While I Was Gone

Right after my birthday, I fell ill, literally. I fell into bed and did not get out except to use the bathroom for nearly a week. I eat next to nothing. The kids bring me strange foods they've invented, the crusts off their sandwiches, and dubious teas. Ron brought me peach tea that tasted artificially flavored. But that could have just been my tongue on a virus.

I have fevered dreams of caves and woolly mammoths.

The moment I'd first gone to bed, I felt a stabbing pain in the back of my head. But that was just the fork I wore home in my hair. I stayed in bed, looking at my Mardi Gras beads, wondering when some kindly person was coming to euthanize me, or at least run me over with their car.

No such luck.

I asked someone the fairies to bring me the medicine box where we store the narcotic cough syrup. In a completely unrelated scene, Ron walked in with a plate of eggs and ate them himself in the rocking chair. He was angry that someone had left egg shells on the counter. The general consensus was if I had taught my children to clean up after themselves before I fell ill, there would be no need for someone to replace me, angrily or otherwise.

The narcotic cough syrup stays upstairs. Damn fairies!

My poor nightstand! That's a temporal scanner, by the way.

My view for a week.

I'm coughing until my throat bleeds. I'm coughing until I gag, and would vomit, except I've eaten nothing. Sudden sharp coughs that give no warning. At one point, I sit on the bed and cough and notice a spray of little blood droplets on the wall in front of me. Using wet toilet paper, I slowly wipe the wall clean, so none of my kids will need therapy later for doing so. Another cough and my laptop screen looks like it belongs in a horror film.

Coughing fits after five kids, you're lucky not to pee your pants. Fortunately, I'm so dehydrated there's little danger of that. However, on day three I start my period, and you ladies can imagine how this lends a whole new complication to the coughing thing. During the stronger coughing fits, I was able to achieve good range, if not accuracy, with my feminine hygiene products.

I use the house phone to tell a teen to bring me down the medicine box. She 'delegates' the job to a younger kid who promptly 'forgets'.

Please won't someone, anyone, have the decency to run over me with a mid-sized sedan?

On Friday morning, the text read, "I can't find my pink paper. Can you look for it?"

"What pink paper?" I send back.

Homework? Permission slip?

I pull myself from the bed where I have lain for the past five days in a flu coma, and head out to look for it.

Another text comes in, "Are you feeling better?"

A little... until I get upstairs.

I'm suddenly feeling much worse.

(Not true. These dishes were a fever-induced hallucination. The house was in fact spotless.)

No one was stepping up.

(Again, this was a hallucination... the trash was emptied daily.)

Kids construct barricades to keep the dog out, rather than pick up dishes and trash he'd get into. I cross the barrier. The rats lunge themselves at me when I come into the room. Water dish is bone dry and their food dish is buried somewhere in the bedding.

I can't see any pink paper.

Why is there a chair in the bathroom?

(There wasn't! Crazy fever dreams!)

My valentine's day roses still rotting in the vase.

Ancient weapons in the butter.

I find a birthday card from my brother that arrived a few days ago. No one brought it to me.

As I walk through my house, I find my house phone, smashed and broken, in two rooms.

No pink paper.

It's for scheduling, she says.

I take the dog out, and look for a pink paper, perhaps dropped on the walk up to the bus.

Broken goblet, thrown from the window?

I'm exhausted, and contemplating a nap among the glass shards in my flowerbed.

She texts back. "I found my pink paper."

I would like to take that narcotic cough syrup at this point, but someone else in the house is now feeling achy and fevered, so I dose him and figure one adult drugged into a stupor is plenty.