Silenus

Sarah stood at the bus stop bracing the cold morning air, her blond hair tussled with the gusting breeze. The wind's prying fingers combed through her hair, rummaging, as though through a purse. It was still dark on the street: the sun hadn't yet encored. She retreated into the meager shelter of the bus stop and crossed her arms, slowly stamping her feet to try and trample the chill. Her only company were the infrequent joggers quickly panting past. Fumbling through her military-green jacket in search of her phone, half out of curiosity and the other half compulsion, she saw it was 5:54. The bus wouldn't arrive for another 6 minutes. To distract herself she thought of things she hadn't addressed from the night before: words that weren't said. Sarah's mother had called - the third time that day - heralding bad news from a different timezone. Her sister was sick and had been hospitalized due to what doctors thought was walking-pnuemonia. While in their care some complications arose - the cause of which were still being investigated, her mother announced - resulting in an infection in her blood: sepsis. Jane, Sarah's younger sister, since she had been born was ravaged by immunodeficit disorders. She had a rare congenital disease that required open-heart surgery while still in infancy. Sarah always suspected that her sister's surgery made her susceptible to newer and more frequent maladies; they cut her open and exposed her insides to all sorts of foreign bodies that normally wouldn't have had a means of entry, leaving her to fend for herself with only the frail and underdeveloped immune system of a newborn. To Sarah it was obvious Jane's life would be a constant battle against invading illness seeking refuge, looking to make a home in the fertile soil of her soul. To sickness, she was a sanctuary - an unexplored country rich with resources, vast un-patrolled borders and no standing army.

Lying in some darkened hospital room alone and beset by exhaustion she imagined her sister sallow and shaking, a persistent perspiration on her skin as though she were some dying amphibian estranged from water. How could the hospital be so negligent, she wondered scornfully. How could they not have detected the infection sooner? With a history like hers how hey could they have been so careless to allow this to happen? All of these questions had one resounding answer: they should have known. Her thoughts were hijacked by the hum of the approaching bus.

--------

Jane, waking bleary eyed and feeling made of feathers, glanced at the clock on the wall and saw it was 9am. She felt hot and her clothes stuck to her skin with a disgusting dampness. Slowly she turned her head west toward the window and saw the sun had risen. Part of her wished it hadn't. Secretly she prayed for the days to stop, for everything to stop; the itching in her blood that felt like small spiders and lice crawling through her veins; the seething pain in her lungs that burned like hot coals when she would try to breathe; the nausea and lightheadedness that made her weak. She often wondered why she hadn't died when she was a child. How much easier everything would've been if she had. A story about a king and a centaur in the woods rustles through her mind, somewhere between her pounding temples.

Slime oozed from her pores like uncooked eggwhites. She imagined her fever cooking them; fluffy white chunks falling from her skin - a delicious psoriasis. She was delirious. The vancomycin in her IV felt like antifreeze and made her cold. The sound of a machine mimicking her heartbeat beeped slow and weakly with an almost musical cadence. It sounded to her like the electronic bleating that would emanate from an electric sheep. She'd seen her first sheep at a petting zoo as a child, and ever since, she'd developed a deep attachment to the wooly creatures. Their warm presence made her feel less alone, less afraid; like sheep, who derive that same satisfaction from other sheep's company. Turning her gaze toward the chair beside the hopsital-bed, her hot blood painfully pooling into the other side of her face, she saw a stuffed sheep grazing on the cushion. It seemed to bleat in time with her heart. She was definitely delirious. The sheep's black eyes stared back at her blankly, but its mouth seemed to be moving with her pulse. Maybe it was just the throbbing behind her eyes making it look like that, she thought. She wanted to reach out and pull it toward her but to do so she would have to sit up, and to sit up would cause a sharp pressure change in her head - sending a torrent of palpitating pain raining down on her skull and out through her ears like pounding timpani.

On the table beside the chair a bouquet of flowers, imperceptibly wilting, marked the passing of time. Floating above them a pair of balloons with shiny metallic backs drunkenly danced to a tempo slower than her bpms. The balloon is full of helium, she thought, like my head. The bleating, rising a few octaves, became louder and higher in pitch, like the voice of a chipmunk. Lazily, her eyes returned to the sheep - now blinking its dark eyes in time with its mouth - which stared at her stuttering as if it was trying to tell her something. You're scaring me she thought, please stop. Seeming to read her mind but intent on disobeying, the sheep became more animated; blinking and bleating faster. Like an oven her lungs began heating her blood with each breath until it was boiling; beginning to melt her muscles as her heart pumped hard in her head. She was panting, fire fell from her lips. Her vision started to blacken, like the eyes of the sheep, who sat staring at her as though they'd traded places: her eyes dark and blinking; mouth open; white teeth clenching; she felt her mind turn to smoke.

The balloons listlessly orbited each other as her consciousness waned. She awoke wearing a glowing dress in a dark wood, two moons hanging large and low in the sky. A sheep stood before her wearing a sign around its neck.

It said