No Fever

by Maris Catherine Tiller

Carrie woke up feeling like her nose and head were stuffed with cotton. Neither nostril allowed her to breathe, and her throat raged with a raw, dry pain. She moaned, sat up, and blood rushed to her head. She realized her ears were clogged as well. The birds outside, the hum of the air conditioner, all sounded muffled and far away. 

She went over to her dresser and picked up the thermometer sitting in a blue porcelain cup. She pressed the button and slid the narrow rod between her lips under her weak, slippery tongue. She tried to refrain from holding it with her teeth. It chirped; no fever. Carrie sighed: a fever would be at least an excuse to lay in bed, to miss work. She had no real proof of her illness; the thermometer had been definitive. 

Just looking for an excuse to miss work, she thought, Lazy. Silly. Stupid. 

Carrie sucked in hard through her nostrils and felt thick mucus slide up, then settle back down into the canals of her nose. There was a sharp, slithering pain in the pit of her stomach, so she decided to skip breakfast. 

Something, Carrie thought, has broken into my house and given me a cold. She started to laugh, giving way to a fit of coughing that would not stop. Carrie tried to catch her breath long enough to put her head through the top of her stiff, gray, professional dress and expelled molecules of spit and green mucus into the fabric. She tore the dress from her body and threw it on the ground with all the conviction of a child throwing a temper tantrum. She stood for a moment, half naked and still coughing. In her stomach something was writhing, working its way up. 

Carrie rushed to the bathroom, phone in hand. She positioned herself, hunched and hacking, over the toilet bowl. With every retch her muscles contracted, relaxed, then contracted again. Her entire body pulsed with coughing. Vomiting would have been a relief. Her hand shaking, she pulled out her phone and called her boss. 

“Hello?” 

“Hello?” Carrie said between gasps, “Jim? It’s Carrie. Listen—” 

“Carrie, you’re going to be late,” the voice on the other end said. 

Not vomiting but coughing up: green, viscous mucus tinged with a reddish color. “No, Jim,” she said, “Listen. I don’t think I can come in today.” 

“Oh?” he asked, skeptical, “And why not?” 

Carrie’s coughing stopped, and she caught her breath. “I’m—” she started, “I don’t know. Something’s wrong with me. I’m really sick.” 

“Do you have a fever?” 

Carrie’s mouth erupted with a great glob of something white that landed in the toilet bowl, above the water. It shimmered like it was moving 

“No,” she said. 

“Then you can come in,” Jim said, “And I’ll excuse your lateness this time but next time you try and pull something like this—” 

Carrie groaned. “Come on.” 

“If you show me you’re not committed,” he said, “It’s out of my hands.” 

Carrie thought with venom, I’d like to see whatever this shit is smack you right in the face. Right from my mouth. Here’s a big fucking present. 

“But Jim—” she stopped. A fit of coughing gripped her again. Her phone fell to the floor as her hand went to her throat. 

“Carrie?” Jim’s voice on her phone called from the floor.

It was coming up now, that big mass of vomit she expected. As it came up her throat, however, Carrie realized the thing was solid, and its forward momentum was not of her alone; it was crawling. 

There was a moment, before the head emerged, where Carrie wondered if she could still swallow it down. 

The invader—fat, cylindrical, long—forced its way out of Carrie’s mouth and flopped over the toilet bowl with a wet, ugly sound. It squirmed as if it were dying, stark white and coated with the same phlegmy slime Carrie had coughed up. She gazed at the thing with no thoughts, her hand still holding her throat. 

“Hello? Carrie?” Jim’s insistent voice continued to talk in the background, faded. He paused for a moment, then said, “I expect you to be in by ten, at the latest.” There was a long, monotonous beep, and nothing broke it.

Maris Catherine Tiller is a fiction writer from Virginia and has been writing all her life. Her work has been featured in The Aubade, Haunted Portal Magazine, 101 Words, and Flash Phantoms. She has work forthcoming in Gargoyle. She is currently enrolled in the M.F.A. program for Fiction at George Mason University and is primarily a writer of short fiction.