Bed

     Face-down on her side of the fully-made bed, hazy behind mosquito netting, is the body of a
young white woman. Her breathing is shallow, skin sweat-polished, the sheets around her damp to the point of translucence. On the floor beside the bed, a plastic water bottle is nearly empty. The net around her is dotted with a half-dozen species of insect, though for the moment, no mosquitoes.

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Room

     The walls are unsanded, stained a brown reminiscent of fertile earth. The effect is of burial. The floor is dusty, except for a clean patch beside her backpack, where something has recently been moved. The air is dense, and the fan does little to relieve this.

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Backpack

     Tipped over on the floor is a green backpack. It is half-full, the unused part rolled over and
strapped down. Beside the bag is a stack of neatly folded clothes: dresses, t-shirts, a pair of jeans, two pairs of silk slippers and a sun hat. Three books are tucked among the clothes. A travel guide and two novels by Robbe-Grillet. The bag is dusty, but in good condition, probably expensive. Inside, besides the clothes, are various medical supplies, insect repellent, and iodine tablets for water purification.

Desk

     The fan, a dented tin contraption scabbed with olive paint, sits on the warped wooden desk.
Clustered opposite the fan are a mobile phone, an international phone card, and a handwritten receipt for a sleeper bus to the capital, leaving at midnight. In the center of the desk, in front of a driftwood stool, are ten sheets of pale blue paper. On the topmost sheet, a single word has been written, then repeatedly struck out. It is a short word, probably three letters, ending with an m or n. Laid crosswise over the sheets is a ballpoint pen, the cap flattened and pocked with teethmarks.

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Nightstand

     On the nightstand, a handful of gold and silver change and a few crumpled bills in pink and blue. A line of four large, round, white pills stand out against the dark wood, spilled from an orange plastic medicine bottle labeled chloroquine. Beside the pills is a passport. Its garnet cover is worn, the crest no longer legible, and one corner has been folded over, leaving a crease. On top of the passport is a beer coaster with a map of Canada sketched on the back, major cities marked by dots, the Rocky Mountains a swath of carets extending through the southern border. Slightly to the east of the mountains, something, most likely a town, has been indicated with a dark star.

Window

     Outside, a rectangular sheet of harbor water is bracketed by three wooden docks and covered in an undulating layer of lime-green algae. Across the water, a line of identical doors ends with a palm- roofed bar doubling as the guesthouse check-in. The bar is empty. Beneath the window, two rowboats are lashed to a single rusty cleat. They float high on the tide, occasionally bumping one another, with the sound of the oars clacking in their locks. The bay is studded with misty islands backlit by the sun, inches from being extinguished by the sea. Walking along the docks, a brown man with a water buffalo tattoo on his forearm patiently skims algae from the surface of the water with a bamboo pole, lifting the green, dripping muck and setting in a plastic bucket.

Bathroom

     The bathroom has cement walls and a white tile floor, no roof except for the palms stretched
across the red sky. The shade and cement walls and lack of ceiling keep it cooler than the bedroom. The toilet is ceramic, but floor-level, a squatter. Beside it is a cement cistern of seawater; on the ledge are a pink plastic beach bucket and a bar of white soap. There is no mirror over the sink. The gleaming encourages monkeys to drop down from the palms and they steal everything, including the jewelry and electronics of guests who will later blame the guesthouse staff. On the sink, a lowball glass holds two toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste, nearly empty, rolled over on itself. The sink and toilet are flecked with blood.

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Dusk

     At sunset the mosquitoes leave their nooks – folds of clothes, behind the shutters, under the
desk – and they converge on the net. The sunlight reaches across the floor, crawls up the wall and hangs there, a perfect square, like a painting of a sunlit wall. Outside, the man with the water buffalo tattoo sets his pole on the dock and walks off with the plastic bucket, full of algae, though the sheet of water between docks is still evenly coated. From the rooms around the water, people emerge, languid with the heat, making their way to the bar singly or in pairs. A low hum of conversation is shredded at intervals by the blender.

Movement

     First, her hand, searching the empty side of the bed. Her body tenses, then relaxes, and she rolls over to reach through the mosquito net, sliding a pill across the nightstand into her palm, then back through the netting and into her mouth. She gropes for the water bottle, which she drags up the bed and drains. When she lets the bottle drop, it rolls into the depression created by her body and comes to rest against her side. She breathes and the room darkens.

Before the light goes, she reaches for the sheets of pale blue paper. Propped against the pillow, she uses her leg as a writing surface. Beneath the crossed-out word she writes MOM, followed by a comma. She stares at the netting, alive with bugs, her lips moving as if she were reading. I'm sorry, she writes. Then, I didn't think. She sets the paper and pen aside, rolls over and is soon asleep.

