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The Fever

Memoir Project Rough Draft

I laid in the bed oozing and boiling. If I tried to move my arms, they drooped and dripped. If I tried to speak, my words were germy vaporous vowels. If I tried to get out of bed, I trembled and shivered. If I tried to sleep, I shuffled restlessly on top of the gelatin world, never able to sink into its depths. I was wide awake and dead asleep at the same time. Earlier my mom prayed over me and gave me two children’s aspirin for my fever, but God’s healing powers and man’s medicine took time to pass through my body, and while waiting for them to heal me, staring at the room around me seemed to be all I could do without aggravating my malady. I looked through the open doorway at the ambient lighting on the hallway walls, listening to the sounds of my mom and step-dad in the living room. The walls moved back and forth, fuzzed and doubled, spun, and became one big blur of yellow light casting circles in my direction. The sounds of my parent’s voices suddenly became louder, bringing things back into focus. I watched the patterns of wood grain in the bedroom door take on the faces of tree demons and water ghosts and it reminded me of the spooky blue abstract painting my mom burned a few days earlier in the backyard as an exorcism from her life of objects harboring devil spirits. Against the wall across from the foot of the bed, a vanity stood with a large, circular mirror and I could see myself in the reflection. My parent’s voices were now even louder and argumentative and my reflection did not appeal to me so I looked at the covers over my body and the wide empty space blanketed around my tiny five-year old body on a king-sized bed, and I listened to my mom yell, and accuse my step-dad of idolatry and other devilish things I didn’t understand. The covers were tight and I felt strapped to the bed so I looked straight above and watched neon shapes dance before my eyes on the canvas colored ceiling. My step-dad wasn’t saying much except that he didn’t understand how it could be a sin to love music. Was it a sin? I didn’t know. I only wished they would stop yelling. I liked my step-dad and it troubled me my mom was so mad at him, but I also trusted my mom more than anyone else, so despite my conflict and confusion, I decided to take her side. As I listened to their words—sin, spirits, music, idolatry, God, Devil—the fever eventually blended them into an underwater language I could not discern until the sharp slamming of a door shattered the spell. I looked at the hall walls and the demon door and listened: the old house spoke creakily in the silence and a winter wind blowing across Lake Erie tapped on the windows, begging to get into the warm house so it could sit by the fire, but the sounds of human voices were extinct. I became afraid I was in the house alone with the creaky old man that lived in the walls, the eerie door, the tapping wind, and the uneasy feelings from my parent’s argument.

“Mom!” I called out.

“Yes,” she said from the living room.

“Where’s dad?”

“He went to work. How are you doing?”

“I’m hot.”

She appeared in the doorway and floated onto the bed beside me. She brushed my hair aside and felt my forehead, “You’re still warm. Just try to get some sleep and you’ll feel better in the morning. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too mom.”

“Good night.” She kissed my forehead and left me with the glob dancers performing on the ceiling and I watched them hypnotically for what felt like a very long time until, with my eyes open, a dream appeared like a transparent movie in the space between the ceiling and the bed.

“Help!” A little girl in a red plaid dress, blond pigtails, and shinny black shoes appeared. “The witch is going to kill me and eat me. Oh you must help me, the witch, she is going to eat me, I just know it!” I watched myself take her hand and hold it tight as we ran in the direction where she pulled me. We ran down a sidewalk along side a busy street lit up by the mid-afternoon sun. Thirty feet behind us, a fat, green, warty, cackling, broomstick-riding, pointy-hat wearing witch flew in pursuit and we ran hand in hand through yards and across streets and between parked cars and into buildings and out of buildings and through school yards and over fences but no matter where we ran, the cackling hag was not far behind looking at us hungrily as she flew. So we kept running and running and running and running until we could not run any longer and we collapsed in the middle of an intersection with cars honking all around. We waited for the witch to take us away, but she was nowhere to be found. The little girl squeezed my hand tight and we looked in every direction, but sure enough, she was gone. The girl jumped and hugged me and squealed with joy, but just as she kissed me on the cheek, a shadow blotted out the sun and we looked up to see the witch swooping down from the sky and when she was upon us I closed my eyes and screamed, “Mom!”

The holographic dream vaporized. My mom’s shadowy figure rushed into my room and scooped me into her arms as I frantically told her about the girl and the witch. As I told my mom the story, she looked around the room like an animal sniffing the air for predators. When I finished my tale, she spoke into the room in a tone that made my feverish skin chill with goose bumps and terrified me far worse than the confrontation with the witch.

“Father,” she said, “in the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to remove any devil spirits that were brought into this house tonight, and I place a hedge of protection over my son so that they can no longer torment him with sickness or bad dreams. Father, I command this in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.”

When she was through praying, she told me my dad brought devil spirits home with him from his band rehearsal, but they were gone now so I could sleep peacefully. Then she smiled at me, kissed me, tucked me back in bed, kissed me good night again, and left the room with a “good night” trailing behind, and I drifted off to sleep at last.

In the morning, when I woke with the rising the sun, the fever and the spirits were both gone. But while one malady was cured, another was just beginning.

END
© 2006 Christian Cloud Abraham

Posted on April 16, 2006 in
Emotion: Fear, Type: Creative Nonfiction