Covid 2024
by Jackson Parrish
Title
Covid 2024
Artist
Jackson Parrish
Medium
Digital Art
Description
Once, he was an average man with mundane worries that filled his days from the blare of the morning alarm to the soft glow of the television at night. His life was a series of routines a comfortable pattern of work, weekends, and yearly holidays his concerns limited to traffic jams and mortgage rates. But that was before the outbreak, before the world knew of the contagion that would come to be feared above all else.
It began subtly with a news report here, a missed day of work there, until the day he woke up with a fever that no medicine could alleviate. He became a statistic one of the many cases that health experts analysed with furrowed brows, behind the quarantined walls of hastily erected emergency facilities.
As the disease progressed so did the transformation. It was an insidious change, one that started beneath the surface of his skin. The mirror reflected back a man he no longer recognised, his features twisting into a grotesque caricature of his former self. His eyes once warm with the light of recognition now burned with a feral glow and his skin adopted the pallor of the gravely ill, mottled with hues that no healthy body should possess.
The fever that had begun as a mere whisper of heat had burgeoned into an inferno that raged within him, cooking his insides, churning his stomach until he could no longer tell hunger from pain. He watched, through eyes that no longer seemed his own as his reflection morphed daily. His skin stretched, discoloured in sickly shades of green and yellow as if his very flesh rebelled against its host. The bathroom became a chamber of horrors, where he'd spend hours picking at the lesions that blossomed like nightmarish flowers across his body.
Sleep abandoned him or perhaps it was he who fled from the twisted dreams that awaited him there. He lay in bed, a sweat-soaked figure wrestling with the sheets that became the tendrils of the disease, binding him, transforming him. Each breath was a gasp for humanity each heartbeat a drumming reminder of the life that was slipping away.
The transformation was not just physical. His thoughts became fragmented, splintered shards of his former self that jabbed at his consciousness. Paranoia crept in whispering that his loved ones were impostors that the doctors were conspirators in a grand scheme. The television, once a source of comfort, now flickered with images that twisted in his vision, contorting the faces of news anchors into leering malevolent entities.
As the pandemic raged on outside a personal apocalypse unfolded within the four walls of his home. The man who had once lived for the simple pleasures found those very memories turning against him, now mocking reminders of all he had lost. In the rare moments of lucidity, he would reach out to his family, his voice a rasp, begging for reassurance for a sign that there was still a place for him in this new world. But even these pleas were soon lost in the growing cacophony of his delirium.
The end, when it came was not with a whimper, but with a primal scream that echoed the collective terror of a civilisation on the brink. He was found a solitary figure on the floor of his once-sanctuary, the last vestiges of the man clawing desperately at the vile chrysalis that encased him. His metamorphosis was complete, the disease triumphant in its grotesque artistry.
And thus, he remained a grotesque testament to the disease's cruelty his humanity ebbing away, leaving behind only the monstrous visage of a pandemic's ruthless legacy.
Uploaded
November 17th, 2023
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