Short Stories Volume 2

The Voiceless

Have you ever heard of the quiet game? Did your parents or any adult ever make you play it? I remember the first time my mother told me to play that game. It was always when she was on the phone and even though my reward would be my favorite spicy chips drizzled with cheese and my favorite movie, I could never really win the game. After two minutes I would get restless sitting still and quiet that I would get up to play by myself as quietly as I could. However my the end I was loud and giggling by whatever my childhood self was imagining. Every time. Ma understood that that just was just how I was. Even bedtime it would take me hours to go to sleep. More often than not, she would fall asleep long before I would. She would simply say that she was grateful that I was an obedient kid in all other aspects.

I always picked up after myself when I was done playing with my toys. I always said please and thank you. Brushed my teeth, did all my homework and when Ma asked me to do something I didn't need to be told twice.

The only dilemma was that I couldn't stay quiet or still. I never grew out of it either. In the classrooms from kindergarden to college, I was always moving about and humming. That doesn't count as talking but I was still making noise, at least that's what all the teachers would say.

No matter how old you are, when something truly scares you, there are times when all you want to do is seek comfort from your parent. Hide under your blanket to make the scary monsters go away. What was this scary monster? It came in the form known as the Rhinovirus. It may seem like a silly name but there was nothing silly about it. It is essentially the common cold. Symptoms can include a runny nose, sneezing, sore throat and may advance to headaches, coughing and muscle aches. These infections are usually mild however in more extreme cases they can lead to bronchiolitis and pneumonia. The ones more susceptible to getting the extreme cases are babies.

The first outbreak happened in Utah around November. See the rhinovirus was more active and dangerous during the winter months. In the beginning, it was just a few cases here and there. No clinic or hospital had more than ten cases at once. Then in a flash, hundreds of cases suddenly started appearing. All children under the age of two.

The news always tries to downplay whatever event is happening because well they want to avoid a panic. I mean we all saw how crazy people went when coronavirus hit. Yes there were thousands who died but how the heck was hoarding toilet paper and trampling people over mask going to help? With my ma being a nurse, she saw first hand just how bad it was.

See normally you just have to treat the symptoms as they appear and make sure the fever doesn't get to high. There is no actual medicine given because the cold is just well it's just a cold. It's the infection that you gotta worry about. When it comes to babies, the infection can cause problems in the lungs thus making it harder for them to breathe. If the infection affect the sinuses then it can cause hearing problems.

In this case, the infection was affecting the esophagus. Usually the esophagus does its job and prevents anything that isn't supposed to go into the trachea from going in. If it doesn't do its job correctly then you get those moments where your spit goes down the wrong tube and you get that coughing fit where you feel like you're going to die until it eventually passes. Well because it was affected the infection spread into the trachea and soon all the patients had laryingitis. The cases got so bad that their vocal chords were getting so damaged that eventually all cries became silent ones.

Within a year, it spread from Utah to across the United States.

In two years, the world.

By five years, every child that was once infected with Rhinovirus which lead to laryingitis had irreversible damage to the vocal chords. Their was no child left in the world that had a voice. All had become mute due to the monster that normally would just be a bad cold. Sadly, that wasn't the part either. After all, the human race can't simply never have any children again otherwise eventually we would go extinct. The truly tragic part was that because there was no cure and how wide spread the virus had become, every child that would soon come to be born would get infected. No matter what precautions people took.