by Jennifer Walker
With shock she noticed the scratch at lunch when she happened to look left while her arm was propped against the counter. It was two inches above her elbow and slashed straight across. Already it had scabbed, but badly, the scab puckered and raised, a jagged mass of ugly brown teeth. It hurt when she drew her finger across it, chips breaking off in pinches and stabs. Around it the skin pulled together rudely, swollen and inflamed, trapping underneath who knew what filth and horror.
How could she have missed it? She tried to keep eating the schav she ate every Wednesday at one, but the soup turned to slime in her mouth. No one could eat at a time like this! Right before her eyes her own arm was starting to putrefy. Wait any longer and who knows how far it would spread. It was likely even now, as she rapped her fingers against the counter in uncontained anguish while the waiter doddered at her bill, infinitesimal harbingers of doom were already coursing through her blood.
It wouldn’t do to stop at a hospital or urgent care. She couldn’t waste all that time waiting to be seen and she’d been thrown out of so many already. No, all she could do was run the three blocks back to her apartment and then take the stairs two at a time until she was gasping in front of her medicine cabinet, her reflection shuddering with every breath.
“Now Myra,” she said to the quaking image, “slow is steady and steady is fast.”
The image nodded. Isn’t this exactly why she’d taken all those first aid and CPR and crisis management classes? Wasn’t she the one in high school voted most likely to survive a pandemic? Hadn’t she devoted her life to the exhaustive study of caution? She always looked both ways and crossed on the green and not in between. She held the handrails going downstairs, put the bathmat down in the shower, washed her hands for at least twenty seconds, never talked to strangers, didn’t lean over wells, or out windows, or over ledges, or venture into caves or abandoned mine shafts. She never played in the trunks of cars, or large boxes, or old refrigerators, or piles of leaves. She never climbed trees, or forded rivers, or swam alone, or shared a drink or a snack. She never dived into a wave, or jumped off a dock, or swam under a waterfall. She never sky-dived or bungee-jumped or hang-glided or tried to do a backflip on a trampoline. She never even went on a trampoline. And she never, ever, ever walked by herself at night. She took a cab! So how could she have let something so simple as a scratch become her undoing?
It must have happened the day before, on the train. There had been that woman with her dog. Myra always saw her on the train after lunch, the snarling beast in a kind of sling across her chest. She’d made a mistake that day, one of those asinine errors that are so stupidly inconceivable their discovery is like finding half a worm in your just bitten apple. Disorientingly appalling. She’d forgotten her hand sanitizer. So instead of palming the microbes of millions on the train car poles she tried to steady herself with a wide stance and slightly bent knees. It was not effective. Twice the train threw her back into the public radio tote the woman behind her clutched at her stomach, once it jolted her sideways into the tattooed bicep of the man on her right, and once the car twisted her around, lurching and turning at the same time, so that, despite her best bracing efforts, she slid up against the dog woman, the creature yapping and snapping the whole time, the woman throwing her free arm around the animal like it was a newborn baby.
The whole experience had been so humiliating, and the amount of germ exposure so paralyzing, that all Myra could do was bolt off the train at the next stop and walk in a muttering daze until she found a drugstore with an entire aisle devoted to hand sanitizer. Even after she washed every exposed part of her body in the drug store bathroom, thrice, and bought two large and five mini hand sanitizers, it took another two hours of inspecting all the various soaps, and cleansers, and antiseptic washes before Myra had the fortitude to get back on the train and go home. No wonder she never found the scratch—she’d been wearing long sleeves!
It had to be that dog. What else? She gave a last longing glance at her disinfectants, antimicrobial creams, and bandages of every size and shape, then closed the medicine cabinet. Before any of that she would have to find out about the dog. Did it have its shots? Could she have rabies? Or brucellosis? Or campylobacteriosis? Or leptospirosis? Or any number of named and unnamed infectious diseases with varying potentials for treatment? How much time did she actually have left?
She burst out of her apartment and down the stairs, each jolt of her foot against the dingy concrete sending a warning throb through the scab so by the time she was back on the sidewalk speeding toward the subway her arm steadily ached. But only once she was on the platform, waiting for the post lunch crowd, did she allow herself a look. The scab was now dark, almost a greenish-black, and the skin around it bubbled red. She spun about, paced the platform, peered in every direction. And then there she was, just coming down the subway steps, light brown hair pulled back in a casual ponytail, leggings, smart sneakers, and a neutral top with long, flowing lines. The carrier was across her chest, sagging with its weight. Myra squeezed through the people around her, holding her scab to ease the pain.
When she was just a few feet away, only one impervious commuter between them, she yelled, “Does your dog have all his shots? Did he get his rabies vaccine?”
Myra had already thought about how she’d make the woman show her the rabies tag, as proof, or find out the dog’s name and its vet to verify at the source. She’d even removed her hand and lifted up her arm, twisting it so the scab was mostly pointed in the woman’s direction. There would be no escape from the specter of her dog’s crime. But the woman just looked over her shoulder, clutching her carrier protectively as if there was another vicious lady with a dog behind her.
