Summary

"Fever" opens with a man staring out the window of a ship at the naked trees. In his mind, he compares them to "barren women starved for love"—and to himself. It is winter, the days are shorter, and he is alone. In the hold of a ship, another man—a slave—wonders why the gods have chosen to put him here, chained to other captives, bumping and shaking in puddles of waste. A mosquito squats on him, drinks his blood, but he does not kill her. He thinks of her as a woman straddling and entering him; if she returns day after day, eventually she will drain all of his blood and he will disappear. The mosquito is an ominous sign of the spread of the fever.

Between these two points of view, an omniscient narrator and a first-person plural...