When I entered her room, it was dark except for the weak flame of a mandarin candle burning by her bedside. The room smelled, unsurprisingly, like mandarin, but under that, something sour. "Pardon me," she yawned, "but I feel as though I've got a touch of the ague."

"The ague?" I asked. "God, it's been so long since I've heard anyone say that. So long that it was probably before I was born. I didn't think people got the ague anymore. I thought it was eradicated... whatever it is."

"Uh, I don't know," she mumbled as she turned over and half rose. "I just woke up. I was just talking. I was just using it as a general term for being sick. Like men is sometimes a generic term for humans, even though it doesn't mean the same thing at all."

"You're cute, jo." I smiled and walked over to her bedside. Her frocks were all crumpled up in a heap at the foot of her bed and spilling in a fat pile into her closet.

For some reason, that sight had me riveted. As my feet beg(a)n to drum unconsciously against the lines of her wooden floorboards, I started remembering fruit vendors in Mexico in their fancy dresses with beads of sweat rolling down their faces as they sold slices of flan and children freed themselves from the impossible folds. They never got their dresses dirty. Never. They were always as clean and shiny as the day they were made. Eons and eons of dirt falling on their dresses wouldn't have even smudged the fabric.

The thought made me want to jot something ridiculous on the dresses on the floor with a marker, like Greek letters - mu or xi or something - just to see if they would make a mark. But then, I knew, she would hate me.

As if to make up for the mere thought, I quickly mustered up an offer. "Would you like some rye toast with butter?" I asked. But she was asleep. I couldn't have given it to her if I had tried. She wouldn't have et it, anyway, with her stomach that ailed her. So I exit quietly.

The qi in the room was blocked from her illness, and the awkwardness that we had, and from my unkind thoughts, so I went back downstairs. The qats in the yard bent under the weight of the sun. They couldn't win, either; their future was rigged. They weren't meant to be in a yard in the hot, wet South. They were meant to be in the Middle East, just as the faux wats in yuppie towns across the country probably felt far from home when they thought of their native Thailand.

No od here, no escape, just like the endless march of numbers in pi, or an el car when the tracks are broken. Okay, that was just terrible. Possibly the worst metaphor I've ever written in my life. Zap this before it gets any worse. And for what? No idea yet, eh? Un-believable. How about by now? Is it obvious yet? Must I hit you over the head with it, like maybe with a bat? Or a bucket of hot aa? Ha!

And lo! It has hit you! Or, has it?