It's almost light and the child's worn a wash cloth since the late show. Sick children notice blue mornings when the other children are sleeping on stale Graham cracker crumbs sprinkled over bed sheets like fairy dust.

Sick children know well the taste of sputum mother collects for the doctor. "A little cloudier this time," he'll say and adjust his horn rims.

The recognizable rattle of the windowpane in red autumn is an old warning to take cover. A sick child will coerce a story from the wind songs to forget the sound of others at play on a June day. The sounds of loss and cackles and toy trucks.

Uneasy dominion over the child's body is a familiar terrain, topographical, if not monotonous. If you squeeze hard, she'll sound like a baby doll programmed to take imaginary water. She knows the tug of a bowel after too much coughing. She knows the weight of pneumonia on her chest like a big dog named Rufus.

Palpings and hesitations mark the delicacy of an especially pale skin, the color of mother's lace and the bathroom tile. The sick child will have spent many nights by the commode, exchanging dinner for an empty belly stoked by Pepto and Flintstone vitamins.

The sick child tastes purple cough syrup and even worse intestinal oil. "Relax," mother says, "It's just the ending. Like dry leaves."

There's an old fashioned thermometer under her tongue that only grown ups know how to read. It's useless to her at twenty-four. She's quiet now. She's not afraid of horse pills. She wears a scarf around her throat in 60 degree weather.

The sick child is a co-traveler with the elderly in thumbs and whirrs. Mommy had cancer, but she got the TB. Her mind moves in thickets of shadows on the wall. Daylight walls with curtains drawn are where the monsters bloom, an inner flexitivity for naps.

The sick child sits beside herself for comfort. "Who's that in the chair?," she asks. The doctor says, "It's only the fever."