There was a man who suffered for eleven years from hiccups. Eleven years, four months, and seventeen days. Sometime in March he woke up and pulled on his overalls to go crack the ice on the watering troughs and there they were, bubbling up in his chest like fat, pulsing frogs. He carried the hiccups through his whole boyhood. He must have suffered many thumps on the back, many spoonfuls of molasses. Perhaps his father held him upside down. Surely his brothers and sisters kicked him under the dinner table, hissing at him to shut up.

He couldn’t help it. How could he? Does anyone choose to be sick, especially in such an obvious way?

He hiccupped in church, and the minister prayed that the boy be cured of his affliction. None of the girls would talk to him afterward and he had no courtships. The hiccups sat on his tongue, hideous toads. It’s not funny anymore, his friends said, disappearing one at a time. You can stop now.

But he couldn’t stop.

Until that bright morning in July when he woke up and found that, as quickly as his childhood, the hiccups had disappeared. They vanished into the air like virginity, like prayer, like the swing of his arm when he threw a stone. The constant sound that had dogged him, the racket that followed him to school and church and even in his dreams gone. He could finish a sentence now, swallow bread, and sing the steady clomping lines of hymns. He was a man, twenty-one, and he could woo any girl without having to stop and hold his breath. His hiccups would not speak for him anymore.

But he would miss the times on Sundays, after church, when they were allowed to do anything but work. Then he would go down to the creek and trail his fingers in the icy water. The branches were so crisp against the blue, like laundry on the line. He had liked to lie on the ground, then, and pile the lost leaves beside him for the body of a friend. He had opened his mouth and let the hiccups come out and trail into the sky, each misshapen syllable taking flight on the wind. He had thought then that they would travel farther than he; he had thought they might lead him away from this place that had shrunk to the size of his throat.