Something’s not right. She could have told you while she sat under the first red light outside of town, the last red light before home. Skyline awash in a dark orange haze, metallic weeds sprouting from the pavement cracks, a steady runoff flow in the sloped embankment coming from…somewhere. The house was shaded as though draped in a dark veil, candlelight peering solemnly through the upstairs windows. Her bedroom and yours. 

 

She shivered on the porch after ringing the bell. The fever crawled up her arms. She didn’t feel it as something inside her, but as something outside that bit and latched on—she could only shake it for a second before it was back and then she’d shake again. 

 

It smelled like a Midwest death. Layered staleness upon what’s already dead. Grey storm clouds pregnant with ice rain, the scent of what’s imminent. The pale teal cloth on the old couch, the flowery striped wallpaper, the Persian rug with singed edges struck chords of familiarity in her. Mother stood in the hall.

 

“Dear, you’re home.”

 

That evening they had sweet potato casserole and watched the news until Wheel of Fortune. The dorm’s halogen glow still buzzed in her head. It survived the softness of the old china lamp beside her. Her dinner was going cold in her lap and she scratched at her leg with the fork. In the box TV Mother’s eyes were turquoise, film-covered like blindness. 

 

“It’s your turn to spin,” said Pat Sajak.

 

It was getting worse. Coming in through her nose now, swirling around behind her eyes. She could feel more than she wanted to, not just on herself but around her—dust accumulating on her arm in clusters, the contours of the springs beneath the couch molding to her own contours, the robotic fiery breathing of the furnace behind the door to her right. 

 

Something was wrong from the moment she arrived. Now she was lost in the haze of the new moment, seeking when things took their turn. She scoured her memory backwards like a magician pulling a scarf from his throat—the deeper she pulled the further she seemed from the end; she found nothing but wrongness previously hidden, tainting them through revision. A regression of experience, a succession of wrongness. There was only that word, “wrongness,” and it was wrong too. 

 

The road, the dorm, the auditorium—rows climbing from the stage reflected the spiraling design on the wall above her professor’s desk. Pencil scratching—she never used pencils—and page flipping and the whirring AC unit like the one in her house now were swirling. She bounced her right foot and with her left she felt the metal bars beneath the desk holding everything together. 

 

She’d been tapping her fork against the potatoes and they’d turned to an orange pulp on her plate. Mother snored beside her. They were alone but she was counting on your arrival. But where were you now? If she could talk to you, or if she could hear just something from you, could she know? Would you tell her? 

 

The house could still unsettle her. She was new enough to its corners and intricacies that something new could appear having slipped her memory, or something bizarrely familiar could startle her. Was the closet door that big when she left? Had Mother gotten the rug cleaned since she left? The sharp ceiling angles bore down on her as the fever began to crawl back onto her. She wished she could know where it came from. If she would never know how to stop it, she wished there were some way to go back and find its origin. It was worse than the physical thing that made her feel like tearing the skin off her arm. The worst was what that feeling did to her mind. But what if it wasn’t the fever that had been pulling at her for as long as she could remember? What was the fever at all? 

 

She knew she wasn’t thinking straight. Out on the porch, the wind began to whip and the flag beat above her while she smoked the last cigarette from her purse. Mother couldn’t see her but she’d be appalled—it was the smoking, she said, that drove her father from the church, from them. Into a life of career jumping and yearly visits from the big city. It eroded his foundation and sent him scrambling in every direction but theirs. But Mother didn’t know about anything else, what she’d picked up and had been picking up recently. 

 

Upstairs now, beneath her blankets in the darkness, having weathered the fibers of her memory, she figured it out. It was the cracked bathroom door, the rail-thin beam of light released from above the sink and expanding outwards, that reminded her. She saw a trace of the night before that had not since been available, a moment reached only by the fragments before and after, what became clear only after interpreting its context. She thought the pill was blue. She thought she was taking it for her headache. But the piling drinks were confusing her, that guy who’d been watching her said he would help and she trusted him because what else would she do, he sounded polite. Then what she had remembered, what came to her through the bathroom door—the shag carpet scratching at her cheeks, her head traveling down in an arc that would soon take it sinking through the floor, the top-heavy sensation leaving her top half immobile.

 

The night had left her with the fever and the enigmatic feeling that something had changed that could not be changed back. The old house and her mother, conversation suffocating and simultaneously all too sparse, night in a place that wasn’t quite home, all sent her reeling with the shakes again. She sweat through the flannel sheets that couldn’t keep her warm enough. Only one thought could hold off what was closing in on her: the hope that you were still coming home. But it was already midnight and besides what could you do? Maybe there’s just traffic. It can be killer at night sometimes. How long before you get here? Where are you? It didn’t take long before this, too, circled the drain in her mind. The fever was tugging at her on all sides. Where, damn it, where the hell are you?