Epidemic Spotted Fever

High fever that shakes you. Your head pounds, your limbs burn, and after several days a spotted rash spreads across the skin — a rash that looks as though something inside you has built up and is now pressing outward. Medically, epidemic spotted fever is a bacterial infection caused by Rickettsiae, transmitted by body lice. Historically it is the disease of confinement. Of camps, barracks, prisons, war zones. It breaks out where people are crowded together in the tightest spaces, where no one has room anymore, where the boundaries between bodies and biographies blur.

That is no coincidence. Spotted fever is the disease of too much. Too much closeness, too much burden, too much responsibility for others, too much absorption of everything that streams toward you. Your body burns because something in you has long been burning — and finds no way out.