Fever (29 page)

Now voices are hushed, the crowd grows silent, everyone’s face is turned upward, eyes fixed on the red and white balloon. It rises in a slow ascent above them and to the right where the water glistens so invitingly, but as dark as the fathomless water in her dreams.

It rises higher, but its sideways movement is faster than its rising and now she is getting her first clear view of it, the heads of the balloonists just a suggestion above the sides of the fishermen’s boat they are using as a basket. It is above the heads of Jim and Jamie who are somewhere ahead of her, lost in the crowd on the ocean’s shore.

Nobody is moving now, nobody is speaking, the upward, onward rush of the balloon holds everyone’s attention, it is as if a string is tied to the heart of each one that connects it to the
upward rise of the balloon. Alexis feels its rise in her stomach, her chest, her throat. She is dizzy with its rise. Up, up it goes, up and out over the water, the red spiral growing lighter in the late afternoon sun. It dips, the crowd sighs, and then it rises again, a massive upward surge and now it has passed the cove, is beyond it, the red and white spiral with the dark dot below it is far out over the open ocean rising higher and higher, and growing smaller with each passing second until at last it melds into the sky and she can’t make it out anymore.

SHARON BUTALA
is a bestselling author of both fiction and non-fiction and has established herself as a writer of national appeal.
The Perfection of the Morning
remained on bestseller lists for over a year, winning awards and a nomination for a Governor General’s Award. It was followed by another bestseller,
Coyote’s Morning Cry,
and
Wild Stone Heart: An Apprenticeship in the Fields.
Her novels include
The Gates of the Sun, Luna, The Fourth Archangel
and
The Garden of Eden.
Sharon Butala’s first collection of short stories,
Queen of the Headaches,
was nominated for a Governor General’s Award.
Real Life
is her most recent short story collection. In 1998, Sharon Butala won the Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career. She lives in Eastend, Saskatchewan, with her husband, Peter.

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Fever

Copyright ©
1990
by Sharon Butala.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Epub Edition © DECEMBER 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40880-6

www.harpercanada.com

FIRST HARPERPERENNIALCANADA EDITION

This collection was written with the assistance of the Canada Council.

“Babette” appeared in
Sky High,
Coteau Books, 1988; “Dark of the Moon,” in
Canadian Woman Studies/Les Cahiers de la Femme,
Fall, 1987; “The Metric System” in Canadian Forum, January/February 1989; “Discord” in
Wascana Review,
Spring, 1989; “Dinner on the Edge of the City” in
Briarpatch,
May, 1986; “The Prize” in
Canadian Fiction Magazine,
n°. 64, Fall, 1988, where it won the Annual Contributor’s Award.

The stories from Richard St. Barbe Baker’s life in “Healer of the Earth” are paraphrased from his books; “Healer of the Earth” is fiction.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Butala, Sharon, 1940– Fever

“A Phyllis Bruce book”
ISBN 0-00-639182-6

I. Title

PS8553.U6967F49 2002 c813'.54 C2001-902532-7
PR9199.3.B798F49 2002

RRD 987654321

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