The feeling came from her lower abdomen, somewhere down behind her belly button; it spread up and out, as if the illness were lifting its arms, preparing for something—a dive, a bow, a final methodical motion before some main event. She gripped the metal fence bordering the park pathway, bent over and vomited onto the blacktop.
The doctor had told her that exercise was okay, but to rest if she felt fatigued. “There will be nausea too,” he said. She hadn’t felt this bad since being pregnant and that was when she was young, softer on the inside, less hardened by the facts of life.
The puke was the color of the medicine, a bright pink like something from the Ghostbusters movie. She wasn’t supposed to take them on an empty stomach. “But what if I can’t eat anything?” she asked the doctor. Her husband looked at her like she was being melodramatic. She called it realistic—preparing herself for the worse.
The feeling passed, but she still felt it in her stomach. A tingling, as if some slime-covered feather were tickling at parts of her body that should never see the light of day, that should remain hidden, tucked away, doing their job, no questions asked. She watched a woman who must be in her sixties walk past, her arms swinging, her legs opening and closing like scissors in the hands of a deft seven year old, chomping their way down the pathway.
She sighed, tilted her head back and imagined falling asleep under the canopy of winter tree limbs, waking up warm, and laughing at how silly women look when they power walk.