At the urgent care center, the nurse took my temperature and said I had a fever. But I haven’t felt warm at all, I protested. You’re burning up inside, she said, softening rage with serenity. Perhaps white doves were nesting in my hair, and underneath tongues of flame licked their wings. It felt as if the world was resting on my scalp, and I cradled it like a sunbeam. I wondered why I couldn’t seek comfort by leaning on my elbows while reading Dante’s Inferno. Why not become a cider song or a cigarette? On the bathroom wall, I saw a woman’s face, an owl, and a pearl button blinking through marble veins. What did the button know that I did not? When I got home, I reached for a flashlight under my pillow that turned into an eel. I remembered the time I narrowly escaped my birthday party when the cake caught fire. Before my father died, he left his glasses on the kitchen table. The copper rims were too hot to touch, then melted away. His face was revealed in a flock of birds.

My brother is a deer, a young buck staring into my eyes until they burn. Between the trees I can barely see him, but he can clearly spot me. His hide is chestnut brown. I glance in the mirror but there is no reflection. He is missing. I am missing his lungs, tied to an empty crib. Yellow balloons dance erratically, not yet deflated. I scream out, coughing. He crosses a bridge, yellow leaves clinging to his feet. He mouths the title words of a George Michael/ Elton John song, a pop hit the year before he died: Don’t let the sun go down on me. But the sun has already gone, traveling to its resting place faster than a sneeze.