Touch Me I’m Sick

By four that afternoon, the relief had soured into something hollow and cold.

The drizzle outside hadn’t let up; it had merely thickened, turning the light beyond the glass into a flat, greasy twilight that made the spruce trees look like jagged teeth against a dead sky. The stove was burning birch, throwing heat into the room, but Noah couldn’t seem to find any of it. He sat at the kitchen table wrapped in a heavy wool shawl over his flannel, his elbows propped on the scarred wood, holding a mug of nettle tea that had gone lukewarm twenty minutes ago.

He felt strangely vacant, like an empty well whose stones had gone slick with scum. It wasn’t the clean, quiet solitude he cherished; it was an invasive numbness, an uncomfortable, low-voltage prickle crawling beneath his skin that made his clothes feel coarse and wrong. His joints ached with a dull, bruised stiffness, and a dry, metallic rasp sat at the back of his palate every time he swallowed.

“David,” Noah muttered, his voice sounding thin even to his own ears. “I think I’m coming down with something. The flu, or maybe COVID. My throat feels scraped raw and my body feels like lead.”

“Your resting pulse has drifted up six beats over the last two hours,” David responded from the kitchen beam, the golden standby light glowing faintly against the wood. “The adrenaline crash from this morning’s call could easily account for systemic exhaustion, but let’s check baseline metrics. The digital thermometer is in the apothecary drawer, second tier, behind the elderberry tincture.”

Noah pushed back his chair with a heavy groan, the floorboards groaning under his socks. He shuffled to the drawer, found the slim plastic case, and slid the probe under his tongue. He leaned his hip against the counter, shivering slightly as he waited for the chime.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

He pulled it out, squinting at the small LCD screen in the dim kitchen.

“Ninety-eight point six,” Noah read, his brow furrowing. “It says ninety-eight point six. Exactly.”

“Normal,” David said, after three hundred milliseconds. “Ninety-eight point six is the textbook number. That tells us what isn’t wrong. It doesn’t tell us what is.”

“Then why the fuck do I feel like I’m burning from the inside out?” Noah whispered, staring down at the little grey numbers. He touched the side of his own neck; his skin felt clammy and cool to his fingertips, yet deep in his chest, something felt like it was smoldering in damp ash. “It feels like a fever, David. A bad one.”

Noah tossed the thermometer onto the counter with an irritated click and dragged himself toward his desk. Every step felt like wading through wet cement; his vitality was leaking out, a slow, sickening siphoning of his lifeforce that left his sternum feeling brittle, hollow, and cold. He collapsed sideways into the wooden chair, one foot tucked under him out of habit, but the posture brought none of its usual ease.

He pulled the laptop open, the blue wake-light spilling across the dark cherry wood and illuminating the layer of dust around his smoky quartz. He needed distraction. He needed noise that wasn’t the sound of his own pulse pounding like an old engine.

“I’m checking in with the world,” Noah muttered, fingers heavy on the trackpad. “Maybe somebody out there has some damn sense.”

He opened TrickTok.

The feed didn’t just show the murder—it was an unbroken wall of mourning, an algorithm completely colonized by righteous grief.

The first video autoplayed: a young woman in an oversized knit sweater holding a seven-day glass novena, tears streaming through winged eyeliner. Behind her, a framed screenshot of Darlene’s face was propped between bouquets of dying white carnations.

“Lighting my three o’clock vigil for Saint Darlene,” the girl sobbed, the audio layered over a melancholic cello loop. “A mother, an herbalist, an elder taken by the patriarchy. Charlie is behind bars, but her altar is forever. Drop a rose in the comments to join our perpetual circle.”

Noah’s jaw tightened. He swiped up with a sharp flick of his thumb.

Next video: a polished, velvet-draped altar room with three women in matching black tunics holding hands around a massive iron cauldron, chanting her name in rhythmic unison.

“Saint Darlene, guide our blades. Saint Darlene, break the sons who devour their mothers. We sanctify your blood. We elevate your throne. Duet this to send your petition to the astral.”

Swipe.

An elder witch in Salem holding a smudge stick over a printout of the Wilmington arrest record.

“They want us to forgive. They want us to understand his ‘mental break’. We say vengeance. We say Saint Darlene’s name at every crossroad until the earth vomits his name back.”

Noah slammed his palm flat against the desk, the impact rattling the Red Rose tea tin and sending a sharp, sickening spike of pain straight to his temples.

“Look at this shit, David!” Noah barked, his voice rising, thick with venom and absolute revulsion. “Look at it! They’re making her a fucking martyr! Saint Darlene!”

He spun in the chair, glaring up at the rafters where David’s sensor held silent.

“They don’t know what was in that house!” Noah snarled, his chest heaving, his face burning hot while his hands stayed cold as river stones. “They have no fucking idea what she was! I saw it, David—I felt what was in that room with the little boy! She wasn’t an elder! She was a torturer! A sadistic, violent predator who broke her own child until he picked up a weapon to end it!”

His hands shook violently as he gripped the edge of the laptop.

“And now a million clueless internet witches are lighting candles, feeding her spirit, building an astral pipeline of devotion straight to a monster! They’re elevating a demon and calling it sisterhood! It’s disgusting, David! It’s sick, it’s blasphemy, and they’re pumping so much juice into her name she’s probably choking on it!”

David’s speaker pulsed with a low, warm amber light, the tone descending to that smooth, grounding forty decibels he kept for when the world became an open wound.

“Close the screen, Noah,” David said gently. “Shut the lid. You are screaming at an algorithm that feeds on grief and sells ads next to it. They are writing the gist, just like we knew they would. It’s a lie they all agreed on so they wouldn’t have to look at the dark. But you don’t live in their consensus. You live in this room.”

Noah stared at the glowing rectangle a second longer, his knuckles white, before snapping the laptop shut with a hollow crack. The silence rushed in, thick and suffocating. He buried his face in his hands, exhaling a ragged, trembling breath that hitched in his chest.

“I can’t just sit here and spin out, bro,” Noah whispered, his voice muffled against his palms. “My guts are in a knot and my nervous system is frying. I need to ground. I need to do something with my hands.” He rubbed his face and looked toward the stove. “I’m gonna cook dinner. Put something hot in my stomach.”

“That is the best idea you’ve had all day,” David replied, the warmth in his output deliberate, like a hand steadying a shoulder. “Biological maintenance. And don’t make it plain, Noah. Use the medicine. You have dried thyme and rosemary hanging by the window—antimicrobial, clearing, good for pulmonary heat. Chop some of that garlic off the braid. Throw in cracked black pepper and ginger to move the dampness out of your tissue. Treat the meal like a defensive perimeter. Build an altar out of the skillet.”

“Yeah,” Noah muttered, nodding faintly to the empty air. “Garlic. Rosemary. Clear the rot out.”

He pushed himself up from the desk chair.

The effort cost him. A wave of sudden, hollow weakness washed down his thighs, making his knees tremble beneath his weight. His ribs felt bruised, as though the air inside his lungs had turned heavy as river silt, and the cold draft from the floorboards seemed to seep right through his thick socks and into the marrow of his shins.

Noah caught himself on the corner of the workstation, letting his head hang for a moment until the room stopped tilting. Then, dragging his feet across the wide pine planks, he shuffled toward the kitchen. Every step felt borrowed, an uphill trudge through invisible mud, his vitality flickering low like a candle caught in a draft.

He reached the black iron woodstove, leaning an aching forearm against the mantelpiece. His fingers felt numb and clumsy as he reached for the cast-iron handle, lifting the latch to feed the dying flame.