A State of Disease
Excerpt from a Young Adult Novel with the same title, currently in process. Published with the author’s permission.
All of the thoughts blurred into a singular, distraught haze. Tobias grasped his stomach and groaned, uneasily rotating himself in bed to find a position that would ease the pain. The never-ending storm was outside his window, rattling the house and hissing against the shutters, but it felt like his tossing and turning was the storm, and his stomach was like a boat out at sea getting rocked by tumbling waves. It hurt to move, but it hurt more to lay still. He was bleeding on the inside.
3:AM – a cursed time revealed by his alarm clock. The damned number was red, a bold red in the blackness. Tobias stared at it without emotion as he held his stomach. All of the painful sensations from before overcame him. The burden of the pain stung his crotch and weighed on it like iron, but he knew he didn’t have to pee. Tobias had to return to the bathroom to defecate, and he knew what would happen even though he tried to forget. He would see red, brighter than the red of his alarm clock, for it was blood.
Tobias closed his eyes. This time of night was a forsaken time. He was awfully tired, yet couldn’t sleep with such trauma and pain. He didn’t want to see the clock, the ever-haunting red. It had been there all of his life. Now it meant something.
He closed his eyes but only saw it: the abomination that came out of him earlier in the restaurant. He winced, held his stomach tighter, and saw the red. It was mixed into the stool and appeared hideous. Red was its true color. Any brown was seared into it like a half-raw hamburger. Tobias felt as if his eyes were bleeding too. All he saw was red—bold, bright red in the dark, like a stoplight in the rain. STOP. Tobias wanted the pain to stop, the red in his stool to stop. He wished he could stop his life and just get a break—a break from this cursed condition, Lucine’s death, and the months of high school ahead. He just wanted it all to be over.
It wasn’t going to be over any time soon. It felt as if he would never turn eighteen and that high school would never end. Its madness and darkness would last perpetually until one by one people disappeared, died like Lucine, or became someone else, someone unrecognizable. Everyone changed for the worse, and Tobias could feel himself changing with the agony of his gut. Lucine may have put one too many knives in him during their fights. In his self-hatred, he may have symbolically stabbed himself in the gut. Anyone could be responsible, but the fact was that he was bleeding.
Tobias tried to deny his reality. He had to go to the bathroom now and should’ve run like The Flash for the pain within him, but he remained rooted in place, curled up in his bed.
I don’t have to go. He lied to himself over and over again. If he told the lie enough, it might become true. It was hard to lie about, however, and impossible to truly believe, for every time he tried to act oblivious to his pain, it grew sharper. Tobias groaned in agony, shifting through the dark with a hand glued to his stomach. He denied it still. There was blood earlier, but it would go away. It would go away! He told himself this, hoping it would come true, like a wish. All of the stars he could’ve wished upon were blocked by storm clouds. He therefore wished upon himself for himself, for he was a fallen star. He used to be so great, so happy, and so colorful. Now he was a shadow of a man, unhappy and sick. It will go away.
Tobias held it as long as he could and lied to himself and the world for over an hour. At five thirty in the morning, his willpower broke, and he nearly broke his bedroom door when he burst out of it. Performing the unholy ritual, now characteristic of his life, he sat on the toilet and emptied out the pain. Mental anguish overwhelmed him when he looked down and saw more red. Bright red against the pure white of the toilet bowl. It looked like a child had taken a paintbrush and splattered red across a blank canvas. Tobias hated the sight and hated it even more when the toilet paper he used more closely resembled a bandage, for it was soaked in blood. He had emptied out the pain but discovered more stress. The pain had only momentarily lessened; his gut remained a nightmare after flushing. He had to flush three times to clean up the entire bloody mess he had made.
There was no use in sleeping. He hadn’t even slept at all to begin with. Tobias sulked into his bedroom, embracing its darkness. He grabbed his phone and scrolled through Instagram, but he was getting tired of it. He was sick with something. So was the world.
Tobias dressed for school early while trying to ignore his stomach pain. It will get better, he kept blindly telling himself. Dressed in his signature black, Tobias took his computer down to the basement. He was a silhouette of the night, a victim of something unnamed, undiagnosed, and incomprehensible to others.
He plugged in his headphones and slung on his bass. Tobias blared rock music into his ears and strummed the bass with furious energy as dawn broke, as if the music could offer a cure, and when the song’s ending screams belted out with intensity, he screamed with them, waking up the world that had done this to him.
Read fiction by Aaron Skye Pharr in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Author
Aaron Skye Pharr graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with a B.A. in English in 2021. While earning his Masters in Teaching, he was nominated to the Teachers of Promise Institute in March 2023. He currently teaches English 12 and AP Literature and Composition in Henrico County, Virginia. In 2017, Aaron was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. Encouraging vulnerability and discourse about illness is a pillar of his writing and teaching. Visit his website at: https://aaronspharr.com/.