Patient zero

It starts on a Tuesday, which feels insultingly ordinary. You woke up warm. Not fever-warm — you've checked twice, thermometer reading a boring 36.7 — but skin-warm, like someone left a heating pad under your shirt. By noon you've crossed your legs at your desk so many times a coworker asked if you need the bathroom. You don't. That's the problem. There's no reason for any of this.

By evening you've done what you always do: searched. Fever without fever. Tingling in fingertips. Sudden unexplained arousal, persistent. The results give you pregnancy forums, perimenopause, a Reddit thread from 2019 that ends with OP never posting again. Your fingertips genuinely do tingle, a static-buzz feeling you've had since this morning, and when you look closely at the pads of your fingers the skin looks faintly darker than yesterday. Or maybe the light is bad. Maybe you want the light to be bad.

You live alone, which means you can't rule out the worst part: you can't remember touching anyone sick. But you rode the bus Monday. You shook hands with a courier. Someone at the coffee shop bumped your bare arm and apologized and smiled and you thought, unhelpfully, that their hands were nice. The warmth under your skin pulses once, slow, like something breathing. Patient zero, you think, and the thought should be absurd, and it isn't.