The Change

The fever claimed Father first. He fell sick in the spring of 1918 and was gone, abruptly, not a week later. Mother was beside herself, certain that the war or the flu was bound to take me. She lived in a state of frantic fear.

Summer in Chicago that year was hotter that usual, and painfully still. Even the sounds of the city were stifled by the heat. In the fall, the flu returned for Mother and I. It was October when her cough started on a Sunday morning. By Friday she was confined to her hospital bed and I in a room across the hall.

We were both tended to diligently by Dr. Carlisle Cullen, a compassionate doctor who my mother took to immediately. On October 16, 1918, the day my mother was to slip into the abyss, she made a plea to Dr. Cullen. Her plea would change my life forever. With her last few breaths, she begged the doctor to save me – her only son, whom she had spent the last seventeen years worrying over.

Dr. Cullen worked late that night, tending to the patients who were moaning, fitfully, in their sleep. I listened to him making his rounds until I found the comfort of sleep myself, for the last time. I awoke to a sudden stillness. Where there was nothing, Dr. Cullen was suddenly standing over me. His eyes gave away that he was there for a devious purpose, but I was too weak to protest. He leaned carefully, tentatively over the hospital cot, slowly getting closer to me. I closed my eyes.

I felt a hot, slicing pain on my neck – like razor blades that had been heated over the stove. My eyes flew open in shock just in time to see the doctor pull his head sharply away from me, strained. It was my last coherent vision.

I no longer felt sick. I no longer felt weak. I no longer felt anything except an intense heat burning through my body. Every muscle tensed with the pain. It was searing, unbearable, consuming. I waited for the end. I wished for it, finally. But the heat continued, in waves, intensifying each time. I lost consciousness.

Every time I woke the heat was worse than the last time, seemingly focused stronger on every inch of my body. It was the most powerful in my chest, as if every sluggish beat of my heart pumped boiling oil through my veins. When awake, I tried to beg for death, but my throat, parched from the heat, prevented me from saying anything coherent.

Who knows how much time had passed. I was surely a crisp pile of flesh at this point. Alive. Dead. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. My throat burned now with all the heat from my body. All else was numb.

It was then I realized it. The heat pumping through my body had cooled because it had no source. My heart was silent.

I leapt, lithely from my bed . . .