[Tea on tuesday]

I know there must be some other writers lurking around here, so I'll take the plunge and kick this off with the rough draft of the first page of my latest story.

George was eight when he was struck by an impenetrable pyrexic phantasmagoria. His vocabulary became a twisted mash of circular word associations that lead to indecipherable conclusions. His tiny pores poured open an immensity of sweat like a faucet whose valves were too rusty to fully close, which seemed to unlock a malignant odor in the skin that had been intended by its creator to remain caged within until death and then decomposition would release it back into the world as a harbinger of sorrow. Still, none of the boy’s relatives that came to see him could leave without remarking upon the scent of lavender lurking just below the overpowering aroma like a nearby battlefield in which both armies had annihilated each other and so laid wedded together as their bodies returned to the earth.

At first the boy’s parents had tried diligently to change his sheets hourly and bathe him daily in the coldest water they could find. When there were no more dry sheets they placed buckets around his bed as if he were an old roof in the summer storms. Soon, however, their zeal dissipated as the chore took on a more and more monumental status. George had been in the fever throws for nine days when his parents, in a state of hopelessness, asked first their neighbors and then the hospital and then the priest what to do. The neighbors shunned them believing that one child producing such a volume of sweat and such a deathly smell must already be dead, and his continued respiration could only be the work of some demon or even Satan himself. The hospital was sympathetic to their plight, but they could no more render adequate facilities than the parents could. The priest saw the boy’s illness as a miraculous expression of supernatural power, but he was just the priest of a small fishing village, and he had no training in such matters. The priest dispatched a letter to his superiors in the city, and in the meantime located a long dried up watering hole that had been used in antiquity as a stopping point as ranchers drove their livestock northwards.

So, the boy was moved to the dried up watering hole just outside of town and assigned a rotation of nuns to watch over him. He was bound to an inflatable raft tethered by hemp rope to a stake hammered into the thick clay and mud of the shoal of the watering hole. He was given blankets that would sometimes slip into the sweat water that was filling the agelessly fallow watering hole. The nuns, at first, accepted the assignment with little concern or opposition, and would read to him from the book of Zachariah and fetch his soggy blankets from the cloudy water and carefully drape them back over him. But, soon the nuns volunteering to go to the watering hole became fewer and fewer. Most of the nuns who had first watched over the boy were now sick, not with a viral or bacterial infection, but with a deep-seated nausea that percolated throughout their bodies. The watering hole had been filled more than it had ever been with the sweat of the young boy in the intervening days, and the local wildlife had begun to drink from it and it slowly flowed out into the soils that nourished the wild grain grasses surrounding the diminutive pool. Those animals that did would become the legendary creatures, hippogryphs and jackalopes and elasmotheriums, that future cryptozoologists would endlessly debate and puzzle over.