Chapter 14: Half a Mile from the County Fair

Dining in the rain, wandering an Ozian ribbon of road, honey pots, fuzzy stomached bears, and knocking on the door of a peppermint cottage.

I don’t know if it is the mango I’ve eaten on the park bench that morning or the food at the Sunday lunch, but within an hour of setting out, I am sick-sick.

My legs feel like cement. Within two hours of saying goodbye to my friends from the brunch, I’m running a temperature. Things are becoming feverishly surreal. I am as tired after this short late afternoon walk as I was coming into Toulouse the previous Friday. By the time I arrive at the hostel, I can barely get through the chit-chat of the sign-in.

The hostel holds twenty people, but it is early enough in the season that there are only the two of us. The other pilgrim remembers me from a stop in Castres. He wants to talk. We’d had a brief conversation there, he says. I nod. I’ll nod at anything. I am too sick to contribute. Later, he will try to write postcards at a small desk across the dorm area while I race past him to vomit in a toilet down the hall. I spend the night on the tile floor.

In the morning, the worst seems to have…