with menace. A white hot light streaked across the black sky, leaving the afterimage of a fading red gash in Dale’s vision.
My God, there’s one now. The thing fell behind the trees far ahead in the direction he was going, which meant it landed somewhere between him and Chatfield. He would have to pass it to get to Clara.
He skidded to a stop, just off the road next to a corn field, the stalks shuddering in the wind. The night settled in around him, alone in his truck and far from town. He could turn around, go back for a few supplies, including his rifle. In his haste to leave, he didn’t even think about food, water, or protection. He had charged off into the night on impulse. He didn’t even warn his family. Maybe he should turn around, go back and figure out a plan. Act rationally, like the Army General instructed. Surely someone in Chatfield would have alerted the police and evacuated the dance. Wouldn’t they?
But one of those things just fell out of the sky. It must have landed nearby. The radio said they move towards populated areas. The machines take time to assemble themselves, then they begin their march. He thought of that bright dance hall, music playing, people dancing and clapping. He could see black smoke creeping in under the doors, gathering around people’s feet as they two-stepped, then the roof shearing away with cracking wood beams and falling debris. Clara would look up and see a black hulking beast against the stars, with glowing red pin-point eyes, raising a metal claw.
Dale gunned his truck, racing toward Chatfield into the night.
Monsters be damned.
In Chatfield, at the town hall, the party was in full swing. The dance committee had been excited to debut a new sound amplification system, with high-fidelity microphones and state-of-the-art loudspeakers. What no one at the time knew was the electrical load for the sound system was too much for the old building’s wiring. The decision to crank up the sound for a rollicking Scottish Reel caused a short circuit, which plunged both the dance hall and the entire small town of Chatfield into late October blackness.
The partiers hooped and cheered in the blackness, but after it became clear that the power was not coming back, the dance was officially ended early, with apologies.
Clara turned to Percy in the blackness. “I’d like to get out of here. Would you take me home, please?”
“Why? We can have all kinds of fun in the dark,” Percy said, putting his hands on her sides.
The thought of being with Percy for a long period of time in a pitch-black room, crowded or not, made her nervous.
“Come on, let’s go.”
“Fine,” he said.
People were milling out into the darkened main street. Headlights of various automobiles cast white-yellow spotlights along the glass-windowed store fronts. Percy walked Clara to his car.
Dale blew into Chatfield’s dark, short main street. The entire town was black, not a single light was on. He pulled up to the town hall. When he burst through the doors of the emptied dance room, he saw the floor was littered with cups, streamers, and party debris. A few chairs were overturned.
“Did you forget something?”
Dale turned and saw a dark figure in the corner. A small red glow appeared, then faded away. A cigarette.
“Where is everyone? Did it come this way?” Dale asked.
“Didn’t you hear? Power’s out. Short circuit. Everyone went home. Real bummer.”
Dale spun and ran back outside to his truck.
Clara sat in Percy’s car as he drove her home through the dark country night. After ten minutes of silent driving, Percy’s rear tire blew out, startling both of them as the car fishtailed a bit and Percy brought it to a crawling stop on the roadside.
“Well, shit, I got a flat,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” she said, then turned to look behind them. “Do you have a spare kit?”
“I have a spare, sure.” Percy took a deep breath. “But what say we turn this lemon into lemonade and sit for a bit. No rush to get home too quick, seeing as how the party ended early.”
“I’m not sure I want to stay here stranded any longer than I have to,” she said.
“Why not? You like me, don’t you? ’Cause I sure like you,” he said, grinning in a way that she despised. “Come on, nobody knows we’re out here, and nobody’s gonna know what we do.”
He pulled her to him and she slammed her elbow into his face. His head popped back and blood gushed from his nose. “Oaaowww! Jesus!”
“Don’t touch me,” she said. “What did you think we were going to do out here? Just who do you think you are? Hell, who do you think I am?”
“I don’t know! I’m sorry, I just — aaaah!” He reached out for her, in a placating attempt, but she grabbed and twisted his fingers in a vise-like hold.
Without letting go, she said, “Where’s the spare kit?”
“It’s — it’s in the back! Let go!” He was crying now.
She let go and stormed out of the car. Fuming, she grabbed the toolkit and spare from the back of the car.
“Listen, Clara, I’m sorry. Please don’t tell my mother about this!”
“Percy, I’m not giving you a second thought after this. Get out of the car. Do you know how to do this or do I need to fix this for you?”
He paused. He’d never changed a flat before.
Clara rolled her eyes at his silence. “Out. Get out of the car so I can jack it up,” she said. “Stand over there by the field and don’t move. When I’m done, I’m driving us home. Make yourself useful and give a shout if a car is coming. And if you come near me again, I’ll knock your teeth out.”
After working a few minutes, a pair of headlights appeared over a rise behind them.
“Car,” was all Percy managed to say.
She stood, saw the lights approaching fast and started waving. She’d know the sound of that jalopy anywhere.
Dale skidded to a stop next to Percy’s car.
“Am I glad to see you!” she said.
“Clara! Thank God! Are you okay? Come on, I’ll get you guys out of here!” he said.
“I’m fine. Percy isn’t. I’d be happy to get myself a lift home. Hey, are you okay? You look like you’ve been through the wringer,” she said.
“Just get in, and I’ll try to explain everything. Percy, you, too!”
“No, Percy can drive himself,” she said. Then she turned back to Percy. “All you have to do is tighten the lug nuts. Righty-tighty. Then lower the jack. Lefty-loosey. Here, you’ll need this.” She tossed the tire iron into the grass by the car. “Have a nice night.”
The first few spats of fat rain drops hit the roof of the truck as Dale sped away.
“Are you sure we should just leave him like this?” said Dale, looking in the rearview at the receding lights of Percy’s stranded car.
