Progression

He woke with a sore throat. As he rose from his bed he rationalized quickly. “This is a dry throat.” He had been drinking the night before. And with his heater running, the air in his bedroom was parched. He brushed aside thoughts of illness, the signals he had seen around him, both at school and at work, blatantly put away. The memories of coughing classmates and nasally waitresses filed surreptitiously away in the black box of his mind. His day is mundane, washing dishes. Today, one moment stood out. Festering behind his dish-washing machine was a lump of what had once been meat. He had no idea how long it had been there, nor could he figure how he missed it in his cleaning for so long. He had only noticed it because, while scrubbing through ketchup stained dishes, he watched not one, but three flies crawl down between the wall and the dishwasher. Perhaps the fly was the same every time, but nonetheless, the frequency worried him. He grabbed the rot with a closed, gloved hand. Turning it over and unraveling his loosely balled fist, he examines it closer. It appeared to have once been a piece of chicken, a breast most likely, but it had long since melted and morphed into a sad, yellow-gray blob. Just as he rolled it slightly with his fingers, it split open. Thick viscous mucus stretches out, holding two loaves of mashed, rotten flesh together and in the midst of it squirmed two white, little worms, writhing in their exposure. He watched their soft movements for a moment, then without further thought, he dumped the young larvae into the trash, along with their mucky home. Aside from this incident, the day had completed itself normally. By the time he returned to his home, exhausted from a double shift, his throat had grown red and angry, eliciting raspy, painful coughs. He felt a tickle somewhere deep in his nose. With a resigned sigh, he internally admits defeat. Hoping to nip the issue in the bud, he finds cough syrup in his bathroom and helps himself to a generous chug. Cringing from the taste, he gingerly walks to his bed, a bare mattress on his floor and enthusiastically throws himself into sleep.

He woke with a headache. As soon as he raised his body from his pillow, he felt a pounding resonate through his core. Stumbling to the bathroom, he shakily fills a glass of water in the sink. He drinks quickly, his throat tense and sore. Finishing the glass, he takes a sharp breath in and doubles over with a rolling, wet cough. When he believes it to be over, it hits him with a second wave, more desperate and sickly than the first. After he finishes sucking for breath, he examines the palm of his hand, haphazardly coughed on, in a vain attempt to keep the infection contained.  Smeared on his palm is snot, thick and yellow, tainted with noxious streaks of gray and brown. The mucus, he notes, is nearly fibrous, not unlike the soft flesh of the throat. In morbid fascination, he presses the ball of slime between his thumb and forefinger. Flicking it into the sink, he begrudgingly carries on with his day. Another double shift slogs by. He spends his day coughing into a dry rag behind his machine, hacking up chunks of greasy, yellow phlegm. Every time any water would spritz off of a plate, or bowl, and sprinkle his face, he would wince. Even the florescent lighting, typically easy on his eyes, seemed arrayed against him, painfully battering his sight. The air was wet and its thickness made his breathing into a ragged purr. His bones ached now, and his mind set a layer of fuzz over his senses. He felt sporadic flashes of fever, which ruined his perception of time. Many hours would zip by, only for the minutes to suddenly grind on for what seemed like an eternity. Eventually, work came to an end, and by the time he leaves, he coughs more than he has peaceful breath. Exhausted, he makes it home, though he does not remember the trip. Another hearty swig from his cough syrup precipitates a long, yet feverish sleep.

He sleeps for half a day. Twelve hours of toxic fluid that has built up in his nose and throat violently long to escape. He wakes with a start, coughing before he realizes he is conscious. He fills a tissue with yellow scum, then a second. The third he only coughs into, for what felt to him like far too long for a reasonable coughing fit. The tissues squish in his hands, as though they are slugs who struggle against a child’s grasp. As luck would have it, he does not work today. He has the day to himself, to recover and relax, until the evening, when he would go to one of his weekly night classes at university. He spends his day in bed, coughing viciously and sipping cough syrup like it was wine. Though successful in further fogging his senses and allowing time to slip by quickly, the medicine seems to fail in suppressing his cough. A crawling sensation dribbles down his throat. Irate fever scratches at flesh deep inside his sinus and a painful tension makes itself apparent in the wires of his windpipe. A rank smell begins to waft faintly from deep within him. Making it to class is a struggle that he does not remember, simply finding himself at the entrance of the classroom, shortly before the beginning of the lesson. His appearance alone seems to draw immediate ire from the glossy eyes of his classmates. He thinks to himself that he must look terrible. It was likely that he did not smell particularly good either. Unable to feel shame in his fever-pitched mind, he finds his seat and quickly takes it, feeling mucus and bitter, cherry medicine sloshing lyrically in his knotted stomach. The projector in the room is set up, prepared to visually aid a lecture. Leaning on his elbows, he tries to listen to the speaking professor, but instead pours his focus into suppressing his cough. It works, to an extent, for he manages to keep his cough meek and infrequent, though the effort hurts his eyes, forcing him to keep them closed much of the time. The buzz of the projector invades his mind, drowning any hope of absorbing information. The professor’s words become a low, senseless echo.

