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sillimarilli
In which tall, dark, and incoherent refuses to take his medicine and our fish finds a unique method of sweetening it.
It’s not so much a bed as it is a low cot with a net of woven ropes. He takes up all of it and then some. So when you try to wake up your fevered-to-the-point-of-incoherence guest to feed him some broth, it doesn’t really go quite as you planned.
The bowl goes flying and he’s got one of his humongous paws of his around your neck and is squeezing. Jesus! If his thumb and fingers were any longer, they might just meet at the back of your neck. He’s not really with it and you’ve trapped his good arm against his side, or he might have taken you out right there and then. Still, no sputtered pleas to let you go or bringing your elbow down on the crook of his arm or trying to worm a finger under his pinky so you can break it is working. He’s not happy with the situation, either, his eyes not quite tracking everything and rolling wildly. So when he suddenly yanks you close to get you under his greater weight and finish you for good, you do the only thing you can think of short of kneeing him in the balls. I mean, you’ve been trying to knee him in the balls, but it seems he has some experience in that area, too, and you just keep kneeing him in the thigh and hip, which is not having the effect you were going for.
Go with your opponent’s motion, not against, drilled into your head in the only hobby you stuck with for more than a few months, you go with it. Down he pulls and you go with him, but then veer off course closer in to him and, yes, you are now kissing him.
Yep, you just did that.
Which is not at all what your sensei recommended and you’re not sure what kind of points it might earn you in a match, but it seems to be having a greater effect than anything else you’ve tried.
The look on his face would be hilarious if he didn’t also have his paw still wrapped about your throat. Though, his grip has slackened with the shock you gave him, and that’s when you can break his hold.
You scramble back over the pile of rushes on your floor and out of reach. How far that reach is and how far back you have to go to get away from it is making you rather uncomfortable about right now.
“Jesus, motherfucker! I’m trying to help you, here,” you yell, for all the good that that is going to do. Yep, scream at the delirious patient, that always works wonders.
You may have had a bit of a shock yourself.
Maybe there should be less screaming. Your throat hurts enough as it is.
He stares at you as if he were attempting to do calculus in his head. He seems to work something out, because, for the first time, he seems to actually see you and not some imagined threat.
He blinks, working his mouth as if he were trying to come up with something to say.
The bowl lies upturned beneath the bench, its contents sunk deep into the bundles of rushes on the floor. God damn it. That hambone cost you the penny you got for all those mushrooms you tramped halfway to Combe to find. Well, at least you didn’t overturn the rest of the broth in the clay pot nestled among the coals and feed it to the fire instead of putting it in your own stomach.
And now he’s making a pitiful attempt at getting out of the bed. What for, you’re not sure, but it truly is pitiful. He’s used up all his strength trying to kill you and now he’s wobbly and uncoordinated as a newborn lamb.
“C’mon,” you say and, sighing, strain over and snatch up the bowl where it had tumbled. “We need to get something in you.”
He watches you warily in between blinking heavily, but after you take a mouthful where he can see it, accepts the willow bark tea. At your continued urging, he takes long, slow sips of it until it is gone, despite its bitterness. He’s awake enough you spoon out another bowl of the broth and get that in him too before he’s falling asleep in between mouthfuls and leaning heavily against your shoulder.
You’ll cull some greens and garlic tops from your garden, and grind up some of the last rye berries for the broth; see if you can keep up a pot of something going for a while. It’s pretty rare you get meat these days and he’s going to need a lot of protein to heal, probably best to get the most out of it you can. And, yeah, you’re probably going to want to be drinking your meals for a while, anyway. Damn it.
You helped him back to lying down on the mattress and now he’s already worn out and drifting off. And still as hot and restless as ever.
With that fever of his and those muscles on him, he’s burning through anything you can pour down his gullet. He’s probably getting as much nutrition in him as he’s expending in being awake and sitting up. It looks like he’d made an attempt at patching himself up and you did what you could to clean out his wounds, but you’re not sure what passes for antibiotics in this place. You’ve checked under the dampened rags you tied to him and the skin is red and hot to the touch. The ditch-water probably did him no favors. You didn’t pick up much during your stint as a personal care assistant in the nursing home but it did pay for a lot of your college tuition. And at least you can recognize infection when you see it and know what happens if you don’t catch it early. Sepsis is a nasty motherfucker. It’s an awful way to die.
God damn it. You stare at a gap between the wattle and daub and the window frame in the wall above the bed. Fuck. Really no good choices here. You need help.
