Once for a period of several days when she was eleven, she had felt she had no capability except to hear. Visual impressions were only enough to give her physical guidance, no pleasure, no pain. Food had no taste. Fingers might have frozen and broken off for all the good they were for touching. But her ears were agonizingly acute. She heard vapor rise. The sound of feet on earth was thunder. And thunder was the end of the world. It all happened on a fiercely hot day that ended in a storm, and when the lightning stopped blinding her and the thunder no longer tore her apart, she was as she had been before. She tasted, she touched. Her hearing was only normally sensitive.

She had forgot that strange time until today. She felt odd. In the morning her ears pounded as if each had a giant’s heart beating just inside the drums. Her face flushed with the first fever she had ever known except the temporary one sun sometimes gave her. That came from without; this fever, from within. Her vision blurred and melted. She rubbed her eyes and then saw halos around every object she singled out to gaze upon.

These sensations, or hallucinations, ceased abruptly, and she felt that she was herself once more: Selma in the garden, Selma on the porch, Selma running, Selma running across the yards and scattering a flock of strolling guineas, running across the fields, and into the woods. She quieted when she came to the creek. She picked a green leaf and chewed it, and when it set her teeth on edge, spat it out. She followed a snake that wriggled away from her until she found herself caught in a tangle of brush. By the time she extricated herself, he was gone. She went to the creek’s edge in something like a daze. It was happening. She would die, that was all, that was it. She looked down at the blood between her feet on the sand bar. She’d known it would be there before she looked. It was an expected horror, she did not know why, like the ugly gaps in her mouth when she lost her first teeth, worse than the boils she’d had everywhere the summer she was nine that disappeared as mysteriously as they had appeared when cooler weather came on.

She went home. When she got there, she walked quietly and steadily, not with her usual dartings and quick halts, across the last yard, into the kitchen wing at the back of the house, through the covered breezeway, through the wide hall of the big house into the front room where the stairs began.