in the house

That Wednesday she started walking about the house. Doing laps, if you will, of the apartment. She had been sick for five days now. Maybe, she reasoned, if I start moving the body a little but more, I will force it to start working normally again. Maybe, she tought as she got a conscious feel of her barefoot weight on the house, I will trick it into being healthy with the distraction of routine walking. Different rooms had different temperatures, and this was not only evident in the way her unwashed hair clung to the back of her neck as she went stupidly from one to the other. The soles of her feet liked her bedroom better, the darkness of the last few days helped keep the floor cool. In the hallway she was puzzled for a couple of laps until it became clear that the unusually high temperature by the bookcase was due to a water pipe that ran just below that particular spot. Had she owned a cat, this would probably be a favorite siesta spot in a rainy day. She didn't own a cat out of fear it would be a certificate of sorts of her loneliness. In any case, having a pet while sick didn't seem like such a good idea at this moment. She could barely carry her own body from one room to the other, breaths becoming shorter with each step. Medicines were another little ritual. She had a hard time keeping all of them together, and she tended to move them from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen every six or eight hours. But her memory was doing allright. She hadn't mixed them up and she didn't have to see the prescription except the first time. That had been Saturday, after coming back from the hospital. A dreadful little affair. Her left wrist featured two purple marks where the nurse had failed to start the IV. It hurt a little when she slept on that side.

So she sleeps on her right side now. And in the morning she opens her left eye early and waits. She does what others would say is conscious breathing, looks around without moving her head so as not to wake up her nausea too early. [...]