a pop as he did so, then retrieved a pair of large forceps from his bag.
I tried to squirm again, but all strength had left me. I watched as he dipped the forceps into the jar and extracted a large leech—nearly three inches long. It wiggled grotesquely in the forceps’s grip, its body twisting this way and that, as Uncle Edward carefully lowered the creature towards my foot.
Just before the leech disappeared from my line of sight, I spied the jaws of the eager sucker opening and closing with appetite as it neared my flesh. Ma looked away, her eyes pinched tightly shut, and Pa, although having grown pale, watched nonetheless as Uncle Edward placed the leech on my foot. I was cold, but the leech was colder still, nearly as icy as Uncle Edward’s stethoscope. I imagined the invader’s tiny mouth fastening itself to my flesh, its rows of sharp little teeth gnawing, burrowing deep, as it began to feast on my blood. I saw it growing rotund as it engorged on my essence. I was trying to block the putrid spectacle from my mind when I saw Uncle Edward’s forceps return with another leech, this one meant for my shoulder, then another after that, and another after that.
I closed my eyes in hopes of finding the embracing grave of sleep.
* * *
? ? ?
VOICES SHOUTED ALL AROUND ME. I could hear Ma and Pa, Matilda and Thornley, and even Uncle Edward. I tried to make out the words, forcing my ears to hone in on one particular voice or another, but they made no sense. When I tried to open my eyes, I observed only the thick tar of nothingness, as deep and forbidding as the bogs behind our home. I found myself drowning in it.
For the briefest of seconds, I saw Matilda standing at my side, her face puffy and shining. In that instant she saw me, too, for her eyes grew large, and her mouth opened long enough to speak my name, crying out loud enough to garner the attention of the others in the room; they looked first at her, then down at me. I spotted Ma running towards the bed from the far corner, and Pa leaning over me on one side and Uncle Edward leaning over the other. Uncle Edward waved a long metal thermometer around and barked something at Thornley, but everything said after Matilda cried my name became lost language. I tried to force my eyes to lock onto Matilda’s, to hold her gaze as if squeezing her fingers in mine, but her sweet face faded away. Nothing remained but a shadow, then nothing at all.
“Everyone out!”
I heard the words, but they came to me from a great distance, barely audible over the cacophony. There was so much tumult around me that I believed I was hearing all the sounds in creation at one and the same time; every hiss, utterance, squeal, and cry in the known universe in unison, each subsequent outburst louder than the last. So loud it wielded wondrous pain, agonizing blades stabbing into my ears—and if I tried to comprehend what I heard, I knew it would render me insane.
“I want this room cleared now!”
It was Nanna Ellen. I knew it was her, somehow, even though the voice was not hers but was instead a wail, a banshee shrieking into a storm-filled night.
* * *
? ? ?
AT THAT POINT I must have succumbed to the blackness, for an instant later I found myself alone. Ma and Pa had vanished, as had Matilda, Thornley, and Uncle Edward. If Nanna Ellen remained, I did not see her; indeed, I did not see much of anything. All I saw were tiny pricks of light piercing the now fading black. For the first time, I noticed a smell, a musty odor much like a root cellar at the tail end of winter when only the rotting husks of summer’s bounty remain, blanketed in mold and feasted upon by the insidious inhabitants of the dank dirt.
“Nanna Ellen?” I whispered her name. So sore was my throat that I took my next breaths in tiny gasps, my eyes tearing from the effort.
Nanna Ellen did not answer, yet I somehow knew she