Day 5: We have reverted to a feral state. Unencumbered by internal shame or external judgment, we fart audibly. We sleep in our clothes. We trudge through the detritus of Christmas Day to the refrigerator where we drink straight from the carton.

We haven’t changed the sheets. We sleep with the dogs. It’s a wonder we manage to feed them or ourselves at all. We just plunge our dirty spoons straight into unheated cans of marginal sustenance and slurp up what remains. The clock, languid in its expression of life force, lurches onward to that blissful four-hour interlude when we can down our shots of Mucinex like the fire-breathing tequila of high school spring breaks.

We are on our third (3rd) bottle of this life-giving elixir, and I can say from experience that Theraflu is distilled from the Devil’s urine cup. It could not touch this plague upon our house!

Instead, we fight it with bags upon bags of cough drops – lemon-honey, mixed berry, soothing syrup center! Armed with a warhead of eucalyptus vapor, we blast at its encrusted mucosa with our weapon of mass humidification. It gurgles and burps past the blockage that sits on my chest like an iron pig. Deep inside this maw of honking coughs, we hork up great chunks of lung butter and cast our soiled tissues into this dark landscape of undone dishes and unwashed laundry.

Though Pat initially mocked me when the chills descended on me like a hard freeze and receded into the painful ache of a feverish afternoon, he knows better now (his fever was longer and karmically more intractable).  But now, we fight this pox together… in sickness and in health (if we ever get there again).

Let this be a warning to you all: Civilization is flimsy veneer, blasted away by the expulsion of just one uncovered sneeze. You are only a few microbes away from eating crackers in bed.