When Terry has a temperature, her skin becomes exquisitely sensitive. It’s as if all her nerve endings prick up like hairs, perpendicular to the surface of herself, and vibrate with the loud sensations of air currents and soft fabrics.

Until she was nearly twenty she thought it happened to everyone. She figured skin hypersensitivity was a regular symptom of fever, like appetite loss and sleepiness. She’s sure she talked to her mother (aunt) about it, and also to her aunt (mother), but they must have shined her on. Terry is now twenty-five.

Her normal body temperature is around ninety-seven and a half. Even at ninety-nine degrees she begins to find it unbearable to pull her underpants down her thighs to use the toilet. This is a benign genetic condition, rarer than a sneeze-response to sunlight or the inability to smell freesias, and it’s how she knew, today, that she had a fever.

She was at work when she became aware of it. She rose this morning feeling weird, sure, but she expected that. It was like having a hard period, and not as bad as the hideous drippiness after cervical cryosurgery, with a bit of spaciness mixed in. Terry felt crampy and a little high. She had no appetite for breakfast but she was never hungry in the morning; today she skipped even her grapefruit juice. Her legs felt tingly on the bus ride in, reminding her of that phantom feeling she sometimes got when she stayed up too late, falling asleep in her chair and forgetting where her body was, stretching her feet out just to locate her deadened legs.

It wasn’t until she stopped in the ladies’ room before entering the office, when she pulled her soft panties down so she could release all that coffee-engendered commuting urine, that Terry knew she was ill.

“Whoh…” she breathed out through her mouth at the irritating/delicious sensation of white nylon on hot skin. “I must be warm.” She raised the back of her right hand to her forehead and guessed she was up a degree. She would have panicked a little if she knew the reality was one hundred two point eight.

At first she didn’t call the doctor. She checked her phone messages and sorted the mail, warmly, dreamily. But when she got dizzy picking a paper clip up off the carpet, and after two co-workers commented on her flushed face, Terry figured she’d better take care of herself. She phoned the gynecologist’s office and was surprised when the advice nurse put her right through to Dr. Goldstein.

“Well, you’re post-operative, Honey,” the doctor explained. “Of course I want to talk to you.”

That startled Terry. It was just an abortion. It had its effect on her, sure, but that seemed mostly emotional. To Terry it had been a procedure more than an operation. Post-operative? She described her symptoms to Dr. Goldstein.

“You have an infection.”

“But it was so simple, and I was well-scrubbed.” Terry can’t forget that scrubbing. Brisk and business-like. The farthest you could get from erotic. But she must have been inflamed or something. That scrubbing, under the influence of intravenous Valium, was a memorable experience.