She broke the cyst on a Wednesday in October, and I was sitting on the porch watching the cotton fields turn brown under a sky that was the color of wet wool. The sound was small—almost nothing, like a dry leaf cracking underfoot—and then she was standing in the doorway with something on her hands and something on her face and she looked at me and her eyes were bright and she smiled and I knew, before she spoke, that something had changed.

She didn't tell me what happened. She cleaned her hands in the sink and dried them on her apron and went inside and sat at the table and opened a book and read for the rest of the afternoon. I stayed on the porch and watched the fields and the heat rose from the ground like a breath and I didn't ask her what she'd broken because I could see in the way she moved, in the way she held herself, that some things don't get explained. They just happen.

The changes came slow. Not the way illness comes—sudden, dramatic, the way the doctor describes things when he wants you to understand the seriousness. No. Tish's changes came the way the seasons change. You don't notice them day by day. You notice them when you step outside and the air is different and the light is different and the cotton is brown and you understand that summer is over.

Her skin grew thick first. Patches of it became scaly, armor-like, warm to the touch. The doctor from Vicksburg—who came once, looked at her, shook his head, and came again three months later with the same result—called it hyperkeratosis. I didn't know the word. I just knew that Tish's skin was changing and she was changing with it and neither of us knew why.

Her temperature went up. She ran at a constant low fever, one zero one point five every day, and she was warm to the touch like a living ember. She craved cold food—ice, raw meat, things that wouldn't burn her mouth. She ate at night, when I was asleep, and the sounds of her eating came through the floor like a secret.

I brought her food. I brought her water. I brought her books from the library because she asked about skin disease and I didn't know how to answer. She read them in the afternoon and then she sat in the room where the heat was worst—the attic, where the sun hit the tin roof and the temperature was unbearable—and she would sit there in the heat and read and smile and sometimes she would put her hand on the wall and press it flat against the sandstone and close her eyes and breathe in the heat like it was something she recognized.

She was fascinated by what was happening to her. Not in the way a patient is fascinated by a diagnosis. In the way a child is fascinated by a frog—something strange and alive and not quite human, held in the palm of your hand, and you want to understand it not because it will help you but because it is there and it is beautiful and it is yours to look at.

I loved her. I didn't know how to love a woman who was turning into something else. She was still Tish. She still made me coffee in the morning. She still looked at me the way she'd looked at me the first day I walked up the porch steps and asked if I could work the land. But she was also something more, and the something more was beautiful, and the beauty was killing her, and I couldn't stop it.

On the last night, the heat was so thick you could taste it. I was in the kitchen and I heard her coming down the stairs—no sound, just the absence of sound where sound should have been, the way footsteps on wood should make a noise and didn't. I looked up and she was in the doorway and she was glowing—her skin catching the light from the stove and reflecting it back, and she was warm, impossibly warm, like standing next to a fire, and she said, "It's almost time," and I didn't ask what time. I knew.

She died in the attic. I found her in the morning. She was lying on the floor with her face turned toward the window and the sunrise was coming through the glass and it made her skin glow and she looked like something that belonged to the swamp and the heat and the places where the land ends and the water begins.

I carried her down the stairs and buried her beneath the porch where the heat rose from the ground like a breath. I didn't say anything. I walked to the field and started plowing. The cotton would grow anyway. The heat was rising. The ground was warm beneath my feet.

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OTMES v2 OBJECTIVE CODE ======================= Code: OTMES-v2-60E6D9-090-M6-8R13.6-H7P4-3D9C E_total (Literary Potential): 13.6 Dominant Mode: M6 Dominant Angle: 90.0 deg Tragedy Rank: 8 Dominance Ratio: 0.69 Irreversibility: 1.0 Description: Southern Gothic, Parasitic transformation, Poetic horror

M_vector: [8.5, 0.5, 3.5, 4.0, 1.0, 6.0, 9.5, 0.0, 3.0, 1.0] N_vector: [0.35, 0.65] K_vector: [0.75, 0.25]

Tensor Transformation from original: V-01: M1->10, M7+2.0, R->0, TI 78.2->95.0, theta 125->240 V-02: K2->0.7, M10+3.0, N1->0.8, R+0.2, TI 78.2->55.0, theta 125->45 V-05: R->0, M1+M6, theta->180, TI 78.2->93.0 V-07: N2->0.9, C->1.0, theta->180, R->0.1, TI 78.2->38.0 V-08: M7+M4, M4->7.0, M1->10.5, theta->90, TI 78.2->85.0 V-09: theta->270, M4->8.0, POV->observer, TI 78.2->72.0 V-10: M9->8.0, M4->7.0, R->0.5, M10->4.0, TI 78.2->80.0