Nastiness Arrives
Saturday, October 13, 2007
It hit Saturday – the big bad day. The very bad day. Collette had had bad days before. She had been sick before. And it certainly wasn’t the worst day she had ever had. But… it was pretty bad.
She woke up at two in the morning feeling the lousiness of the past several days rolled together inside. This, mixed with the unnatural and nauseating feeling of unexpectedly waking from deep sleep to unusual pains, made her dread the rest of the day. After waking up off and on throughout the rest of the early morning hours, Collette realized at 6:30am that she was, indeed, quite sick.
For the rest of the day, she hardly budged from the red couch.
So OLeif and Puck had a dad-baby day. They drove over to Blockbuster to look around. They watched the rain come in. They almost went out to the fall festival in the cool gray afternoon, but decided against it. They took a walk around the neighborhood. They ate things. The usual manly stuff.
Collette’s eyes burned. She got the chills three times. Piled in a blanket and pillows watching innumerable episodes of Andy Griffith, I Love Lucy, and a man named Andrew who ate bizarre foods around the world on the travel channel. This included grab bags of unlaid chicken eggs and rooster tops, fried bees, fermented tofu blocks rinsed in fermented vegetable slop, fish sauce (also fermented), etcetera. Mostly in Vietnam. And Taiwan. But Collette was too ill to be unappetized. She decided that maybe they had discovered cable just in time after all. What better way to distract oneself from a day of misery than to watch a goofy man in his thirties eat abnormal foods?
Every limb had an ache, every ache had a limb. Odd parts of her head throbbed, and despite the fact that she was burning up, she couldn’t get warm enough under her comforter. OLeif, clattering pans and banging cabinets in the kitchen startled her throughout the times she thought she was maybe sleeping, but couldn’t exactly tell. Sickness was a strange thing sometimes…
But the rain, the rain she loved. She still wasn’t sick enough not to enjoy the sound of the rain.
There were a few cheers to the day. OLeif brought back cinnamon melts for her from his special weekly out-to-eat fund. And of course Puck’s smile – his smile so happy his whole face was a smile – that always made a bad day less bad.
Most of the rest of the day was a blur, an unhappy painful blur.
Meanwhile, Mom, Frances, and Linnea were at the fall festival. Petting zoo, blood drive, fair fare, hot air balloon (which was never launched due to wind), face painting (if Mollie decided to show up), Civil War reenactors, bonfires, square dances, caramel apples, etcetera.
That evening it was Ben-Hur’s turn to drop in. Collette was feeling less worse and napped in the bedroom while the boys shucked themselves out for sodas and an FM transmitter for Ben-Hur’s dad. Collette fell asleep to strains from the television of more bizarre foods around the world.
A lapse had come in the misery.
“Fax this to someone.” – Scrubs’ Janitor (one would have to see it, to understand)