Clare Cummings
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Ma told me I have the fever. Early morning while I lay still tangled in the thin bedsheets, she pressed a hand to my forehead and shook her head, brows pulled tight together. Later, she said it isn’t looking good. But she said that to Pop, not me. I heard her, whispering to Pop while they thought I was asleep. Ma doesn’t want me to think that I’m done for, but I know I am. Last month, Jesse got the fever and by the next week he had walked himself into the middle of town and ripped off his shirt and scratched at his skin until his fingernails were bloody. It took four of the neighbor men to bring him down. My older brother Ben said he knew Jesse was toast the second he said it was too hot in the schoolroom, because the winter here is so cold it freezes all the windows shut, so how the hell could Jesse have been too hot? But now I’m too hot, hot in a way that feels like fire and there are no chills, no shaking with cold and then boiling once again – there is only boiling.
Ben’s taken to standing at the foot of my bed after Ma leaves and just staring at me. I know he’s worried but he looks mad too, lips pursed and brows drawn, and I can’t figure why. I think he knows I’m done for, too. I think he’s standing there, watching my blood boil my heart until it stops dead in my chest, and thinking about how we’d sit together and peel potatoes for Ma, or get up together at dawn to collect the eggs from the chicken coop out back, and how once I’m gone, he’ll have to do all of those things alone.
When I sleep I’m too hot, and I have dreams that aren’t really dreams. I can feel the sheets scratch at my bare skin and the sweat that beads on my forehead and slips down my cheek, so how the hell could I be dreaming if I can feel the whole world around me? Like last night – I shut my eyes and when I opened them again, Ben was crouched in the corner of the room instead of standing near my bed like usual. He was half-hidden by the dark, hunched over with his back to me, and when he turned he had bugs in his hands, cockroaches pouring out of his fists like rushing water and I lay there, still as death, while he opened his mouth wide, too wide, and the cockroaches began to crawl up out of his throat. I opened my own mouth to scream but no sound came and when I looked down, the bugs were there, too, crawling across my own chest.
I ask Ben about it, later while he stands at the foot of my bed. He says nothing, just looks at me with those angry eyes turned even angrier, stares and stares then turns and leaves, sudden like a gust of brittle wind. I don’t exactly know how long I’ve been in this bed, burning, but it feels like maybe it’s been forever.
When night comes again I wait until Ma’s tired eyes droop and she leaves me, a fresh rag draped across my forehead. The fire that burns me from the inside out licks at my heels as I creep into the washroom. Each step takes terrible effort, but it is solace enough just to feel the bones in my legs stretch beneath my itching skin. I splash water onto my face just for the joy of using my hands for something other than untangling the sheets from my damp body. In the dirtied mirror my face stares back at me, waxen and pale, a familiar ghost. I open my mouth slowly, leaning over the sink to peer into the dark hole of my throat. I stand utterly still while small insect legs reach around the back of my tongue. The cockroach crawls leisurely out of my throat and across the inside of my mouth and I feel it, tickling.
Down the hall Ma calls for me and frantic dread seizes in my chest. I shut my mouth with a snap and the cockroach’s shell crunches between my teeth. Ma is happy I had the strength to get to the washroom by myself. I must be getting better, she says. I smile at her, tightlipped, terrified that she may see the legs poking through my teeth.
The next night, Ben visits me again. I toss and turn and look away because his eyes are huge and bulbous, bulging from their sockets, and his shirt is ripped in several places. Through it, I can see angry, red marks on his skin, like maybe he’s been scratching at it and it scares me terribly; I think of Jesse and how it took those four neighbor men to subdue him. A cold hand clutches my shoulder and I turn, try to wrench myself from Ben’s grip but his hand is nothing but roaches, hundreds and hundreds of roaches, scurrying down my own arm and across the sheets and Ben is smiling that awful, too-wide smile again. It splits his face near in half, his jaw wide and gaping like he’s going to scream but no sound comes from his open mouth, just more roaches, crawling over each other to get to me and finally I scream, so loud it tears my throat. Ma rushes in and grabs Ben away while he spits up more roaches and makes desperate noises like a wounded, wild animal.
I haven’t seen Ben since. But I’ve been feeling much better. Less hot. Ma says I’m awfully lucky. Pop says it’s a miracle of the Lord. I don’t tell them I can still feel the tickling of spindly legs, deep in my throat. When I ask about Ben, they look at each other with round eyes and say they have no idea who I’m talking about – it must have been the fever, confusing me. They lock his bedroom door and say it’s always been that way, all boarded up and I know they’re lying. I know they’re lying because when Ma wakes up sweating, burning, Pop looks to me, eyes hard, and says he’s sorry. Then he locks my door, too.
Clare Cummings is a current graduate student at Stony Brook University, pursuing her MFA in creative writing. She left her small Maryland farm town to attended Fordham University, where she recently received a Bachelor of Arts. You can find her work in literary magazines such as Ampersand, Bricolage, and Apprentice Writer.
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