Slipping into fevered sleep, he finds himself at the helm of his dishwasher, digging rotten meat out of the gears of the machine. Each chunk would disintegrate in his latex hands, revealing a nest of fat, glimmering maggots. No matter how many he threw away he would dig out a new fistful of festering meat and with it, white, writhing worms.

The projector clicked out of use, the sound somehow reaching into his subconscious and pulling him out of sleep. Despite mechanical silence, he still could hear the buzzing, now decentralized from the projector and flitting about the room. Suddenly alert to the noise, he looks around nervously, growling softly to alleviate his urge to cough, though a few wet, sickly coughs would slip through from time to time. The buzz radars, changing in frequency and volume, and from time to time, he swears he hears the beating of tiny, cellophane wings. From the corner of his eye a black dot flees. He jerked his head to follow it, but missed his chance. The buzz grew again, teasing him with its inexplicable fluctuation. Again his attention is drawn, before he can rationalize it, to a black dot at the edge of his periphery. It rockets behind his head, buzzing painfully loud. He snaps his head around, hoping to catch it in his hazy focus, only to be interrupted by clamoring classmates, rising together and rushing to leave. In a daze, he sits for a moment, listening for the buzz, but failing to hear it. His focus slips, and he lets loose a powerful cough. As he finishes hacking into a balled fist, he unrolls his fingers and examines the product. Splattered in his palm are white bands of wiry snot, streaked with the faint browns and reds of blood.

The night was troublesome. Sleep did not come without struggle. He had finished his bottle of syrup, yet could not grab hold of steady sleep. Perhaps he had not drank enough, or perhaps he drank too much. Regardless, he tossed and turned for a time, unable to reconcile the position of his head with the heat of his sheets and the soreness of his limbs. Occasionally his struggle was interrupted by a fit of coughing, which would end only when he successfully ejected thick, fleshy gobs of brown-streaked snot from the nooks in his throat. He filled dozens of tissues with his nose and mouth. As he became settled over the hours, and his body relaxed, he began to drift into slumber. In a state between wakefulness and sleep, he felt a surreal crawling. It began at his feet and slid up his sweat-speckled back, like a shiver in reverse. When it reached the nape of his neck, it wrapped itself around his throat and began massaging, as if with thick and gentle fingers. The stringy muscles of this throat shifted unnaturally, half cramped and half asleep, offering confused, token resistance to the ghostly force inside of his throat. When sleep finally overtook him, he dreamt blindly. Sounds and smells shifted foggily around him. Buzzing and squishing invaded his dreams and the smell of musty rot wafted in and out of his notice.

He woke feeling better. He coughed, as he had the last few mornings, but the pain is now gone, replaced by a sort of morbid satisfaction. He feels the mucus that once likely caked his throat, loosen and fly out of him with every wet hack. Looking at the chunks, he notes their continuously strange texture. They’re nearly solid and are marbled with dried blood. He takes a deep breath and feels a flutter somewhere between his lungs and his throat. The irritation of it makes him cough again, but this cough is a whooping one, dry and fruitless. He goes about his day, freshly thankful for his bones, now free from constant, dull pain. This morning he was to attend class, and this time he felt well enough to actually do so. His drive was peaceful. This time of day, there were not many other cars on his route. A red light stops him a couple blocks before he reaches school. Another cough creeps up on him, wet, just like when he woke. He coughs into his fist, measured at first, but something tickles the back end of his sinus and launches his cough into hysterics.

He coughs until he shakes, until he heaves and until he gags. He feels warm, solid slime splatter into his hand, again vainly attempting to block his mouth. He unrolls his fingers to see the product. In his hand, streaked with the browns and reds of blood, lies a pair of thin, snot-specked worms. They feel the nip of the cold air and begin writhing futilely, weak, hungry, and dying.