She is sleeping and will not wake.

She feels herself move between thin sheets, nearly waking every so often. She shifts and feels her bed damp with sweat, moves to the other side of the bed. The night’s heat confuses her body; she tosses uncomfortably each minute, but cannot come out of the heat-induced stupor that invades her. She stays trapped in fever dreams.

She can hardly make sense of the things she sees. One moment things are bright and sharp, and someone speaks to her, and she answers – then she turns around and everything is in a blur, and all of the people she knows are people she doesn’t know. In a sleep that is on the edge of consciousness, she is both the character of the dream, who responds as if everything were normal, and herself, who does not understand what the dream-writer is doing or why.

And she thinks, “If I could only write something, it would help.”

But immediately turns over and continues in her perpetual haze, wasting away in discomfort and stillness.