SWEET CRIMSON ELIXIR

The squelching of the alarm clock was a dull nuisance prying through the groggy numbness of a full-on head cold, and Max couldn’t find the energy to reach over to hit the snooze button. Instead, he lay there for an hour until the alarm clock gave up its futile fight to rouse him. Max’s brain throbbed softly in that slow, thick tempo that makes one’s head feel three times its natural weight. And sure enough, when Max picked his head up from the pillow, his nose seemed to be the heaviest thing about him.
“Shit,” he mumbled and dragged back the sweaty covers. “I don’t need this today.”
Max was at once cold, then hot, and then dizzy. The bathroom, although just across the room, seemed miles away. He stumbled towards it and grumbled at the spinning of his head. He felt around the medicine cabinet and found his one and only hope for a halfway normal day. Max peeled the little plastic cup off the top of the NyQuil bottle. Dried up pieces of the cherry-flavored stuff fell like ruby crystals into the bathroom sink. As the lid came off, the sickly sweet smell of something like fruit-scented rum hit Max hard in the nose.
“Ahhhhhh,” Max moaned. “The sniffly, sneezy, drowsy, achy, lifesaving medicine.”
It happened every year at this time. The month of January is always a tease and there is always at least a few days when the weather warms up and tricks the populace into thinking that they can get away with not wearing a coat. Max is no exception to the deceptive warmth.
As he stood in the shower trying to wash away the prickling aches that threatened to turn his whole body into a shivering mess, Max thought of a moment yesterday when he’d noticed the weather and the fact that he wasn’t wearing a coat.
“Damn, I knew this would happen,” he said to the bar of soap in his hand. “I was walking down the street and I was watching my own breath come out of my mouth and I wasn’t wearing a coat. Idiot!”
A surge of shivers ran through Max. He throttled the hot water knob to full-on and sunk down into the back of the tub to let the water massage him into something similar to comfort.
“What a way to begin a day,” Max mumbled again to the bar of soap. “And I still to need to find some way of paying the rent. Unemployment and a bad head cold. What a bitch.”