l a p s e

the blur

On the sixth day in the house, I do not think I woke up. The day comes in flashes when I try to remember – your face hunched over mine, leaning on the wall to be fed messily, the thick burning in my side. The lawyer did not wake either. She had stopped coughing and became silent as death but for the gentle rattling of her breath.

I heard splashing from below, heard shouting. You and the botanist. I worried, and then it tired me, because at this point I believe I went to sleep again. Hours later I woke up to eat soup again, barely four sips of it, before I lurched to the bathroom and spit it up. My vision went into a kaleidoscope. Someone wiped my head with a towel and piled one, two, three blankets on top of me. Even though it was not cold at all in what I could remember from the days previously – despite the rains the air had carried a brutish, battering humidity, one that had bathed us all in the sheen of sweat – that day I shivered like I had been shoved into a deep freezer.

My senses returned full force sometime in the evening, when the sun was just setting and the entire room was stroked in a kind of ethereal, distorted half-darkness. The peony-patterned curtains were striped in shadow: light, dark, light, dark. The wallpaper glistened with dust. A single shaft of sunlight entered the room like a spear from the window, impaling my stomach where it fell.

For all I could tell, I was alone. There was only a fluttering noise, like papers turning, or like very tiny footsteps through the thick sludge of disuse that coated the floor. Yawning, I turned over on my side on the narrow bed so that I was looking at the ground, careful not to put any weight on my side, and sure enough I found the source of the noise.

"Statue," I murmured, letting my hand down for her to crawl onto. She must have slipped out of my pocket sometime during my incessant sleep. Her fur was soft, crusted with something, and she gladly wriggled out of my hands and onto my chest, where I felt the pat of her paws on my chest for some time before she disappeared into my blankets again.

The door opened at this moment. "How are you feeling?" came a watery voice, and I realized it was watery only because the bearer's eyes were red-rimmed and painfully swollen.

"Alright," I told you, shifting so that I leaned against the headboard. I had done nothing at all to aggravate my wound but it pulsed and clotted with pain – blue and swirling, nauseating – and I had to throw my head back suddenly to gasp for air. I could feel my eyes rolling like marbles in my head.

I heard the thump of your footsteps as you hurried over to me. Placed your hand on my forehead – I recognized your fingers from earlier check-ups, and from the times I'd held your hands. My breath slowly welled up in my lungs again, and I nodded to tell you I was okay.

The bed shifted as you sat down beside me. Your hand on my forehead trailed down my face, tentatively, almost in the shape of a question mark, down my cheek. Lingered on my chin. Your face tilted to match the axis of mine; your eyes were depthless and I was drowning. Something was cloaking my mind in fog. A vision of your face swam in front of my eyes.

The last thing I heard was your voice - hoarse, like you had been hanged – calling my name. Once, and again. Then a last time.