“No you! I’m talking to you.” Myra jabbed in the air toward the carrier, just missing the ear of the person between them.
The woman hunched forward, stuck her chin out and mouthed, “Me?”
That was when Myra saw the baby inside the carrier.
She melted back into the post-lunch swell, let it carry her along the platform until she was lost in the push and press of dispassionate, bustling bodies, the roar of the emerging train erasing the shame of her mistake. So she was wrong. The woman looked just like the lady. Anybody could have confused the two. Myra stared at the thinned-out crowd, the woman blessedly gone, and even, actually, everyone else who had been there, just seconds before, gone, with new people slowly filling in their places. And there, just over by the graffitied advertisement for an antifungal ointment Myra new, for a fact, did not work, was the lady! The right lady. Dark blond ponytail, loose fitting top with light grey leggings, orange carrier slung across her front like a pageant sash. How had she mistaken her before? She raised her arm again, waving the scab like a battle flag.
“Hey! Your dog scratched my arm. Or bit it. Does he have his—” But she stopped, still several yards away, when the woman lifted up a little baby, brought it to her shoulder, and started to bounce.
Now people were looking at her, closing in, shaking their heads.
“Back off lady,” one muttered.
“Go home and take your meds,” said another.
All Myra wanted to do was go home and take her meds, lots of them. She wanted her antiseptics and antibacterials and antifungals—that worked—and her vitamins C, D, E, and zinc. She wanted her warm compresses and epsom salt soaks, her magnesium and turmeric, her salves and tinctures and ointments and creams. Her arm felt full of gravel, dense and heavy, and when she looked at the scab, even in the dismal orange fluorescence of the station, it turned darker still and the skin around it pulsed purple and split. But she couldn’t treat it until she knew what to treat. Rabies changed everything! They’d have to see her right away in the ER then. They couldn’t kick her out.
Now she moved through the packed platform, the low tremor underfoot confirming the soon arriving next train. There was barely any time left to find the lady before the horde would be sucked inside the cars and spirited away. She thought she saw her over there, and then there, and then around there, each permutation of long ponytail, decorous leggings, and colorful carrier a perfect match. But all they turned out to be carrying were kids.
It wasn’t until she threw herself aboard the train in the last second, even as the doors were closing with their sinister sigh, that she realized she might have gotten it all wrong. The weight of her arm pulled at her neck and she began to feel dizzy. She looked around the train car, holding onto a pole with her good hand because she had a mini hand sanitizer in each of her pants pockets. Her vision blurred but it looked like there were two, maybe three women in the car who could be the one. She knew now none of them had dogs, knew every carrier like that in the world only carried babies, knew no dog ever had nor would be carried in a carrier like that. That’s why it must have been a baby that bit her. Could babies give you rabies? Why not? Especially if they hadn’t had their shots.
She stumbled a little getting to the first woman, almost crashing into the sleeping baby curled up against her chest like a mealworm. The woman yelped and quickly backed away as Myra, in as decent a voice she could manage, asked the woman if the baby had had its rabies shot.
“I have to know,” she said and tried to lift her bad arm so it could be seen. “Your baby bit me.” She didn’t waste time trying to chase the woman but spun around and leaned over the next one seated closest to her. “What about you? Did you get it its shots?”
Embarrassingly Myra heard she was starting to slur her words. She was so dizzy now it was hard to stay standing on the swaying train and sweat was making it impossible to keep hold of the poles. The seated woman was suddenly gone and Myra dropped into her seat, exhausted. She tried to see where the women went but the car was very dark, like they had just entered a tunnel, and her eyes kept involuntarily closing.
“Hey, hey,” said a woman close to her and Myra struggled to see. She had a long brown ponytail and a red and white striped carrier across her chest. She reached into it and took out a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff. “That arm looks pretty bad. I’m an ER doctor. Is it okay if I check you out?”
“Is it rabies?” Myra managed. “I was bit by a baby.”
“No,” the doctor said in a quiet, beatific voice. She gently laughed. “Not rabies. But I think it might be sepsis.”
There were some gasps now, perhaps Myra passed out, or the train swung around and she fell off the seat, but it didn’t matter. She wasn’t fazed by how her arm had gone numb or how she finally couldn’t see anything at all. Even the sudden sounds of scuffling and shouts, or the whine of a nearby defibrillator, didn’t raise concern. She was still stuck on the wonder of her new diagnosis. Sepsis. It had to be the most beautiful word she’d ever heard.
Jennifer Walker is a short story writer who grew up in a strange and unsettling place called the suburbs. Her stories can be read in recent issues of Eclectica Magazine, Five on the Fifth, and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Magazine. She now lives in the Virgin Islands with her girlfriend, two dogs, and an untold number of increasingly suspicious roosters.