Fever

When you feel like your life is a lie, you embrace brutal honesty. That's the philosophy I adopted walking the 6 steps into my house. I hugged three girls. The teenager, Juliet, even gave me decent squeeze. The kiss I placed on Shane's lips let her know a lot. It shaved an hour off our discussion later. I gave my daughters their cliche New York gifts, t-shirt's with I Heart NY and miniature Statue Of Liberty figurines, then walked my wife into the bedroom and locked the door.

"We're moving to New York, aren't we?" Shane asked, completely misreading the situation.

I laughed awkwardly and just began talking. Everything, from meeting Breann, to the nurse, to my heart, to poisonous metals slowly killing me. Shane knew if she didn't stop crying, the kids would be upset. So we just hugged each other a lot until Juliet, Kat, and Esme went to bed. I showed Shane the texts and emails from Breann. The progress we had made in corresponding with the others seemed to comfort my wife.

My chest hurt a lot. The headache was painful, but I didn't want to complain in front of my wife at the risk of making her more upset.. As we got ready to sleep, Shane pushed herself close to me and whispered in my ear, "I'm not ready to lose you. I want you to spend every spare minute finding a way to get these doctors to fix you. Whatever it takes, do it. We aren't ready to lose you." We held each other for a while then Shane said "You feel really warm, feverish actually. You should work from home tomorrow, you need rest." We fell asleep uncertain.

A fierce coldness consumed my body. I opened my eyes and wondered had I walked in my sleep, outside. I had not. Under a sheet, a bedspread and an afghan I was freezing. Not wanting to wake the warm body next to me, I arose and made my way into the bathroom. I stared at the pale face in the mirror. Remembering the words "if you feel fever, it's a warning." I opened a drawer and found a pair of scissors. Not wanting to wake her I didn't turn the hot water on, I just made an incision in the left part of my chest. I cut at the flesh until I felt an obstruction. The blood was significant. I was risking bleeding out. It took two towels to clean away enough blood to see what I was supposed to see. It was metal. Then I saw a red light reflected off the metal carriage. Standing before the mirror naked, I saw what I was for the first time in my 40 years. Part something, part something else, but definitely not what I am supposed to be.

"Baby, you ok?" I felt warm arms and chest wrapped around my freezing back and shoulders. I was awake but back in bed. I threw the covers off and anxiously investigated my body. Shane stared incredulousy at me and asked "are you having a bad dream or are you losing your mind?"

Nothing is there. No blood, no metal carriage, no red light, just me, flesh and bone. It must have been a dream, or a warning. The fever remained.

*blogger's note* - This is another piece of episodic fiction from a story I am writing. The other ones are here:

1) synchronicity
2) personality crisis
3) serendipity 6
4) Hot Dog Harbinger
5) Goodbye Stranger
6) House of Irony
7) Connection
8) Dead Man's Party
9) Hope Springs A Turtle
10) Drown
11) Toyed

Hope you enjoy reading. Feel free to constructively criticize. This is associated with a writing prompt of RISK by @Studio30plus over at http://www.studiothirtyplus.com/ .

Today's song is a request from a reader, Lisa aka @RandomGirlBlog. She said this would make a good theme for the story. Here's Thirty Seconds To Mars' The Kill....get your Jordan Catalano/Jared Leto fix....