TAMMY FLU AND JESUS
The doctor calls it Tammy Flu
as if it were a person.
I drive behind a car
with the license plate “AHA”
sunk into this wash of sickness
so deep I can’t tell
whether it’s morning or night.
Night punctuated by sleep,
interrupted by calls
from the yellow bedroom.
In the next city over, my son’s
piano teacher tells me,
the incubators are full.
Sick infants allowed no visitors.
The younger son has beaten the older
in the category “highest fever.”
If sickness were a contest,
he would win. If whining were
a contest, he would also win.
The doctor swabs my son’s nose
by which I mean she places
a thin wooden stick
at the side of his mouth to measure
its depth, then goes all the way
back through one nostril.
That afternoon, his nose bleeds
then stops. At night, I stay
in the room to make sure
he is still breathing. I wish
I’d never read the news story
about the mother putting her sick child
to bed, then drinking her coffee
the next morning, Christmas, thinking
that it’s nice having time
to herself, only her child upstairs
no longer breathing. My son
snores, thrashes, moves
from floor to bed and
back again. He sleeps half on
half off the mattress. I sit next to him,
the blue light of my screen
washing everything with panic.
What if I hear the voice, he asks,
you know, the one that says
you’re about to burn. I tell him
the angel will watch, not
the purple angel carved from stone
on his bedside table but the one
that is actual, though invisible,
the one who has promised
to watch over his life.
Is Jesus a grownup, he asks me
over breakfast the next morning.
I tell him that Jesus was
an interesting boy who liked
to learn. I leave out
the part about him abandoning
his parents, going missing
on purpose. My son will not
climb the stairs without
my hand in his. He tells me
he is scared of the house.
That night the kettle turns on
without warning in the next room.
I walk in to find a blue light
cast over everything
and the switch snapping off,
as if in response to my attention.
There is no water inside, but
I take the time to make
a cup of peppermint tea
because it seems like
the right thing to do.
Is he with you, the parents ask
each other frantically
when it is clear the child
is no longer there. My brothers
when younger would hide
in the center of the circled
bolts of cloth at the fabric store.
The women with sharp steel
scissors at the counter
would shake their heads
when my mother was not looking.
The brothers survived
to adulthood
with various deficits,
as we all have. With my son
sick I am too shaken
to offer my hands in healing.
Shaken, as a leaf, the cliché goes.
I study the tree’s form
through the window, note
the flock of birds who pass
and gather on the ground under
the feeder that I keep filling.
I buy my son Lucky Charms,
chocolate milk, rainbow
popsicles and say to him
It is your lucky day. Jesus,
the child, that is, once wrapped
a bird in his hands and
brought its beating heart back
to life. Or was it that he formed
the bird from the earth
at his feet, spat on it, then molded
the bird until it was a bird
that he set free into the sky.
The tests come back negative
but the medicine, it seems to help.
The fever releases my son slowly.
Tammy Flu’s visitation, it seems,
has been a success. She lays
her hands on my son’s
sweltering forehead. His skin
glows with heat. I cannot
see her face beneath her hair,
but she has done her work.
The frostbitten outdoors
keeps its cold countenance
turned away. Snow passes
over and around our house
in the rough January wind
but does not come to rest.