Fever

I close my eyes... and a moment later I am seven years old, on the flower couch in my parents living room. Never very comfortable, but always providing a safe and cradled haven in the stormy sea of sickness.

Pitching and yawing in an Icarian dystopia, I lift my right hand - an enormous lobster claw - then drop it to my chest, that I might experience it's colossal weight.

I lift my head, only to realize it too presses ever downward through my pillow and into the sofa's frigid briny depths.

Surfacing.

Tributaries, formed on the watershed of my brow, become raging rivers careening wildly down my temple, pooling placidly in my ears.

I'm drifting.  Shudders, long past controlled, wrack my teeth from their dry berths.  Saliva scuttles their small craft, tossed out with the flotsam of a late lunch.