The Broken Hearts Epidemic

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Gina.

Then she died.

Now, lots and lots of people die, so her passing really shouldn't have been anything too spectacular. It wasn't even theatrical like throwing one's self from a cliff or being burned at stake. She simply keeled over one day and never got up.

The doctors came round soon afterwards to see why a healthy teenage girl like Gina would drop dead so suddenly. Doctors usually do that, since doctors are terribly curious creatures, so there was nothing odd there either. But there was something odd with what they found. They found that Gina had not died of some terrible disease or from choking on a gumball, as they had predicted. Gina had died for...well, for no reason at all, it seemed.

The doctors were baffled. They didn't like not knowing things such as why someone dies, for it sounds dreadful and callous to call somone up and say that their loved one has died for no apparent reason.

But since they couldn't find the reason for why poor Gina had expired, they had no choice but to call her mother and tell her the sad and perplexing news.

The doctors searched Gina's purse for a phone number they might call, and found her address book alongside a few sanitary napkins, a credit card, some makeup, and a folded piece of looseleaf.

One doctor said he'd do the calling, so he went into the other room to call Gina's mother. But the other doctor stayed behind, intrigued by the folded piece of looseleaf. She opened it up and read.

The doctor was almost moved by the contents of the letter. For she found that it was from Gina's boyfriend, Shane. Apparently, Shane had thought that the relationship had reached a plateau and had called it quits. "Poor Gina," thought the doctor. "She must have been terribly sad."

Just then, the other doctor burst into the room.

"Did you call Gina's mother?" asked the lady doctor.

"Yes...but she's taken the news terribly hard, I think. She simply stopped talking, and I heard a crash. I think she may have fainted."

The doctors soon agreed that they might have to make a housecall (which they didn't really like too much, since everyone knows that it's the dying patient that's supposed to go to the doctor for help, not the other way around), so they did. They drove in their big white ambulance all the way to Gina's mother's house and, after receiving no answer when they knocked on the door, decided to break in. (After all, Gina's mother may have fainted and hit her head on something hard.)

Sure enough, when the doctors searched the house for Gina's surely grieving mother, they found her lying quite still on the carpet of her living room, the phone a few feet away. But when they looked further at Gina's mother, they found that she was...dead.

So of course, the doctors performed another autopsy, but found no reason why Gina's mother should have died either. No reason at all. She'd died just like her daughter. This made the doctors more than a little uneasy. Was a keel-over-for-no-reason plague sweeping suburbia?

They searched for another next-of-kin, and found Gina's grandmother. So they called up Gina's grandmother to tell her the sad, sad news. But before the doctor was done speaking, Gina's grandmother, too, had apparently dropped the phone and fainted.

Now the doctors were terribly worried. They'd both seen 'the Ring' and though they had scoffed at the validity of some of the suggestions it made about telephone calls, they were beginning to jump to conclusions. They reluctantly decided to go to Gina's grandmother's house too.

They found the same thing: Gina's grandmother laid out on the floor with no plausible cause of death except for perhaps the keel-over-and-die plague that was probably infecting everyone.

Now, three people can't just die for no reason all in one day and get away with it. Pretty soon, it was on the news: 'Three People Drop Dead for NO REASON in Small Town'.

Then a curious thing happened. One of the more sensitive reporters covering the story (whose name was Juan) keeled right over on Gina's front porch, dead as a doornail. His last words were, "oh, that's so sad!"

Well, now that four people had died for absolutely no reason, it was big news indeed. Now it was on TV. Shane happened to be watching the news at that time. When he heard that Gina (whom he had felt badly about breaking up with) had died, he was filled with an unbearable feeling of sadness and loss.

Then he died.

Then his mom walked in, saw her only son dead on the floor, and she died. And as the news covered all these deaths with misplaced enthusiasm, more and more people began dropping dead. The strange thing was, only people who knew the victims personally or who cried during the news broadcast were affected. And as the death toll mounted, it continued to grow exponentially.

After a few weeks, everybody in the whole wide world had dropped dead right in front of their TV screens except for a few people that didn't have TV's and a few more that were mean and heartless. The cause of death? A broken heart.