The Science Behind The Hidden Disease

• Joy Yin, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2018

It’s a phenomenon that scientists are baffled by – a secret plague that’s spread undercover for centuries, infecting everyone. Its only cure is impossible to attain.

No one has immunity – if they’re human. If we’re human, we have flaws. The disease makes someone see only those flaws, no matter how many they have themselves, and singles them out.

“She’s so loud and weird, isn’t she?”
“Oh yeah! She is actually.”

What used to make someone laugh now makes them pause. The strange look in their eyes could seize your heart as your mind anxiously analyses the slight curl in their lip, their upturned brows.

Patient Zero started it all. Infection starts with the smallest seed of thought, warped with different shades of hate. The disease transmits through the mouth and tongue, yet it only affects its ‘target victims’. Epidemiologists call these victims ‘skopelecti’, meaning ‘the-selected’ in Greek and Latin. To their horrified confusion, they’ve found this disease doesn’t affect the skopelectus’s physical cells, but rather it twists their own minds into self-damage. It’s the spread, the number of carriers, that afflicts it with paranoia and fear. Then physical symptoms appear.

Do lips suddenly seal in your presence? Do people’s eyes shutter away from you when you ask what’s happening? Beware because you have been targeted. Your heart will grow heavy with dread at the sight of congregating people who have ‘private conversations’, discussing and glaring at you as if you are the disease they’re trying to eradicate. They want to quarantine you, warding everyone away from you. It’s not just how you do everything ‘differently’ but how ‘everything’ you do suddenly becomes ‘weird and strange’. One day, one joke would’ve made seven laughs. Then, the disease turns it into seven pairs of judging looks. Your chest squeezes anxiously as your mind turns over your next possible words, looking for the holes you know they’re are ready to rip apart. There’s a constant weight on your soul. Sleeplessness in the dark hours send your thoughts reeling: who will look at you like that tomorrow too? You don’t tell anyone though, because you know your words will be twisted. Don’t text those words. You never know who’ll take it and turn it into something you didn’t intend.

It’s quite shocking how much power a pair of eyes and brows can do to one’s confidence. Watch how Patient Zero revels in your silent suffering. Your friendships are straining and ready to break. Others join in your suffering for their own sake; to them the only way to feel superior and protect themselves is to put someone down.

If we could, we would have the cure. We would have truth.

Scientists call it ‘skoposimortegemynd’, its Greek, Latin and Olde English words meaning ‘selective-death-to-the-mind’. But it’s more, the way mere words and looks could upturn your world. I call it ‘psychemortlogia’ – soul-death-by-words.

We will never stop this disease. We can't stop gossip because we all love it. And so do I.