Sick Day

You laze on the couch, your head lolling on the armrest, mindlessly scrolling. As your eyes flick past cooking tips, bad memes, and news feeds, you wish you didn’t have to be sick today. You had to miss going to see M3GAN with your friends. It was supposed to be a great time with a great movie with great people. You can only hope they had fun without you.


Not only are you coughing up a storm every now and then and getting infuriating muscle cramps, you’ve had this incessant headache for the past 20 minutes. It started in tiny pangs shooting through your head. Then it came in waves, coming and going like the tide of an unnecessarily unpleasant shore. Now, after a long, dull period of barely tangible pain, it’s started pulsing. Sharp, precise pulses of pain that slice through your brain like laser beams and force you to leave the comfort of the couch.


You get up too quickly and your body reels. Staggering to the door, your head is throbbing, and the corridor –is alive– moves like it’s alive. Fighting through the all too sudden nausea-inducing agony, you throw open the bathroom door. Rummaging through the medicine cabinet, your hands land on The Bottle Of Painkillers. You almost –rip the lid off and shove a handful of pills down your throat, plastic casing and all– drop the bottle as you shakily make your way to the kitchen. You almost want to smash the glass you're holding into tiny shards and breathe them in as your migraine almost rips your entire head apart.


Almost choking on the pill you swallowed, you can suddenly feel everything. The pill sliding down your gullet. The force as it thwacks against the broiling, burning pit of acid that is your stomach. The way your insides rearrange themselves as your stomach churns. The way your worn vocal cords vibrate as you cough and splutter. The way the pill is fusing with your stomach acid, the way your stomach acid coagulates and shifts around. The way every part of your abdomen contorts your anatomy. The way your body jerks around like you’re a meat puppet. The way-


Something is forming in your stomach, sculpting itself from your body, fusing mucus, rancid acid and parts of your digestive system into an abomination. It’s growing larger, shoving a part of itself all the way through your intestinal tract. It latches onto the walls, and you jolt forward when it violently sucks your intestines into the hellish pit festering in your abdomen. It forms its own body, cradled comfortably by the walls of your stomach. Sensory organs poke and prod, examining your insides. A slimy tentacle, probably its tongue, reaches up your throat. It forces your mouth wide open as the tongue extends out. It flicks it around, sensing the environment around you. The creature finally retracts its tongue and you fall to the ground, heaving and coughing. You shouldn’t be alive right now, but you are.


You wish weren’t. You wish the sweet embrace of death would finally come to free you from this hell.


It evidently isn’t going to, seeing as you can feel the organism stretch itself and snake up your oesophagus. With one final heave, the monster falls out of your mouth, landing on the wooden floor with a sickening splat. It drags itself along the floor like a worm, leaving a greenish-yellow trail of slime.


Blood falls from your lips as the thing leaves your blurry vision. Now you feel the exhaustion settling in, the raw, burning pain growing dull and distant. You lay your head down, not caring about the fact the floor’s covered in mucus and blood.

You don’t care about anything anymore. You can finally end this nightmare. You can finally rest. As your watery eyes close, you thank death for coming to save you, at last.