Fever Dream

     The walls are fertile earth and she is growing toward the sun, the heat, her head swelling,
inflating, trapped in a wedding veil of mosquito netting. In either hand she holds a toothbrush. There are stars in the bathroom. The toilet sinks into the ground, into a black hole with no bottom. Somewhere inside the hole a night bus crosses the back of a beer coaster, searching webs of ink for a town marked by a black star. Somewhere in the town is a fresh sheet of pale blue paper. Above that sheet a mosquito whines. The bathroom fills with stars. The revving of a blender. Snatches of conversation, laughter, an airplane taking flight. When she falls, the air she falls through is soft as the breeze from a fan.

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Darkness

     She wakes in pure dark. The murmur of conversation drifting over the water blends into a
language she alone understands. It is the language of the living dead. She feels the surface of the desk, fingers groping for her mobile phone. She has no missed calls. It is one minute past midnight.

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Fever Dream

     The bus rolls on pills, crossing the cover of a featureless passport, following a groove
inadvertently folded into the cover. The people on the bus speak to her in their blended language. Which stop is yours? Is this seat taken? Rows of pill-white eyes watch her trying to find a seat. She hugs her half-full backpack, fingers the beer coaster on which her stop is marked. The bus is lit by chemical light. The digital face of the sun bleaches the faces of the passengers, each of whom carries a backpack in their lap, their clothes and books, toothbrushes and expectations sealed in waterproof bags. Every seat is taken but the one beside her. The bus comes to the end of the groove folded into the passport cover, and sails into darkness.

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Dawn

     The air is cool, the light hazy. Islands materialize from the mist, black at first, then grey, violet, and green. The tide is out, and the smell of the uncovered shore hangs in the air, algae cooking in the mud. Inside the room, the netting around the bed hums, each mosquito the size of a child's splayed hand. The sheets are dry. Her hair is knotted, and she sleeps with one arm thrown over the spare pillow. The only noise is the rattling of the old tin fan, and distant monkeys screeching. Outside, the man with the buffalo tattoo crosses the dock carrying a length of bamboo and the white plastic bucket.

     A moan from the bed, followed by violent coughing. She tries to drink from the empty bottle, then presses the plastic to her face. It is the same temperature as the air. A ring of water swings around the bottom. She manages to turn the bottle upright, and holds the swig in her mouth, swallowing slowly. She lies back. She doesn't know what number to call to have water brought. Doesn't know the word for water.
     It's time for another pill, but she has no saliva to swallow it with.

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Monsoon

     The rain comes every day between two-thirty and three. There is blue sky, then black sky, with nothing in-between. The pounding rain on the zinc roof has a martial rhythm. In front of the window, the corrugated roof channels six streams of water, like from six open taps. She picks up the bottle and braces herself on her hands, crinkling the plastic, crawling under the netting and out of the bed, like some ancient creature leaving the land, crawling back to the sea.
     She hoists herself with the windowsill, holding the bottle outside, beneath a stream. Eyes
closed, she listens to the water striking plastic, then water sloshing water, the pitch deepening. Before the bottle is halfway full, her forearm begins to twitch, then tremble, and the bottle, too heavy to sustain, falls to the dock outside. She leans against the wall, watching water flow out of the bottle, through the cracks into the sea.
     One hand on the wall, she guides herself to the door. It swings easily inward. Cold rain sluices the sweat from her shoulders, dulls her fever, soaks into her hair, tickling her back. Sheets of rain pulled tight around her hide the islands, the bar, the ocean. The beating on the zinc roofs and flat palms is so loud that nothing else is audible, no voices, no blender, no clacking of oars. She takes the bottle with both hands. Everything left, all the water below the bottle's mouth, she drinks. Everything left to be felt, she feels. Water pounding on water. The fever, the rain, the dock rolling beneath her. The smell of sea and algae.

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Fever Dream

     The engines of the bus pulse as it bursts from the earth to take flight. The passengers applaud and string their silken clothes each to the other, making a festival bunting to celebrate the voyage. The bus shakes. The shaking lulls her deeper into her seat. Over the PA, the man with the buffalo tattoo is speaking. Are you alright? Miss, are you okay? She's okay. Even now her fever is receding, a sea gone off in search of the moon. The life she set out to find, she's found. It was there, in the water and containers of water. The bottle, the body, the muck, the monsoon. All these dreams the same dream, of a wooden room, a distant home, of leaving and being left, and islands taking form from the mist. All this water the same water.

David Serafino holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and has fiction appearing in the Los Angeles Review, Dulcet and Radon, with stories forthcoming in AGNI and Oyster River Pages. He has been nominated for the O. Henry and Pushcart prizes, as well as the WSFA Small Press Award, and has been shortlisted for the Zoetrope AllStory Prize, the Big Moose Prize, the Henfield Prize and the Master's Review Novel Excerpt contest.