2019-10-01 - Cleaning & Contemplation

Sparrow wiped everything down with disinfectant a second time, just to be safe. Even the interior of the fridge. No one in the house could afford to be that sick right now. Especially not her. She'd already skipped lab last Tuesday after finding Alfie in the basement under unsettling circumstances. It set her four hours back on an eight hour project and deprived her of a lab partner for the duration. It meant she had to skip kickboxing on Thursday to stay late at the lab and do the full experiment in one go while weaving around freshmen busy with quantitative analysis. Even thinking about what missing a whole week might mean made her queasy. So she didn't think about it. She just cleaned.

By the time she was done, the whole first floor reeked of artificial citrus, the lemon not quite as fresh as advertised, though the chemical smell at least offered some assurance that maybe all the germs were dead. The second floor was blessed with the more pleasant scent of fabric softener as she switched the loads, folding the first set of blankets after transferring the second from washer to dryer. Other than the thrum of that machine, the occasional thud of the unevenly distributed wet-blanket weight, the whole house was quiet. Such a contrast to the night prior, a third movie still running when she and Alfie absconded for her bedroom after everyone else had gone home or passed out.

She hadn't expected to find him sleeping when she got back to her room, "What--" making it out at a perfectly conversational volume before sinking into a softer, disconnected, "Oh." She only stood and stared for a few seconds before drawing close and carefully dislodging the paperback from under his cheek and between his fingers. It fit nicely on the nightstand, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and its Meanings by Jonathan Raban set atop Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman, both books beside the now-cold banana and granola pancakes she'd brought up earlier, only partially picked at.

She only stood and stared a few seconds more before turning to the bathroom. It was hard not to stare. Not just because she liked looking at Alfie, but because this sleep was precious and necessary, so exceedingly rare this past week. Since the Dream. The one they shared, divergent and terrifying. The few hours when exhaustion overtook chemical correction merited cherishing. If she didn't stink of sorta-citrus, she might've stared longer, might've outright watched him until she passed out too. But she needed to shower. Badly.

And it gave her time to think, to sort through some things she'd been avoiding. Like how hard it had been to talk with her brother about all of this because she was supposed to be the strong one, how that's what he needed of her while his world was getting so weird. Like how she'd been avoiding any real conversation with Jens because she knew she would want to ask him about dreams, push into creepy stuff when she still had too many other unresolved feelings going on over there. Like how good it had been to talk with Garrett, to know he'd experienced something similar, that there might be some pattern to be found. Which meant there might be rules. Laws. Science. Something she could understand.

Did she want to understand?

She stood under water until it ran tepid, just before it crept toward cold, that question still unanswered as she dried her hair and toweled off. She pulled up the covers as she sunk into bed next to Alfie, as she wrapped her arms around him as best she could without waking him and snuggled in close, no nearer to an answer as she drifted back to sleep, her face tucked against his shoulder.