The world started to end with a scratch. Perhaps I should say an itch. An irritation that you just had to get your fingers into and work hard. Scratching was only a momentary relief; at least it distracted those affected from the end of the world.
No ever suspected a little irritation to be so serious. Thinking back; that had to be first sign. No horseman raging over the world nor missiles falling from the sky. We didn’t even get hordes of zombies digging themselves out graves.
What we got was an itch that had to scratched.
Kind of a let down really.
Like of lot of maladies it started in Winter. Not long after New Years. People here and there complained of not feeling that great. Of having an itch on their eyes of torso. No one mentioned it.
At least not until things got worse.
At first small numbers of people started to pass out. Not for a moment or two. No, they’d stop and fall into full blown coma.
It took a few days but then the media started to notice a glut of unconscious people being taken into hospital.
Then more people started to feel ill.
Memory says that this is when everyone started to talk about it. It became news, chat, photos and memes. None of the memes were in good taste.
It went on like this for weeks. Slowly the hospitals filled, as none of the patients recovered. The memes got sicker and the Internet filled with a million conspiracy theories. Perhaps what made it feel worse was the endless looping of mainstream media. Supposition after theory, after the same story. Bodies adding to stories but nothing feeling like we actually knew more than the moment before.
I can’t even remember when they first got called The Sleeping. It was not medically accurate. People needed a something to relate too. So they were called The Sleeping.
We had The Sleeping, but at this point services were normal. Even if the new big thing in fashion was a facemasks
Everywhere were cheap masks, expensive masks , cool looking ones and slightly disturbing ones. Not wearing one one made you the object of suspicion. Wearing one was of dubious.
After all we knew the symptons but at this stage we had no way of identifying the disease.
So the misanthropy grew. Weird logic ran rampant. Just about every minority group and every gender became a target for some one
Fear and hate could be smelled in the air.
Stream of Consciousness 