“He can stand a little work in the rain,” Clara said. “What’s going on? I thought you were staying in tonight.”
“Something awful happened tonight. I heard it all on the radio.”
The rain came down hard now, filling the windshield with translucent ripples lit by Dale’s headlights as they tried to pierce the night storm. The noise was aggressive, mean. Sitting inside the truck, in their small dry place, while the rain pounded from the outside, they felt closed off from the world. They had a little sanctuary. Jagged white light pierced the sky, leaving a pink after-image, followed by deep, chest rattling thunder.
“I don’t know how to say it, but I think we’re being bombed. I heard a man die on the radio, he was broadcasting from New York City. Everything there has been destroyed.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“I heard it all myself. The radio cut out. I heard it all happen, and as soon as I realized we were in trouble, I came to get you.”
“Oh my God, is it the Germans? Are they coming here?”
“It might be the Germans, but — and this sounds crazy, and I can’t believe I’m saying it — the government thinks the attacks are from space. From Mars.”
Clara thought that sounded crazy, but in that moment, driving down an isolated road in the night during a hard October thunderstorm, cut off from the normalcy of the outside world, the idea had a dark tint of possibility to it.
“Whoever it is, it’s bad, and people are dying,” Dale continued. “I think now we need to get you home, get some supplies, get our folks, and then head out of town. They’re attacking towns, cities, places where people are gathered. It’s terrible. Something falls out of the sky, then out of the crater this massive machine comes, spewing flames and poison gas. I saw something fall out of the sky on the way to Chatfield. If one of those things is near here, hopefully it can’t see any better than we can in this storm.”
“So what are you doing driving all the way out to Chatfield, alone? Why aren’t you holed up in a storm shelter with your family?”
“I guess I couldn’t do that unless I knew you were safe. I didn’t think about anything else, really, just finding you.”
“I can’t believe this. It’s the end of the world and you drove out here, alone, to find me.”
“Clara, you’re the best part of my life, and if the world is ending, I want to spend the last of my time on it with you, ok?” He turned to look at her.
“I love you. I do. Always have.”
She reached for his arm. “I-”
A dark shape appeared in the headlights in front of the truck. Dale swerved just enough to avoid hitting it, ran his right tires onto the berm and corrected. It was a deer. Dale and Clara looked at each other and couldn’t help laughing.
His jalopy sped down the road, toward town, tossing up a dark spray of water behind it.
The rain had backed off to a mild sprinkle by the time they pulled up to the side of Clara’s house. No lights were on. They got out and ran for the door, and were startled by the huge, dark shape of Patch, the family’s Black Hereford, standing in the yard.
After both of them gave a shout followed by mutual relief, Clara said,“Even if it’s the apocalypse, I don’t want Patch out in the open. Come on.”
She led Patch back to the barn, with Dale following. Dale kept scanning the skies.
They rushed into the house and tried the lights. They flicked on.
“Shut them off!” Dale said. “Don’t draw attention to the house!”
“Okay, but turn on the radio. See if there’s anything new about the attack.”
Dale hurried to the wireless and flicked it on. It hummed to life.
The kitchen light flickered on. “What’s going on? Clara?” It was her pop, Mr. Davis. “Dale? It’s awfully late for callers.”
“Pop, Dale says we’re under attack. Maybe Germans,” Clara said. “Turn the lights out!”
Dale tuned the radio to the Central Broadcast Company. “They’re on the air! Shh! Listen!”
“For those listeners who tuned in to Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast from 8 to 9 PM, Eastern Standard Time tonight and did not realize that that program was merely a modernized adaptation of H.G. Wells’s famous novel War of the Worlds, we are repeating the fact which was made clear four times on the program, that, while the names of some American cities were used, as in all novels and dramatizations, the entire story and all of its incidents were fictitious.”
“Wait, what?!” Dale said, turning pale. “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He twisted the dial, tuning to another station.
“Is that what you heard? War of the Worlds?” Clara asked.
“Hold on,” he said. He tried another station. Baseball scores. He turned the dial again. Cole Porter. Again. News. Nothing about attacks, nothing about death rays or toxic gas. Nothing about mass casualties, death, or destruction. Nothing about an invading army from Mars.
“I’ll be damned,” Dale said.
“Pop, you can go back to bed. Turns out everything’s fine. Come on, Dale, I’ll walk you to your truck.” Clara said.
Dale stood, speechless. She motioned him to follow. They walked out to his truck.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say,” he said, turning to her. “’Cept I’d like to throttle that Orson Welles.”
“Well,” Clara said, smiling, “you sure gave me an adventure. Maybe should be thanking Orson Welles. It took his Martians to get you off your butt to come talk to me about how you really feel. Without his Martians, I might never have known. Unless,” she ducked her head to catch his gaze, “that was fiction, too?”
His face flushed. “Hell, it’s in the open now, isn’t it? I do — despite the embarrassment — I do love you. It’s apparently the only real thing about tonight.”
“Well, thank God. Because you know what? I love you, too,” Clara said. “Just don’t wait for another alien invasion before you ask me out on an actual date.”
Then she leaned over and placed a sweet kiss on his cheek, right there under that dark — but very ordinary — October sky.
This story was based on actual encoded diary entries from 1944 and the author’s imagination. For the incredible story about discovering and decoding the diaries, read Secret Codes in Grandma’s Diaries.
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John Essex is a professional medical editor and founder of Peak Medical Editing. He is the former Editor in Chief of two U.S.-based scientific journals — American Pharmaceutical Review and Pharmaceutical Outsourcing. When not editing medical manuscripts, he enjoys reading, writing, watching movies, and cheering for his toddler son’s potty training efforts (though not necessarily in that order, and sometimes they overlap). He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and son. You can find him on Twitter as@johnessex3.
