It starts in your hands. You wake one morning, tired and groggy, and it’s not until brushing your teeth you realize the soreness in your hands. As the day progresses tightness expands across your low back. You stretch and pop three aspirin but by evening it’s clear you’re sick. 

Common colds are, by definition, common. They follow a predictable path, and as you are not immune from either commonality or predicability you have contracted a cold. You’re running a low fever and your joints feel chiseled. You barely sleep.

You wake to a pounding headache. Your nose is stuffed and mucus stains the back of your throat. By lunch your voice disappears and your nose turns red. Each time you cough gunk sputters up the back of your throat and fills your mouth with chewy, slippery gobs of green you spit down the sink. Your temperature’s risen and the back of your tongue is a morass of white-dotted stumps. 

You see the doctor and are given drugs that promise to de-this and anti-that. Their most immediate impact is to dull your mind and turn it to fuzz. After leaving the pharmacy you wonder if antibiotics have any street value. You know nothing about the street value of drugs. You’re simply tired. Sleep is what eludes you. You swallow more drugs and finally you sleep. 

Your alarm blares but you don’t wake. You remain in bed as morning turns to noon then after-noon and dinner passes. Darkness expands and you sleep until you never wake up. 

It takes several days but a neighbor eventually calls 911. The landlord nervously unlocks the door and an acne-scarred young police officer with shaking hands finds your body. Time’s passage hasn’t been kind, and the sight sickens her.

An ambulance arrives. There are no lights or sirens for there’s nothing requiring a speedy response. Your body is hefted atop a gurney and draped beneath a flimsy, pistachio-colored sheet. You’re whisked from the premises like a pop-star after a show. The ambulance stops several times before arriving at the hospital. One wheel on the gurney catches and you’re propelled down the hall at an awkward slant. 

A door slams and there is silence then cold. Time has lost its orientation and finally there is blazing fire. The rising ashes are the color of unwashed salt. 

A breeze sweeps you to a desolate train stop where you wait alone in a shroud of darkness. Trains scream and hum through the distance until one stops and you clamor aboard. As the train accelerates the darknesses lightens and sticks to your cheeks like spiders’ webs. Finally you’re shattered by light. Your eyes slowly adjust and you look down toward your hands, so tiny and filled with life.