anti:freeze

I spent most of yesterday curled like a comma on the living room floor. My body was the punctuation of how it felt: a pause between busy phrases, stillness, breath. The fever was so high my quadriceps quivered when I tried to stand up. I melted back to the floor, unable to fetch water or chicken soup. Tears streamed, not from sadness, but from the fever (the kind of tears that leak without effort, no strain of muscles around the eye). The last time my forehead was this hot, my brother heaved me into a bathtub filled with cold water and fresh ice. Doctor's orders, in a tinny voice over the telephone.

I slipped in and out of heavy sleep all day and night.

Images I remember:

My mother, cradling a glass bowl filled with Jell-O salad, the kind with marshmallows and squishy fruit candies. I made a down payment on my coffin, she says. I wake up, briefly, and remember the day she actually said this. Ten years ago, when I was nineteen.

A ten-year-old version of me, with pigtails and red corduroys, running around a parking lot after dark. I was with someone - a friend or a cousin, maybe. We stayed out all night and slept behind a car. When our parents found us, they took us to a pile of dead bodies behind the house, teenage boys with bulletholes in their foreheads and chests, missing limbs, twisted expressions. They shoot you if you stay out past curfew. See?

Sewing a stack of velvet keys, stuffed with cotton balls. Each one was an exact copy, and each one could open a steel box hidden behind the wall. I had urgent reason to copy the keys.

This morning, I am strong enough to sit up again, but I already sense pressure inside my ears, the hot flush in my cheeks, a distinct chill in my shoulders. I am writing while I still can, in those in-between-hours, the ones where you wake up and feel okay again, only to find yourself collapsed on the floor an hour later, fever rising.