A work of flash fiction that speaks to the intense power of enchantment, a fever that’s so hard to bear…
by: Scott Ortolano
She moved with the easy grace of water, and the spark of her presence electrified the air, lacing it with a static friction. He couldn’t tell where it originated, whether from his fever which was well over 102, or from the rain residue on the Florida summer asphalt.
He should not be out. The disappointed look of his teachers — after deadlines passed or bizarre experimental projects — said more clearly than words that he was no scholar. Even so, he knew that he should not be out. The thought hammered through his DayQuil induced haze.
He had almost called it off many times, even as he was first getting into her car, but then, she had given him that look, the mischievous spark alive in her eyes, lips parted, teeth caressed by a searching tongue. The blue streak in her auburn hair, brushed softly against her tan cheek, as the too hot sun streamed through the tinted windshield. She had an odd way of smiling, it reached up to her eyes, creating the illusion that she was winking, looking, directly into your soul. Her eyes, they asked questions that he had not yet learned to name.
She laughed carelessly while swapping out the CD, holding the new disk between barely parted lips before exclaiming, “Let’s find trouble!” This would be the only time he wouldn’t regret that penchant of his to find it, moving from event to event, driven by the storm.
As his eyes lingered, that other fever overtook his better sense and he found them careening, maybe a bit too fast, down his street. The speakers reverberated in his head, and through the rest, as she sang along at full pitch. So taken away by the sound, he didn’t notice the slight concern in her gaze, that her look was one more of sympathy than what he would later come to understand as love. He was, after all, young and only human — or at least for what passed as such.
They had miraculously, he couldn’t recall how, made it to the mall and now found themselves walking through the half-deserted aisle ways of JC Penny, apocalyptic wasteland of a lost world — sanitized, clean, and doomed. They snapped photos in ridiculous outfits, passing time until the others arrived. Zander and Leo were late, as usual.
Let them take as long as they want, he lazily thought, as he took a picture of her with a too large sunhat and dark, wide, red sunglasses, lips pursed in a mock pose. Another, in a frog beanie, with long tassels and a pink pen with absurdly large feathers, fluttering. Her smiling face rippled into that look, which he’d never seen anyone else replicate — pulling into and highlighting her eyes, irresistible more for the pure exuberance and joy that it expressed than for the figure it struck.
His fevers raged, and he felt dizzy but words came to his mind in half a whisper, from the well-known shadow in the corner of his consciousness. “Let the world open up here and swallow me whole. If I feel too much, like everyone says, let the fire here, drown me in her company.”
“Amory, are you okay?”
Suddenly, pulled from the clouds, he found her eyes, staring directly, full of worry and concern. He couldn’t place the source, though deep down, he would later realize, he knew it wasn’t the same heat of his own heart.
Not wanting to lie, for she would know anyway, he cast his eyes downward and stammered, slowly, “No, I’m sick.”
She looked at him, taking a different meaning from the words. “Of course. All of us are.” And, pulled in from a distant place of her own, from the fight she had flown earlier that afternoon. Suddenly, she leaned forward, and the world froze as she pressed her lips against his, leaving them in place for a long time. Their pain, if only for a moment, unified, under the artificial glow of the recessed lighting.
When she pulled back, he did not see the sadness in her eyes or understand the purpose had been not to find love, only an effort to fix something broken.
The pull of his fevers had him now, completely. The flames radiated, emerging from his fingertips, seeping out of his pores, consuming even his surging mind. The ignorance of youth assured him that no one had ever been so in love.
Scott Ortolano is an English Professor at Florida SouthWestern State College.
