Free Dinner Along the Amazon by Timothy Findley

motion of swinging her legs over the side made her even more nauseous and she nearly fell forward onto the floor.
    She attempted to stand, but this was even worse and she knew that she would have to be sick there and then. She lunged towards the bathroom but couldn’t reach the toilet or the sink and was sick on the tiled floor. “How disgusting,” she said. “How revolting.”
    After a moment she recovered and took a towel from the towel rack and wet it under the taps in the bathtub. She wiped off her face and her hands and threw the towel into the corner, looking after it as though it were a discarded victim of the plague, then she took another towel, soaked it in cold water and returned to the bedroom, shutting the bathroom door behind her.
    Back on the bed she put the cold towel behind her neck and lay back on the pillows. However, the smell of the perfume soon began to reattract her attention and she looked about her to see where it was coming from. Finally after scrutinizing the floor and the bed, and after holding her negligee sleeves up to her nose, she noticed the stain on the wall. She closed one eye to look at it, then she opened that eye and closed the other. But she couldn’t focus her mind on it. She stared at it—opening and closing her eyes—but she could make nothing of it. Finally she just sighed its presence out of her mind and decided to open her window.
    At the window, the glare of the afternoon sun stunned he:
    and she fell back into the shadows. In doing so she stepped on a piece of glass and cut the ball of her right foot painfully.
    “Oh God,” she muttered, “what is happening ? What is happening to me?”
    She limped into the middle of the room and stood there swaying back and forth, looking from corner to corner, trying to make sense of what she saw.
    “I’m going to get blood on the rug,” she thought. “There will be blood all over the rug. A—ll over the ru—g . All over this bea-u-ti-ful god damn rug.” She felt oddly as though she were dreaming, and so, with the callous recklessness of a dreamer, without the responses of reality, she abandoned her bleeding foot with the same sense of useless incomprehension as she had the perfume stain on the wall.
    From beyond the open window she heard laughter. Pulling her negligee around her she walked delicately across to the window, where she leaned weakly against the sill. She could only barely see through the chiffon curtain, but she was afraid to expose her eyes again to the flat glare of the sun, so that she peered almost blindly out through the gauze.
    There was more laughter and at the end of the driveway she made out the black umbrella and the orange deck chair with Miss Kennedy sitting in it with Jo-Jo on her lap. Harper and the other children were gathered about her.
    “What on earth is she doing?” she wondered. “What is she doing in my deck chair? And that umbrella—that’s Peter’s umbrella. No!” she cried out. “No. No. That doesn’t make sense even. No one’s ever touched that—that was Peter’s—that was Peter’s—that was his. No one has ever touched it.”
    Perhaps she only imagined that she was calling to them because no one turned in her direction and there was no sign whatsoever that she had been heard. “I guess they know,” she said. “Of course they know.”
    Relieved, she tottered uncertainly back in the general direction of the bed, but she missed it and found herself suddenly sitting in the middle of the floor.
    For a second she was too stunned to react to what had happened but then a spasm of tears burned up towards her eyes from her throat and she wept, with her legs stretched out before her and her hands caught in the disorder of her negligee. She looked like a broken doll.
    After the tears a wild confusion of images appeared before her—some real, some flickering in and out of the picture from the past, some, distortions of the actual. She saw her own tears where they remained upon her