World-building: You and Cholera

It’s Friday night and you feel a uneasy, a little queasy. That meal you just ate doesn’t agree with you. When would you learn that fried food wasn’t your thing any more? Then you definitely have an upset stomach. Had your kid brought a bug home from school? Or was it that fish you ate last night? You have a bucket next to the bed and spend the night next to the toilet. You have stomach cramps but not enough to worry, we’ve all had a stomach bug before.

Saturday, you are so thirsty, you can’t get enough to drink. You wish your family hadn’t gone away for the weekend. It would be so much easier if they were there to look after you. But you’ll soldier through, it’s a long way for them to come back. You drink some and keep vomiting. Then the other end kicks in. How can you have diarrhea when you’ve vomited so much out? You spend hours on the toilet, lying on the cool tile floor in between bouts. It doesn’t smell, you wonder why it doesn’t smell.

You know you need to call someone, but you can’t get to the phone. Your fuzzy brain realizes that it probably isn’t charged up, and you can’t face trying to plug it in. And by Sunday morning your body has shrunk, if you could reach the mirror you could see that you have aged, your skin turned into a farmer’s leather pulled tight with lips of blue. Before you sink into unconsciousness, you look at your nails and wonder how they turned gray.

Your family bursts into the house that evening, excited to tell you about their trip to the Grandparents, but the house is silent. Your wife wrinkles her nose when she walks through the bedroom at the sweaty sheets and bucket of vomit. She calls out and her heart races when you don’t answer. Maybe you’re at the hospital, she thinks, worrying about how you didn’t answer your phone. She walks into the bathroom, a scream stopped in her throat at your dark shrunken body lying on the floor.