The winds where howling round his dizzy head, beating back his fever with their icy current. For a moment, his sinuses and thoughts cleared, and he took a deep, grateful breath.
“Howard!” There was chastisement in the shrill call. “Howard, get back inside.”
He felt nurse’s soft hand close around his arm like iron, pulling him back in from the balcony. A torrent, not less violent than the one she’d saved him from, was spewing from nurse, long remonstrations he didn’t bother to hear. He was not expected to answer the philosophical inquiries she raised: “Do you want to be sick?” “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” “What if you had fallen?”
“I’m sorry, nurse,” he said meekly as she rolled him back into bed. She was still going, full steam, as she left him to the solace of his lonely room, and he wondered how long she would go on correcting him without that toilsome necessity of having him there to correct. How far down the hallway would she get? Would she make it to the kitchen still asking him things like, “What were you doing out of bed?” without the bother of his being there to not answer? Perhaps, once she sat down to finish her tea, the process of putting something into her mouth would necessitate the closing of it.
These musings, as distracting as they were, could not fully distract. His heart, filled with a longing that, were he given the space to answer nurse, he could not hope to express, pained him to his soul, and he rolled back out of bed and found the one, small, round window of his room. Outside the trees, their autumnal colors and leafless branches swayed and danced like towers of flames. The wind rushed and howled and stirred up the fallen leaves into the air. For a moment, as he stared, holding his breath to keep the fog from covering the glass, he could see the fairies at their sports, and their terrible grins.
The vision went, and the boy sighed, his exhalation fogging over his one portal to the storm which had captured his heart.
“Achoo!”
Tale Told 