The exercise:
Write about: side effects.
Well, that wasn't a fun day. Did manage to avoid throwing up, so that was a plus. The chills and headaches will get a hard pass next time from me though. Not that, hopefully, there will be a next time.
Just gotta keep telling myself it's worth it.
2 comments:
Ah, I'm sorry you had side-effects. I've heard a lot of people here in Malta got them as well -- I just had the same response I had to the initial vaccine jab. But then this is exactly the kind of disease I don't catch, so I think I'm just lucky that way. Which makes a nice change :)
Side effects
Dr. Fraud sat in his office listening to the tick of the clock. It was a deep, resonant sound because he'd spent four hours that morning getting all six of the clocks in his office to tick in synchrony, and it was almost, but not quite, hypnotic. At least for him; it had proved quite hypnotic for two of patients and getting them to leave had, for a change, required only telling them that they wanted to. He was regretting not telling them they wanted to pay for their full course of treatment in advance now. He yawned, stretched, and checked the time. Two minutes to four, when Alexander, who preferred to be called Alexei, was due.
The knock on the door came at 10seconds past 4 o'clock; one of Alexei's minor issues that he wanted help with was a compulsive punctuality that led him to arrived an hour earlier for all appointments and to stand outside doors and windows staring helplessly at his watch until he could knock and go in, knowing that he was exactly on time.
"Herein!" shouted Dr. Fraud. There was a moment's pause and then the door opened slightly and a florid face framed by blond hair peered round.
"Is that like выходите?" asked Alexei. "Only I don't speak Italian."
"That was Austrian," said Dr. Fraud, who had his own issues with who owned the language he spoke. "Come in, come in. Why are you looking so scared?"
Alexei came in and set a fist-sized black sphere down on Dr. Fraud's desk. "This," he said. "I was told to give it to you by a tall man outside. He was wearing a black cowled robe."
"In this heat? Was he insane?" Dr. Fraud could be oddly insensitive regarding mental illness at times.
"Maybe? He knew who you were, doc."
The clocks all ticked for a few moments and both men looked at the object.
"This," said Dr. Fraud, slowly, feeling old memories return, "is a Sphere of Annihilation. They took them all away after the war, you know."
"What war?" asked Alexei, who looked to be barely thirty.
"One of the special ones," said Dr. Fraud. The black sphere on the table seemed to pulling shadows towards it. "They don't talk about them in the ordinary history books, you had to have been there. This is... this shouldn't be here, you know?" He looked up and met Alexei's eyes, and Alexei flinched. "There are side effects to it being here," said Dr. Fraud. "We were working on that, you know. We were finding ways to mitigate them."
"You should probably do that right now then, doc," said Alexei, backing away from the desk. "It's getting dark in here."
"Do I look like I have a prison camp and an authorisation letter to dispose of seven hundred prisoners?" asked Dr. Fraud. "It's a bit late for the cheap mitigations, and even then I would need a handful of cheap sapphires and a pigeon with a limp."
"I'll get the pigeon!" yelled Alexei and darted out of the door. As it closed, Dr. Fraud sat staring into the shadows, listening to the resonant tick of the clocks.
Greg - my first dose gave me a sore arm for a couple days, and then fatigue a few days after that, so I was expecting/hoping for more of the same this time around.
Not to be, it seems.
I'd ask what sort of disease you normally catch but I'm afraid to hear the answer.
This isn't your usual Dr. Fraud tale, but the important elements are all there. I enjoyed the 'Was he insane?' bit quite a lot. And the details about Alexei were great. Rather tempted to ask for a follow up to this, actually!
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